Watch the wild hand that determined the World Series of Poker Main Event final table. You still have about a 20 percent chance of winning the hand by getting a set. Obviously, that was not a. Winning hands by ranks 1,Royal flush-AKQJT having the same suit 2,Straight flush-5 cards having the same suit and are in sequential ranks 3,Four of a kind/quads- 4 cards of the same ranks 4,Full House/full boat/boat- a hand with triplets and a pai.

1. Poker Hands
2. Show Me Winning Poker Hands Free

In poker, players potentially convey meaningful information with every action they perform. Often at the tables we are confronted with the hard task of telling truth from fiction in the information given off by our opponents.

Today I’d like to focus on one specific category of information that opponents give us — the voluntary show. I’m referring to situations where a player bets, others fold, and before being delivered the pot the player willingly shows his hand. Usually the winner in this spot just mucks the cards unseen, as there is no obligation to show. But once in a while the player will show one or both cards.

What should we make of this nugget of information?

As with most questions in poker, the best general answer is “It depends.” That’s not very helpful, though. Let’s see if we can pick out some of the factors that might be useful in decoding this data. To do that, I’m going to divide the voluntary show into four categories, each defined by the intentions of the player who without having to decides to show his cards.

1. The Voluntary Show as False Propaganda

We know that poker is a game of deception, so a lot of times our first instinct is to assume that any voluntary disclosure of information is false propaganda. Now, it’s not like an opponent is going to be sneaking cards out of his sleeve and showing you ones other than what he was actually playing. Rather, he is trying to use the true information of these particular cards to create in your mind a false generalization about how he plays.

On the first level of analysis, then, a player showing a bluff probably wants us to believe that he’s a frequent bluffer. Why would he want us to believe that? Because it’s not true. If he were genuinely a player who bluffs a lot, he would not want you to know it, because you’ll call more often, thus foiling his strategy.

Conversely, if the player shows a strong hand, he probably wants us to believe that he always has the goods. But, again, that’s unlikely to be so. It would be self-defeating to make that known if it were true, because a player who is consistently strong when betting wants calls, not folds.

This first-level analysis holds particularly well if a voluntary show is being made early in a tournament or cash-game session. This is usually a player trying to create a particular image, intending to play the opposite way thereafter. This is a crude and amateurish approach, because it’s pretty transparent, but it is quite common.

The obvious adjustment, then, when faced with a later close decision, is to be more inclined to call if your opponent has gone out of his way to convince you that he only bets his strong hands, and be more inclined to fold if he has tried to establish an image of being a frequent bluffer.

Simple, right? Well, not really. Several considerations arise to muddy these seemingly clear waters and create other categories of intentions for the voluntary show.

2. The Voluntary Show as Truth in Advertising

One reason why you can’t automatically assume players are trying to deceive you when voluntarily showing their cards is that certain players actually want to establish a true image of how they play.

Why would anybody do that in a game that requires deception in order to maximize profit? I can think of several reasons, including:

• The player is primarily interested in poker as a social experience, rather than a money-making venture. This is especially likely to be true in the setting of a home game with easy-going players who know each other well and play together frequently.
• The player fears having his big pocket pairs cracked, and is not confident of his postflop play. For him, showing a premium starting hand says “Don’t mess with me,” because he really doesn’t want to face the difficult decisions that the possessor of such hands usually has to make on later streets if opponents stick around.
• Some people just get a strange pleasure out of letting everyone know how they play — and then actually playing that way! This lack of deception is not exactly the road to poker riches, but they take pride in being straightforward. This will not be the case for frequent bluffers, but it’s not hard to find players who boast about never bluffing, and are telling the truth when they do. They may find bluffing too scary, or worry that they have a tell, or just find something generally dishonorable or distasteful about bluffing.

In all of these cases, the player showing his cards is actually trying to communicate the truth about how he plays, not trying to deceive.

3. The Voluntary Show Without Strategic Purpose

Meanwhile there are also players who have no particular strategic intention whatsoever in what they’re showing. These can include:

• The player who loves to show a bluff just to revel in the fact that he got away with it, and it has nothing to do with whether he bluffs frequently or rarely.
• The player who has a favorite junk hand and loves showing how he can win with it.
• Players who are drunk or complete novices at the game. Both types might have no clear idea if they were bluffing or value-betting in a particular situation.
• Players whose motivation has nothing to do with establishing an image, but who are only stroking their egos. Showing bluffs lets them feel clever. Showing a strong hand makes them feel like they have the game mastered.
• Similarly, some people desperately want the approval and respect of the other players. This is manifested by showing the hand along with an explanation. E.g., “I had to bluff, because it was the only way I could win.” Or, “With aces, you can’t give people free cards to beat you.” To these people, having opponents view them as skilled players trumps any strategic considerations.

4. The Voluntary Show as a Targeted Message

Finally, you can also run into players who are being selective about their image. These will tend to be more experienced, sophisticated players. They are capable of projecting different images to different opponents simultaneously.

How is that possible? Well, these players know that even though their cards are exposed to everybody, the person who will pay most attention and remember most vividly is the one who had the most money invested in the pot before folding. That’s a simple but powerful psychological truth about the role that strong emotions play in forming memories. Such players, then, are primarily focused on making an impression on the last player who was left in the hand, and any effects on other players are secondary.

These deeper-thinking players are much more difficult to decode than those discussed above. It will usually take a lot more observation to figure out what thought process lies behind their show/don’t show decisions. However, I think the two most common patterns they’ll be using are these:

• Show hands selectively to punish erroneous decisions. This strategy sees poker as psychological warfare. It says that you should never reward an opponent with a sense of relief that he made a correct decision, but only torment him with the knowledge that he made a mistake. Since we’re talking about hands shown voluntarily, in the absence of a showdown, that means that this kind of player will typically be showing only bluffs. The key to detecting this motivation is that the hands he voluntarily shows after everybody folds are mostly or exclusively bluffs, but his bluffing frequency is revealed to be much lower when his hands go to showdown.
• Show hands selectively to reinforce a particular player’s erroneous tendencies. This strategy says that you show bluffs to players who tend to call too often (even if they folded this time), and show strong hands to players who tend to fold too often. In both cases, the person showing is trying to keep that opponent in his familiar, comfortable, and mistaken patterns. Detecting this strategy requires you first to have figured out which players call too often and which fold too often, then to determine whether the person showing is doing so selectively consistent with those observations. This will require a ton of careful watching. But if you can pick up on it, you can figure out what that player thinks of you by what he chooses to show you — and that knowledge will be pure gold.

A player who shows his cards when he doesn’t have to is giving you information, but he is not giving you its interpretation. Getting that right is entirely up to you.

Robert Woolley lives in Asheville, NC. He spent several years in Las Vegas and chronicled his life in poker on the “Poker Grump” blog.

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Poker is one of the greatest games on earth. The combination of skill and luck, the psychological element, and the fact you can make money from it all help with its popularity. But in order for you to make money from poker, you need to learn how to win at poker, which is actually easier than some would suggest.

Learning how to win at Texas hold’em can be broken down into four categories. (It can probably be broken down into many more, but for the sake of simplicity we’ve opted for four.) Those categories are:

• Learn the basics
• Learn advanced concepts
• Apply your new skills
• Continue the learning process

Learn the Basics

It should go without saying that in order to discover how to win in poker, you need to learn the basics of the game. When I first started playing poker, I didn’t know anything about the game, even including what hands beat what. You’d be surprised at how many people sit in a real money game and expect to win at Texas Holdem poker without even a clear understanding of the rules and other basics.

Those basics not only include knowing the poker hand rankings so you know what beats what, but also the various positions at the poker table and how they affect your strategy, pot odds and implied pot odds, and the importance of following solid bankroll management rules. Once armed with this information, you’re ready to add a few more strings to your bow and move one step closer to discovering how to be a winning player.

Players new to any form of poker could do a lot worse than start their poker career at WSOP Social Poker. The free-to-play site designed by the World Series of Poker is the perfect place to get to grips with cash games and poker tournaments because there is no rake and no financial risk at all.

Learn Advanced Concepts

The next stage in your quest to win at poker every time is to learn some of the more advanced concepts. Fill your mind by studying such aspects of the game as three- and four-betting, as well as how to play against the various different player types — e.g., tight-aggressive, loose-aggressive, and loose-passive — because each opponent type needs to be approached with a different strategy.

One advanced concept became public knowledge in the mid-1990s when David Sklansky penned The Theory of Poker. It is in this book that you will find Sklansky’s thoughts on what he calls “The Fundamental Theorem of Poker,” which reads:

“Every time you play a hand differently from the way you would have played it if you could see all your opponents’ cards, they gain; and every time you play your hand the same way you would have played it if you could see all their cards, they lose. Conversely, every time opponents play their hands differently from the way they would have if they could see all your cards, you gain; and every time they play their hands the same way they would have played if they could see all your cards, you lose.”

This text may seem long winded, but the idea being expressed is quite simple. What the theorem is essentially saying is that the correct decision to make in any given poker situation is one that has the largest expected value, or “EV” as it is commonly abbreviated. If you were able to see your opponents’ cards, you would be able to calculate the mathematically correct decision and would win at poker every time!

Obviously, it is not possible to calculate the correct decision to mathematical certainty as poker is a game played with incomplete information. But you can use all of the available information presented to you to make a decision that would yield long-term positive results — decisions that are +EV.

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Apply Your Skills

While it is practically impossible to learn how to win at poker every time in a monetary sense, due to the luck factor, by making decisions that are +EV you actually are winning every time you play poker, at least in the long term.

As a simplified example, imagine you are heads-up with an opponent in a hand where the board reads . You hold and your opponent has accidently revealed , so you know that you need to complete your flush to win the hand. There is $100 in the pot and for some reason you opponent decides to only bet $20. In this situation you should snap-call, because even if the river is not a spade you actually gain in the long run.

Why is this the case? Because the pot odds you’re receiving are 5-to-1 (calling $20 to win $100) yet your chance of hitting your flush with one card to come is about 4.1-to-1. As the pot odds are greater than the odds of hitting the hand, you actually make money in the long run even if your flush misses! That is to say, if you faced the same choice many, many times and always chose correctly, you do stand to come out ahead thanks to your consistently “+EV” decisions. And that folks, is how to win at poker every time!

Of course, the game is more complex than that overly simply example suggests. But in essence the idea still holds. The key to how to win at poker is to make more +EV decisions that –EV ones, and then play enough for the math to make the results run true. Sadly, this can take longer than you could imagine, but it does happen eventually!

Continue the Learning Process

It may seem to an outsider that the best poker players have discovered the secret of how to win at poker every time, yet this simply isn’t true. What is true is those at the top of the pile are extremely skilled poker players, but they are also some of the hardest working people in the industry, constantly working on their game and trying to improve.

One way to improve your own game vastly and increase your chances of learning to win at Texas Hold’em is to play around with different scenarios to see what the mathematically correct decision would be. Load up the PokerNews Odds Calculator and look at how much equity your hand has on different boards and against different possible hands for your opponents. There are other tools out there that allow you to see how your exact hand fares against a possible range of hands, too.

Knowing this information and being able to draw upon it while in the heat of a hand could be the difference between winning or losing at poker or losing. Always look to extract as much value as mathematically possible, if you want always to win at poker.

_{This article was originally published on Jan. 15, 2016. Last update: Jun. 8, 2019.}

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