Chasing a flush on the internet – Sometimes the numbers just don’t add up!
There’s an age old debate in poker – should you chase a flush? 1st of all we should define what we imply here by "chasing a flush on the net."
Chasing anything in Holdem poker is the practice of betting to stay in a palm in the hope that you simply will generate a greater hand, even though you may have absolutely nothing at the time. So chasing a flush means gambling that you just will obtain the card or card that you just have to total your flush hand about the turn or river. You cannot chase a flush prior to the flop because at that time you only have two cards so the flush isn’t on.
So let’s say you happen to be playing one of the big poker websites on-line, you’ve been dealt the Ace and nine of spades and you have paid to see the flop.
The flop is twos seven-s Kd and one of your competitors comes out gambling strongly with a fair sized raise, what do you do?
Very first of all ask yourself what type of hand you are up against. The possibilities are triples, an additional flush draw, a pair of Kings or a total bluff, so as it stands you are only winning towards the bluff with your Ace. On the other hands in case you hit a spade in the last two cards you’ve got the nut flush and could only lose to a full house or four of a kind.
To the face of it you may well assume that statistically you may have about a fifty – fifty probability of hitting your spade, after all there’s 2 cards to come and four suits so there must be about a half chance, right?
Wrong!
You already have two of the spades in your palm and there’s an additional 2 showing around the table, so you know five cards and four of them are spades. That means you’ve nine spades left obtainable out of the forty seven cards you haven’t seen, which is only a 42 percent chance of catching your flush.
When you do bet on the turn and do not produce your flush, what do you do then? You’ve got probably now become pot-committed, you may have put so a lot into the pot that you simply could possibly as effectively bet again to the river unless there is a big increase or all-in in opposition to you, except now your chances of creating the flush have dropped dramatically to only twenty one per cent.
Except what of that other factor, the mysterious net poker syndrome? What I imply by that is though you statistically have a forty two per cent likelihood of creating a flush, is that what in fact happens in reality? In the event you played the similar hand at the identical net poker table 100 times would you acquire a flush forty two occasions? From my personal encounter I doubt it. Flushes seem to come around a lot much less often than 42 out of one hundred instances!
That is just my own opinion and I am sure the poker sites would tell you a unique story, but the way I see it’s 42 % will be the very Greatest you happen to be ever going to acquire and you may perhaps well have a good deal much less opportunity than that of hitting your flush.
Bottom line? Chasing a flush on the web is a really risky method that sucks you in and over commits you, with out giving you enough of a probability of pulling out the winning hand.