When not to chase a straight or a flush

POKER TIP OF THE DAY:
Don't expect a miracle or the turn or river

POKER TIP OF THE DAY
We see a lot of players online who are always drawing for that possible straight or flush. If you only have three suit connected cards or three cards for your straight available to you after the flop, it’s asking a lot of Lady Lucky and not much of Sir Sensible to expect the turn and the river to deliver the miracle cards you need.

You’ll have a lot more profitable year with your poker if you learn when not to chase. A few small losses are easily made up by a big win. If you chase too often, your overall financial position becomes extremely difficult to recover.

What the tip is really asking you to count. A draw that needs both of the remaining cards is a different proposition from one that needs either of them, and the three-card version described above is the first kind. Nothing about it feels different at the table — the cards are pretty, the hand has a story, and the pot is sitting there. That is precisely why it costs money: the decision is made on how the hand looks rather than on how often it arrives.

The habit worth building is to price the draw before calling, not after. Two questions do most of the work. How many cards finish the hand, and how many streets are left to find one? Both answers shrink as the betting goes on, while the bet you are being asked to pay usually grows. When those two move in opposite directions, the call that looked thin on the flop is hopeless on the turn.

The other half of the lesson is the one the column keeps returning to: folding a draw is not timidity, it is the same discipline as betting a made hand hard. A player who never lets a pretty hand go is readable, and readable is expensive. Our odds and edge section sets out the arithmetic in full, and the strategy archive carries the hands it came from.