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
Most really good combinational analysis
Most really good combinational analysis will come post analysis after playing the hand. However, there are some situations where knowing common possible combinations that beat you can be helpful in decision making. If you have AdTc on a flop of AsQdTh, you'll know that there are only 5 combinations of sets, 16 combinations of a flopped straight, and 9 combinations of a higher two pair that beat you for a total of 30 combinations. There are only 9 combinations of worse two pairs that you beat, and 4 that you split with. So if you bet and are raised on the flop, you can fold in most situations. Although we'd discount some of the hand ranges such as a flopped straight that might look to just call, there are still a lot of hands that have you beat, even if you add a good amount of air hands to your opponent’s range.
Another helpful aspect of understanding
Another helpful aspect of understanding combinations is applied to pre-flop hand ranges. If you're facing a tight pre-flop 3-bettor, say someone who 3-bets only slightly over 2% of their hand range, we'd safely say they are 3-betting KK+, AKs, and AKo only. If we took those four hands, it might seem as if they are 3-betting each about 25% of the time. However, if we look at the total combinations of hands, they are actually 3-betting KK+ about 43% of the time (6 combinations twice for a total of 12), and AKo, AKs the remaining 57% of the time (12 offsuit combinations plus 4 suited combinations for a total of 16). Most of the time they're going to have AK instead of AA or KK.