The world of poker has been in full riot the past week. The game of poker isn’t a stranger to controversy, and any game as old as poker is going to have some growing pains along the way.
The final table of the World Series of Poker this year was… divisive, to say the least. What happened on the felt wasn’t necessarily the big issue though. If you haven’t been paying attention to this controversy, let’s take a few minutes to dive into it together.
This is a very important moment in the greater world of gaming. How we use digital tools in games will be a topic that comes up over and over throughout the entire industry.
Spoilers: We’ll be discussing the final table of this year’s World Series of Poker Main Event. If you don’t want to be spoiled on the final table until you get around to watching it, don’t read further!
Solvers on the Rail
On Wednesday, July 17th, Jonathan Tamayo won the 55th annual World Series of Poker Main Event. He outlasted 10,111 other players and won the grand prize – a championship bracelet and a cool $10 million. He defeated amateur Jordan Griff in heads-up play to take home the championship.
Jonathan Tamayo is the 2024 World Champion!
Tamayo takes home the $10,000,000 top prize in the largest WSOP Main Event in history!
— WSOP – World Series of Poker (@WSOP) July 18, 2024
Tamayo is a great player. That’s not where this controversy lies. In his decade plus career, he’s proven time and again that he can sit with and beat the best.
Also, the main event of the World Series of Poker isn’t exactly the exclusive club it used to be with a few dozen tables featuring a few hundred of the greats. Nowadays five figures of players are getting in on the action. The main event has become a mental endurance test… a test that Tamayo passed with flying colors.
The real controversy was behind the table though, at the rail. Sitting on the sidelines, Tamayo’s friends rooted him on. Also fellow pro poker players, Tamayo would be crazy to not occasionally ask for their advice on a tough call within the game. This is pretty normal practice. Coaching is allowed.
The real trouble started when everyone watching at home could see what was going on at his friends’ spectator table. A laptop sat there facing away from the playing area. Clearly visible on the laptop screen was a popular poker simulation platform. As Tamayo told his friends about the hand pre-flop, they’d punch in the cards and determine his exact odds on certain calls.
I have to be honest here…if this really is the future of tournament poker I'm not interested at all. @PatMoorePoker 📸 This railbird team coaching stuff has to be curtailed it isn't going to grow the game we love it will only stunt the growth. Regardless of the stakes. pic.twitter.com/mkvqa5NxZ5
Tamayo claimed that he had no idea what his friends were doing at the rail… but in this picture captured by a spectator, you can clearly see both the stream and the solver pulled up and ready to go just as easily as Tamayo can…
For a seasoned pro, this isn’t a huge advantage. Most people who make their living playing poker can tell you exactly what the odds are for any hand pre-flop against random hands to two decimals… this is elementary stuff for competitive poker. Using AI and algorithmic analysis to verify and simulate this information against different hand sizes and differing chip stack sizes does give someone an advantage over just using their more fallible head math.
These poker problem solvers have been used more frequently both online and in person, with numerous pros having been caught sneaking analysis on their phones in recent years. Still, poker governance authorities are really yet to define the hard line on what constitutes cheating.
After this main event, they may have their hand forced.
How Far Is Unfair?
It’s important to note that Tamayo says he had no idea that his friends were going to bring a laptop. He claims he was asking for normal coaching and had little clue what was happening outside the rail.
“I mean, that stuff wasn’t under my control. My job was to play. Joe and Dom were giving me advice. I didn’t tell them to bring anything. You know, whatever was on there was on there. My job was to play. You have to be pretty narrow-minded when you’re playing. All the other external stuff is just wasted energy.”
This looks bad though. We have a professional player playing against an amateur in the biggest poker tournament in the world. The professional is not only getting help from two other professionals (one of whom is a previous main event bracelet winner), but also a dedicated computer program designed to solve poker problems.
The World Series of Poker has been clear about not allowing poker solvers in play. How does that apply to coaches on the rail though? How did it feel for Jordan Griff playing against not only a seasoned professional, but two sideline opinions with more experience than him backed up by AI?
All in all, Griff is handling what could be considered a $4m cheat with surprising grace.
Griff spoke to Doug Polk Poker’s podcast about the issue. He was totally unaware of what was going on at Tamayo’s sideline. He had totally assumed that if anything going on was nefarious that the WSOP floor team would step in.
“I’m sure in their mind if they knew they were doing something wrong they’re like ‘oh, well they’ll just tell us to put the laptop away’. I don’t think there was any serious repercussions people thought would come out of that.”
-Jordan Griff on Doug Polk Poker
Griff still walked away with $6 million, so not a week of work to whine about. As he discussed on Doug Polk’s podcast above, the most disappointing thing is that everybody is talking about someone trying to scrimp any unfair advantage they can get instead of the uplifting success stories that are always around in such a massive tournament.
We don’t know exactly how they were using the solver, but there are ways that it could’ve clearly tipped the balance. Were they referencing the stream to see what cards Griff was holding each hand, then punching that into their sim? If so, they could’ve gotten incredibly insight into his tendencies over hundreds of hands that Tamayo never would’ve been able to glean on his own.
We’ll probably never know how much the solver helped Tamayo. In theory, however, Dominic Nitsche and Joseph McKeehen definitely thought that it would help their buddy. Otherwise, why would they even bother?
“You think you’re getting heads-up, and you’re playing against – you know – robots now,” Griff summed up. “Optically … it’s not what you want to see at final table.”
A Gaming-Wide Problem
What constitutes fair? Especially when we’re using technology to actually engage with a game, what level of human intellect is required to be considered “fair play”?
Far more poker happens online than in person. If they aren’t even hiding that they’re doing it at the biggest in-person table in the world, surely these programs are being used all the time online in big money games. What’s most interesting in this regard is that Jordan Griff is considered one of the biggest online players in the world. Jonathan Tamayo, on the other hand, is traditionally a live tournament player.
There’s a lot of big questions here and not just for poker. Due to poker’s highly mathematical mechanics, it’s typically more straightforward to build a program to simulate it than for more convoluted games… but that doesn’t mean robust tools won’t rise for other competitive games.
Let’s start with the obvious… would a casino put up with this behind a player at a blackjack table? Of course not! Would this be acceptable in competitive chess? Definitely not.
Let’s take it further. Think about strategy games you may have played, where addons and external tools are often ubiquitous. In this day of AI, where is that line between unfair help and fair help? Most ToS on video games specific one player to one account… if you’re using the abilities of tons of programmers in a tool, is that really one human player to one account?
These are big questions… and ones I definitely don’t have the answer to. The entire world of gaming will have eyes on The World Series of Poker and the Nevada Gaming Commission, however, to see what their next steps are. How they react to this controversy will have echoes across the gaming industry for years to come.
The Future of Gaming Aids
It’s important to discuss these things, because culture will decide in these moments what’s acceptable in the future. How we incorporate technology into play and competition will change the trajectory of the human race… for better or for worse.
Where do you think that line is? Do you have a hot take or a path forward from this issue?
Bring your opinions over to #gala-gold or #general-chat-gala so that we can all see multiple perspectives on this really complicated issue. There’s no easy answer, and discussion is the best way to form educated viewpoints and find real solutions.
This is also a great topic for some great table talk!
Hop into Sweep It Poker today to take down some juicy pots while you discuss it with your poker buddies at the tables!
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the advent of the internet revolutionized the world of poker, breathing fresh new life into an already beloved game played all over the world.
Online poker platforms emerged, offering players the opportunity to play from the comfort of their homes. Texas Hold ‘Em in particular, which was known casually in poker circles as “the Cadillac of poker,’ quickly became a worldwide phenomenon, attracting a whole new type of player to the game.
The early 2000s saw a significant boom in online poker, particularly after Chris Moneymaker, an amateur player who qualified through an online satellite tournament, won the World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event in 2003. This victory inspired millions to try their hand at online poker, believing they too could win big.
By combining the streamlined appeal of video games with the thrill of gambling on well-known and trustworthy games of skill, online poker companies made billions of dollars, one $50 deposit at a time.
Despite the convenience and accessibility of online poker, there are elements of live poker that are typically missed by an online remote experience. There’s something special about sitting down at a green felt table for a game as exciting and historically rich as poker.
Physically Reading Players
In live poker, the ability to read physical tells and body language is a crucial skill and an intrinsic part of the game. Players can observe their opponents’ reactions, postures and facial expressions to gain insights into their typical behaviors with certain hands. On top of that, a player will typically spend a lot more time in a live game seat than an online one, giving opposing players more of an opportunity to draw conclusions about their patterns and behaviors.
Communication at the Table
Live poker provides a social atmosphere where players can engage in conversations, banter and psychological games. This social interaction adds a layer of depth to the experience. Sometimes live players will bond of a big pot hand in a way that can lead to a lifelong friendship, while you’ll seldom find a similar bonding experience in an online game. Even the most serious live poker players will tell you they enjoy conversations they have had at poker tables, or that they have kept in touch with people they met at memorable card games.
Even with its inherent connection to money and wagering, poker is a distinctly social game, and one of its most enjoyable aspects is the camaraderie of sitting around a table for hours, having refreshments and engaging in light conversation with other players. Some players even like to use this conversational aspect as an important dimension of strategy, allowing their friendliness or intimidation tactics to influence the ways their opponents act and react within hands.
The “Dealer” Experience
The presence of a human dealer who shuffles and deals the cards, manages the pot, and controls the pace of the game adds a tangible authenticity to the game. The dealer also acts as an impartial mediator, ensuring the rules are followed and calling out the action in a convenient way that makes the game easy for players to follow.
Even the physical game components themselves are a very enjoyable piece of what makes live poker such a popular game throughout the world. The shuffling, passing and holding of cards is extremely satisfying to the players. Playing cards are a timeless form of gaming and perhaps the most popular type of game in the world. There are hundreds and hundreds of card games that can be played with the standard deck alone, and over a hundred different games within the card game family we call Poker. Additionally, almost all board games have some kind of card element. People love playing with cards.
Even with all the magic of live poker, online poker offers several benefits that enhance the gaming experience in ways live poker cannot:
Easier to Find Players
Online platforms host millions of players from around the world, making it easy to find a game at any time. This vast pool of players ensures a diverse range of skill levels and game types. Whether you’re looking for a heads up showdown, a ring game or a large multi-table tournament, you can be almost certain that the type of game you’re looking for is somewhere on the internet, just waiting for you to take a seat.
Instant Access
Players can log in and start playing instantly without the need to travel to a physical location. This convenience is a major draw for many players. Even when you factor in things like creating an account, KYC procedures and jumping through deposit hoops, chances are that these obstacles will be far easier than traveling to the nearest casino game.
This aspect also makes it easier than with live games for players to get up and switch seats as often as they like. When you know there is another seat waiting for you at another table only 30 seconds away with a fresh set of players, you’ve got more options and you can play more freely.
Without the need for things like shuffling and physical dealing, online poker typically has faster gameplay, allowing players to play far more hands per hour compared to live poker. This can drastically influence play style for many players, usually resulting in tighter and more mathematical gameplay online. The more hands you play, the truer the statistics and the odds become and the less likely that there will be probability outliers.
I’ve known online players who will keep a game going for hours while barely paying attention to it, simply folding every hand until they see pocket Kings, pocket Aces or AK. This is an extremely tight mode of gameplay made possible by online poker, but even that method has its pitfalls– If you have to wait 60 hands to see that high pocket pair, then chances are you’ll expect to win once you get it, which could make you less likely to fold against someone else’s drawn straight or flush. You can still lose with good hole cards.
Less Patience Required
The pace of online poker means there is less waiting time between hands, catering to those who prefer a faster-paced game. The addition of buttons like “Fold to Any Bet” or “Check/Fold” have also given online players the ability to auto-select their coming action based on the action of those before them in the round. Thus, a great deal of strategic play in online poker has morphed into what I call “reaction time” strategy. If you have auto-selected your action and therefore act instantly, you’re indicating that you barely had to think about it. On the other hand, if you almost let your action timer run out before calling, checking or folding, you’re showing opponents that you were really thinking about this one.
Multiple Games at Once
This is one of those things that’s entirely impossible in the world of live poker and only became a reality because of online gameplay. Online platforms allow players to participate in multiple games simultaneously, significantly increasing the potential for winnings and providing a more engaging experience. In the heyday of online poker, I was often playing on 4 cash game tables at a time, and I remember speaking with skilled online players who would play more than that simultaneously.
One friend used to say that he’d always have a tilt table in play to ensure that he could play responsibly on the other ones. He’d use that table to make wild bets, play with rags and basically blow off steam whenever he was mad about the results of a hand from one of the more legit tables.
Evolution of Poker into the 21st Century
Both live and online poker have evolved to meet the demands of modern players, each bringing unique advancements to the game:
Live Play as a Spectator Sport
Professional poker has transformed into an exciting spectator sport, with live broadcasts showing players’ hands and featuring expert commentary. This transparency and analysis bring a new level of engagement and education for viewers. While professional players probably have mixed feelings about their gameplay becoming so transparent, aspiring players have been able to learn all sorts of new tactics from watching the pros. Overall, the adoption of poker as a spectator sport has elevated the game throughout the world.
In the same way that casinos have continued to enhance security and grow with the latest technologies, online poker platforms have continuously improved their security measures to combat cheating and bot usage. This has led to stronger, more secure platforms that provide a fair playing environment for all users.
The integrity of the game of poker is paramount to its enjoyability. If someone is rigging the system somehow, it’s good for the whole poker community when that person is discovered and removed from the game. In the Wild West, we may have had outlaws with aces up their sleeves, but the new outlaw can sometimes take the form of a hacker with a bot network up their sleeve.
Despite the differences, both online and live poker remain immortal games of chance, skill and strategy. Whether played on a phone, PC or at a live casino table, the core essence of poker endures, captivating players worldwide.
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Alright, you’re all shuffled up and the cards have been dealt. You’re a master of reading other people, so you know you’ve got this. Suddenly, you realize that your powers of observational deduction don’t work quite right in online poker… whatever shall you do!?
I’ll tell you what you’re going to do. You’re going to math harder than you’ve ever mathed before!
Odds and Playing the Math in Hold ‘Em
So we all know the poker player who plays with their feelings – “I’ve got a good feeling about that turn,” or “I can feel that he doesn’t have it.” That’s fun for tossing plastic chips around in your cousin’s basement over some beers, but I wouldn’t exactly call that a solid strategy when there’s real stakes.
Like most games, poker is based around complex systems of relatively simple math. What distinguishes poker from other games is the incomplete information factor. This is the main mechanic of the game. You know what you have, but everything else is a variable.
Think you can “feel” what other people’s cards are? Let’s review some facts from our last edition to dispel that illusion:
There are 1326 different possible combinations of hole cards you can be dealt in Hold ‘Em
There are 2,598,960 possible combinations the five cards on the table can be in as they are revealed
There are 9,122,409,676,719,740,029,270,368,190,464,000,000 (9.122 undecillion!) possible combinations for how the entire 23-card board could play out for a game with 9 players.
Still think you can play with your feelings? You’re playing the math whether you like it or not… embrace it!
Poker doesn’t have to be undecillion-level complicated though. With just a little learning and practice, you’ll be automatically weighing the chances of any hand you have with a surprising level of human-quality accuracy. The key is to always remember that there are waaaaay more ways that your hand can go wrong than it can go right.
Miss our last Thinking Poker? Check it out to have your mind blown by the not-quite-so-simple, traditional deck of cards.
Base Hand Odds
So you’re at a table with five other players in the hand. Your decision to fold, call or raise to see a flop. You’ve got A/K of hearts. Pretty confident about that? Let’s see where you’re at from an odds standpoint preflop:
Your A/K suited has the following chances of making a hand by the end of the river, not accounting for any other players:
High Card : 17.8%
One Pair : 44.1%
Two Pair : 22.3%
Three of a Kind : 4.2%
Straight : 2.9%
Flush : 6.2%
Full House : 2.3%
Four of a Kind : 0.1%
Straight Flush : 0.0%
With this hand matched against five totally unknown opponents, your hand has a 31% chance to come out on top. That is better than the 16.66% that would be an even distribution for you and 5 opponents..
A few things to note… That straight flush is at 0 from rounding. Keep in mind that a royal flush is just the highest straight flush. Yes, you have a gutshot royal flush draw – only if the 10 of hearts, the jack of hearts and the queen of hearts all hit the table. That’s a less than 1/1000 chance. The suited feels like it helps your odds a lot, but in the end having those matched suits is less than a 7% bump to your odds to make a decent hand.
In the above hand, you’ll be getting one pair or less in the likeliest circumstance. Think hard about how much that’s worth paying to see a flop.
Let’s look at the above hand again, this time in heads up play. There’s only you and one other player in the game and it’s your call whether to pay to see the flop.
Against a totally random hand in this circumstance, your A/K of hearts has a 66.1% chance to win. That is better than half, but it’s not quite the +11% over even odds that you had against 5 opponents.
You’re also not playing against a “random” hand. A player has filtered their cards to a degree. They’ve bet and called, so they are at least signaling they don’t have junk.
Pot Odds
Above, we were talking about straight odds to win. There is, however, another limited information mechanic in poker – the price. Throughout the game, you are put to a decision to add to the pot to stay in the hand repeatedly. This can be looked at as a price to stay in the game. Pot odds are what we call it when we weight this price versus hand equity or expected value.
Say you have a pair of 7s before the flop. There’s two other players in and there’s 800 chips in the pot. The decision is on you, and you can call for 200 chips to see the river. That means you’d be putting 20% of the value into the pot that you could prospectively win. There’s a table pair, and no possible draws on the board. There are two larger cards than your pair on the table.
Against two random hands, you have a 39.1% chance of taking down this pot after the river. You cannot, however, win if you don’t make it to the river or make everyone else fold.
You know from your cards and odds against a random hand that you are likely to have the best chances of anyone else, unless someone hit that low set on the flop. You’re paying 20% of the potential hand winnings to get into the river, and you’re roughly sitting at a player equity of 6:4, or 40%.
This means that you’re paying less than the perceived value of your hand to see the river. With your mathematical likelihood to win, you could conceivably call bets worth around 500 chips and still be on the right side of the numbers. Keep in mind, the pot gets bigger as you add more, thus diluting the pot odds argument and “pricing you in”, so to speak.
This is a good time to mention that “pricing you in” is an illusion. Remember the pot odds. Let’s say you’ve already paid 1000 chips to stay in a hand and there’s 5000 chips in the pot. The river has come, and you know that you have less than a 5% chance to win against random hands. Someone makes a small value bet of 400 chips (to puff up their pot probably!). If you have a 5% chance to win, paying 400 chips to see it through is a bad choice with only 5000 chips in the pot. You’d need ~8% chance to win to square those pot odds.
Already putting money into the pot does not mean you are priced in. Beware sunk cost… it’s the biggest weapon that the person with the winning hand has at their disposal to make you keep pushing over your chips!
Implied Odds
Let’s take this a step further. We know that pot odds are when you take the size of the pot into account versus the price of continuing in the game. Let’s move into something more abstract – implied odds.
Implied odds don’t only look at the pot and your chances versus a random hand. They are looking at the potential throughout the rest of the hand. Let’s look at another example.
You’ve got 10/J suited versus 5 opponents before the flop. You’re at about 24% chance to win… better than even 20% (1 of 5) odds! But wait! Someone’s going hard pre-flop… made hand? They throw down 900 chips into 100 chips of blinds. 3 callers, your decision. You’re now being asked to pay 900 into a 3700 chip pot to see the flop. This is less relative price than your chance to win to see three more cards, so you jump in and call. But… the player on the button raises to triple! Only one caller. It now comes back to you at with another 1800 into a 9100 chip pot. You’ve got the odds on your side in isolation… but this is starting to feel like sunk cost.
…or is it?
Let’s freeze in that moment. Someone made a ridiculously high bet off of just blinds… usually meaning that they have (or are representing they have) a medium pocket pair. They know they likely have the best hand preflop, but after more cards come out they probably won’t. That first player was probably trying to just buy the blinds, plus maybe some sucker that jumped in with trash.
The second player, however, made a value bet. While their raise was high compared to previous bets, they knew that at least one or two players would feel obligated to call after already putting so much money in. This player is intentionally growing the pot bigger instead of trying to elicit folding. This usually means they think they have the winning hand, or it is very likely that they will be the time the river is flipped.
They are trying to price other players in with pot odds… make it so they simply can’t fold over such a small amount of chips relative to the size of the pot. If you call, you’ve paid 2700 chips to access around a ~10k chip pot. While it’s likely that this is worth it to see a flop with your upside chance of almost quadrupling your chips in the middle of the table, tread lightly. If your opponent understands pot odds, they may be keeping you on the hook and just building up their pot without scaring you away.
It’s important to keep in mind here that there are three cards on the flop. With a hand like 10/J suited, you’re likely to know whether you have a real hand or not after the flop. With the turn and river only being one card, be very cautious about following value bets to those cards. If you haven’t gotten a hand worth playing in the first five cards, it’s unlikely you’re going to make one with those last two. A good player who knows they have you beat will just bleed you the rest of the hand to grow their pot.
Simple Gameplay. Complex Nuance
Poker overall is a very simple game in concept, but the combination of playing card randomness and incomplete information makes it so a lifetime of playing poker would still not be enough for anyone to totally understand the nuance and intricacies of the game.
In this article we’ve only scratched the surface of quick odds calculation in poker. Even knowing these few things though, you can estimate what’s worth it to you much better than just playing blind. Poker is about incomplete information… the more information you know about the game and theory, the less disadvantage you take from not knowing what’s in other players’ heads.
That’s all for us in this week’s Thinking Poker. We’ll be back in a few weeks to talk more about the fundamentals of all things poker!
Practice makes perfect… hit the tables today! Play Now
Here are some basic poker tips for anyone looking to enhance their gameplay and increase their chip stack. Even though it involves elements of luck, poker is a game of skill.
Tip 1: Play to Learn
Poker is one of the most popular games in the world, not only for its intrinsic connection to money, but also for the multitude of strategic nuances that come with the game’s intricate balance of math and chance.
The best poker players will still tell you that they don’t know everything about the game. To some degree, the more you play, the more there is to learn.
“The more you know, the luckier you get in poker.”
-Doyle Brunson, poker champion and best-selling author
Doyle Brunson played professional poker for over six decades, until his death in May of last year at 89 years old. If you want to learn poker from a master from the absolute pinnacle fof the game, check out his books, Super System and Super System 2.
The moment you start thinking of yourself as an experienced poker player, you’re opening yourself up to untold vulnerabilities. Don’t get cocky– It never hurts to acknowledge that you could be missing something, especially in a game that’s so deceptively complicated.
Tip 2: Play the Opponent
You may have heard the standard poker advice, “Play the opponent, not the cards.” This is more than just stock advice – It’s a system to live by. Poker is not a game about your hand. Your hand is merely a single aspect of your strategy, while your opponent has the power to bring you victory or defeat depending on how you deal with them.
The “Showdown” event in which players must reveal their cards to determine a winner is rarer than it seems, especially on a player by player basis.
Consider that an average player in a Texas Hold’em ring game (9 seats occupied), will only participate in 2 showdowns per 100 hands dealt– That’s only 2%. But the other 98% of the time, that player still had cards in their hand. What they did with their chips in those other 98 hands matters far more than the showdown hands.
When you’re able to spot the patterns in your opponent’s betting habits, you can truly start to play the opponent. You can always make guesses about the cards they’re holding, but you’ll never know for sure until the rare moment of showdown. With your hands, the best you can do is to play aggressively when the odds are in your favor.
In the same way that you want more chips in the pot when you have the nuts, you want to see more cards with fewer chips when you think you might have a losing hand. More community cards (turn, river) might turn your hand around and make you a winner, but no matter what you’re doing to the pot, you don’t want your opponent to know your position. Assume that every player is playing from that same place of mathematical responsibility, betting hard when their hand is strong and softening up when their hand is weak while also trying to hide their intentions.
Remember – Chances are that neither you nor your opponent will have a chance to see one another’s cards. That means that whoever played the other more effectively will take down that non-showdown pot. Only 20-25% of hands in a ring game will even make it to a showdown at all, so patterns tend to matter more than hands.
Tip 3: Chase with Caution
Whether you’re calling preflop with a couple of low suited connectors or holding out to see the suit you want on the turn, chasing a draw is generally a risky move.
“Chasing” in this context means that you have most of a good hand. If the cards you want fall, then you’ll almost always have the winning hand. If they don’t, you’re sure to lose if it comes to a showdown.
Some draws are worth chasing. For example, let’s say you have 5♠/6♠ and you get to see the flop with no preflop raise. If you see a flop of 3♥/4♣/10♦, you’re in a good position to chase your straight if the price is right.
Any 2 or 7 will make your straight, so if you can see the turn, go for it. Additionally, there’s currently no chance of someone drawing out a flush on you to beat your straight. However, by calling instead of raising, you’d run the risk of revealing that you’re on a draw and trying to minimize the bet. Therefore, when chasing a straight like this, you’d better be ready to commit some chips to the chase, then ditch the cards if it loses economic reasonability.
Be very careful with draws in every situation. Someone with a made hand is almost certainly looking to price you out and take the pot before your draw hits, and they’ll almost always recognize when you achieve the hand you were drawing for.
With straight and flush draws, it’s better to play against others who are chasing draws than to chase them yourself. If you are chasing, present your betting actions as having the made hand already.
One unlikely advantage to chasing straights and flushes can come from playing in early positions on the table. This will help mask your intentions, lending legitimacy to your check and waiting to see how the rest of the players will act before you decide to pay for your draw.
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Poker isn’t a complicated game. The rules and mechanics are pretty basic, but the nuance runs deep. The origins of poker go back more than a thousand years by some estimates, in large part because of this simple elegance.
We like to get under the hood of games here at Gala, so we’re going to take some time in this series to delve deep into some specific mechanics and ideas that make poker poker.
While it may seem simple from a player-perspective, the “engine” powering poker is amazingly powerful… so that’s a good place to start. The classic deck of playing cards… one of the most useful analogue randomness engines ever created!
The Magic of Playing Cards
The possible combinations of deck order in a 52-card deck is equal to 52!, or 52 factorial. This means 52x51x50x49, etc. Factorial growth can get out of hand very quickly, so 52! is a MASSIVE number.
There are 1326 different possible combinations of hole cards you can be dealt in Hold ‘Em
There are 2,598,960 possible combinations the five cards on the table can be in as they are revealed
There are 9,122,409,676,719,740,029,270,368,190,464,000,000 (9.122 undecillion!) possible combinations for how the entire 23-card board could play out for a game with 9 players.
There are roughly 8×1067 possible combinations for a deck of cards to be shuffled in – that’s roughly 80unvigintillion!
Let’s use an analogy to illustrate the above… after all, 80 unvigintillion is more atoms than are in the entire Earth… or more molecules in the entire universe! We could use a better way to visualize it.
Let’s say hypothetically that every solar system in the universe has 100 planets on average (crowded, right?). Each of these planets has 100 billion people on them, and there’s 1 million solar systems in each of 1 billion galaxies across the universe. Every person on each of those planets has 1000 decks of cards that they shuffle 1000 times every single second since the beginning of the universe.
On average, each of those 10 octillion people (1028) shuffling cards will NEVER have shuffled to the same deck setup twice in the ~ 436,117,077,000,000,000 seconds since the universe began. In fact, they’d be way off.
All those people would’ve theoretically explored around 4×1051 possible combinations (4 sexdecillion). They would need to repeat the entire experiment around 20 quadrillion times (2×1016) before they had enough repetitions to even possibly cover all combinations. Unfortunately, that’s probably long after the heat death of the universe.
Looking to have your mind blown by some more card math magic? Check out this oldie, but goodie!
Fifty Two Cards
The standard deck of playing cards has 52 cards – 13 of each suit: 2-10, jack, queen, king and ace. For our purposes we will ignore joker cards, as they are a non-standard addition to the deck and aren’t used in many games.
Playing cards themselves have unclear origins, but it’s widely thought that they began to emerge as dominoes in the 10th century in China. The classic tiles were eventually replaced by more decorative paper cards, which people crafted games around. The silk road spread the cards first to India and Persia, eventually winding all the way across to the far edges of Africa and Europe.
It’s important to note that these weren’t deck of cards as we know them, and there was no standardization for what was a playing card deck. People simply played games made for the cards they had access to. They’d adapt existing games to their deck or make new ones. Since gaming often happened in small communities or families, this was perfect at the time.
In the 16th century in Europe what we think of as a standardized deck began to surface. First there were many different decks, but popularity began to focus on a 52-card deck with four suits created in France – largely resembling the one we still use. Spurred by the spreading of coffee houses across the continent, standard decks were massively helpful as gaming left the home and often found its way to a cafe table.
Poker and the Standard Deck
Poker also has an unclear origin, but we do know that it began to gain popularity in the 19th century. There were lots of different rules and games, but many of them were designed around the most popular type of deck at that time… that’s right, the 13×4, 52-card standard!
The rest is all about industrialization creating worldwide standardization. On June 28th, 1881, the Russell, Morgan, and Co. printing company manufactured their first 52-card deck featuring a familiar design on the back with filigree embellishments and two bicycles. The company would rebrand their company name to the popular name of their Bicycle line of cards before long.
It was their printing that popularized the inclusion of two jokers and two advertising cards (later one would be swapped out for a rules card).
This pretty much brings us to where we are today, with the amazing 52-card analogue game engine that is a deck of cards being spread the world over.
Thinking Cards
It’s easy to forget in these days of digital calculation and instant algorithmic analysis that we were very clever for millennia before computers. There are tons of games that use the 52-card deck of playing cards, and it’s not hard to see why.
Playing cards ensure fairness and pure randomization across a wide variety of game mechanics. Not only are they so amazingly random, but every card looks the same. This creates the opportunity to make games with incomplete information mechanics that don’t sacrifice any of the power of randomization.
In the future, we’ll dive into more poker-specific topics in this series. Still, the groundwork we’ve discussed here today is important, because poker would not be what it is without the classic deck of cards. In fact, we’d go so far as to say that no games would be what they are without our history in playing cards. Humans have been playing games for countless eons, but the deck of cards may be our crowning achievement in it… even if it is one of the most simple and elegant.
Tune in for more deep dives coming up as we get beneath the cards into the nuances of poker mechanics and keep Thinking Poker!
