Tournament Strategies
After receiving pocket cards, you are immediately faced with a choice: play your cards and either raise or call the blinds, or fold.
Practice Matters
Combinations
Combinations Counting card combinations at the table in most situations will be nearly impossible. However, knowing and understanding about how many combinations of hands exists for specific hands that you beat, and have you beat will help in the decision-making process. In real time you will rarely be exact with this count, but you can get close, and in post analysis it's helpful to know in analyzing and reflecting on your play.
Total possible hand combinations for
Total possible hand combinations for any two card hand are multipliers of the cards left in the deck. So pre-flop, there are 16 total combinations of AK. Four suites of aces, and four suites of kings, or 4 x 4 = 16. Anytime you remove a card from the deck, you remove one possible combination of that particular hand being possible. If you saw a flop of Qs9d4h, and you wanted to know how many combinations of AQo someone could have, then we remove the Qs from counting. We'd come up with 4 suites of aces times 3 remaining suites of queens, or 4 x 3 = 12.