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
Now we must find the possible number of pairs to be matched with
Now we must find the possible number of pairs to be matched with the three of a kind. Suppose we start with a pair of fours. The fours can be paired six ways. The same holds true for all the other denominations. But we cannot use the deuces; those have already been used to form the three of a kind. That leaves us with 12 different denominations. Multiplying, we get a total of 72 possible pairs to hold with our three deuces. To get the total number of full houses we multiply the 52 possible three of a kind by the 72 possible pairs, and get a total of 3,744 full houses.
Flushes
Flushes To find the number of possible flushes, we first must find the number of five-card arrangements that can be formed with 13 cards of the same suit. This we cancel out as follows: But this total also includes one royal flush and nine straight flushes. Subtracting 10 from 1,287, we get 1,277 flushes in one suit. But we have four suits—hearts, clubs, spades, and diamonds—therefore we multiply the 1,277 by 4, and get a total of 5,108 flushes.