A few minutes each, one visual each. New? Start with the basics. Played before? Jump to next steps, or open Going deeper under any lesson for the math. Tap any underlined word for a quick definition.
Two forced bets (the ), two private cards each, then up to four betting rounds while five shared cards come out. Step through one hand.
Heads-up, the button posts the small blind and acts first before the flop, last after it. Live games may add antes or a straddle; see Table rules.
Before any cards come out, two players post forced bets called the , so every hand has something to win. Vega posts the small blind ($1) and Blaze posts the big blind ($2). You have the dealer button, marked D.
Best five cards wins, from your two plus the five on the . Rarer hands rank higher; ties go to the higher .
There are 133,784,560 ways to deal seven cards. With seven, you finish with at least a pair 83% of the time, so one pair is often not enough at showdown in multiway pots.
Acting last lets you see what everyone does first, so the can play far more hands than .
Solver-based 6-max charts open roughly 15–18% of hands under the gun and 40–50% on the button. The Playbook is tighter on purpose: fewer, stronger hands are easier to play well.
The dealer seat. It acts last on every round after the flop, so it sees what everyone else does first. The best seat: play the most hands here.
are the cards that would save you. On the flop, outs × 4 ≈ your chance by the river; on the turn, outs × 2.
The Rule of 4 runs high above 8 outs: use outs × 4 − (outs − 8) instead (15 outs ≈ 53%, the exact figure is 54%). Discount outs that pair the board or complete a bigger flush for someone else.
You have four hearts. Any of the 9 hearts you can't see makes a flush.
Lime: your outs. Faded: cards you can already see. The other 47 cards could still come.
Call when your chance of winning beats the price: what you pay ÷ the pot after you call. That price is your .
Pot odds treat the hand as over after your call. add what you win later when you hit; reverse implied odds subtract what you lose when you hit a second-best hand. The defender's side of the same math is MDF: continue with pot ÷ (pot + bet) of your hands and bluffs can't profit automatically.
After you call, the pot is $40 and $10 of it came from you: $10 ÷ $40 = 25.0%. Win at least that often and the call pays off over time.
Lime bars: how often each draw hits on the river. White line: the equity you need.
One hand is mostly luck; thousands of hands are mostly skill. Even good players lose for weeks at a time, so judge your decisions, not your results, and don't let a put you on .
A 6-max No-Limit win rate has a standard deviation of about 80–100 BB per 100 hands. After N hands, 95% of results land within win rate ± 1.96 × SD × √(N/100): a +5 BB/100 player is still behind after 10,000 hands about 30% of the time. With real money, 20–30 buy-ins of keeps that swing survivable.
Units are big blinds (100 BB = one buy-in). Dashed line: what their skill earns on average. Even at +5 BB per 100 hands, some of them are losing after thousands of hands.
A wins only when they fold, so it has to work often enough to pay for itself. The best bluffs have a backup plan: a with a draw can still win when called.
A bet of b into pot p needs folds b ÷ (p + b) of the time (alpha). On the river, a balanced betting range has bluffs in the ratio b ÷ (p + 2b): about one bluff per two value bets with a pot-size bet. Choose bluffs that block your opponent's calling hands, like holding the ace of the flush suit.
Risk ÷ (risk + reward): $10 ÷ $30. Small bluffs need fewer folds, but they also make folding easier to resist. The lime figures must fold for the bluff to break even.
You can't see their cards, but you can see how they play. How often someone plays (VPIP) and raises (PFR) sorts them into a type, and each type has a simple counter. Bet size is the best : new players often bet big with big hands.
VPIP and PFR settle after about 50–100 hands; aggression and showdown stats (AF, WTSD) take several hundred. Think in , not single hands: each action removes hands they wouldn't play that way.
How to spot them: Calls a third of all hands and hardly ever raises.
How to beat them: Never bluff. Bet bigger with good hands, even just top pair: they'll pay you.
Tap a player. In a coached game, the tracker shows these numbers for everyone at your table. Give it about 30 hands before you trust them.