wp_adminSo you spend a good deal of time and energy playing online poker, over at your favorite online casino uk provider? If you’ve already come to terms with basic strategy poker, chances are you may be looking for some intermediate-to-advanced techniques that might help sharpen up your winning edge. In that case, you are now in the right place at the right time, as you’re about to learn how to count cards.
Poker card counting is not for everyone, really… although there are some simple formulas that can be learned quickly and easily, as shown below.
The learning can when you’re learning how to count cards in poker be steep depending on your natural abilities and inclinations, and it’s a mentally burdensome skill. But for those who love a good mental puzzle, learning how to count cards can actually be an enjoyable task.
Moreover, the potential rewards are plentiful, since the better you can do poker card counting, the more forcefully you’ll manage to turn odds in your favor.
How to count cards explained in simple terms here
Card counting in poker, as the name suggests, is simply all about keeping track of the dealt cards during a game of poker – in order to try and make the best possible decisions. To do this effectively, you have to be familiar with poker hand rankings and have at least a general idea of poker hand probabilities.
Here’s how to count cards in poker: you have to look at the current hand and determine the possible number of useful cards might that come out next, based on your current pocket cards combined with the community cards (and your understanding of poker hand rankings).
Once you determine this figure which is known as the number of outs, you then have to determine your “pot equity” – in other words, your likelihood of taking the pot, considering the cards revealed so far.
There is a simple formula that can you can rely on to determine your pot equity without help from external tools. You can only use it on the flop or turn, however:
- while playing on the flop, you can determine your pot equity percentage by multiplying your number of outs by four.
- While playing on the turn, your pot equity will usually be close to the number you get by multiplying your number of outs by two.
This is just a simple example of how you can use a formula to anticipate outcomes in poker, but to get the best possible results in poker card counting in a real world setting, it takes a highly involved mathematical effort.
While playing in a traditional casino, you have to be really strong at memorization as well as calculating probabilities. Unless you’re already very skilled to the point you can do poker card counting effortlessly, trying to precisely keep track of all dealt cards in a game to determine probabilities can become a burdensome analytical task.
Before you can decide if card counting is a useful poker skill that you want to spend time and effort developing, it’s worth the setting makes a big difference. If you’re playing in a online casino uk, the poker card counting process is much easier compared to what would be needed in a traditional casino – since you don’t have to rely on your mental prowess alone.
Poker card counting: is it worth spending time developing this skill?
When playing in an online casino, you will often have an easier time reaping rewards from card counting, since you can rely on using specialized tools to help you do the math. From simply using a pen and paper to keep track of cards to running poker card counting software, there are many ways to use technology to your benefit when playing in the comfort of your home through your favorite online casino uk.
However, if you’re playing in a traditional casino – you’re all by yourself! Since no brick and mortar casino will appreciate you using any type of card counting system, you have to be able to do it entirely in your mind.
Some players seem to have an intuitive grasp that allows them to perform card counting naturally, but for everyone else, becoming really good at poker card counting in a real world setting is a laborious process.
So before you decide if it’s worth learning how to count cards in poker, you need to think about where do you typically play: if you spend most of the time enjoying poker games at your online casino uk, by all means start tracking and counting cards to improve your winning odds.