Inside Straight

There’s no surer way to screw up a moderate start in hold ‘em than to try to draw to an inside straight. Well, there is a surer way, and that’s to start with a crap set of cards, but I’ll get back to that in a second.

If you start with 10J, and the flop (the first three community cards) turn up KA4, for instance, leaving you to chase the queen, well, don’t. There are only two cards left and your chances of getting a queen at best are 1 in 11 on the next card, and 1 in 5.8 by the end. Which means if you’re up to betting $20 as it comes to you and there’s only $100 in the pot, well, you’d better bail. Your ROI is crap. Remember, that’s at best.

Sure, even a blind squirrel will dig up an acorn occasionally. But let’s face it, if you’re playing for money, you need to make sure your risk matches your reward.

The odds are even worse if you need to catch a pair of suits to make the flush – now you’re looking at 1 in 20. You should have learned back in the 4rd grade not to chase a three card flush possibility when you were playing 5 card stud without wilds for the first time, and it’s even more true now. Because now your opponents know that a flush beats a straight.

So the best way to screw up a good session of poker is to play a crap pair of cards. Sure, maybe you get stuck with a 2J and you’re the big blind. I get that. But there’s no way you should even wait to see what happens with that if you’re sitting at the dealer button. Let’s face it – if you do manage to pair it on the flop, your whopper of a 2 kicker ain’t gonna get you anywhere but away from the table.

If you want a nice and easy rule to remember, don’t play unsuited cards that are:

1. more than ‘2′ spaces apart (8-J, 10-K, etc), and
2. have one of the cards less than 8.

and for that matter you should seriously reconsider going in with a pair of less than 7. The best you can hope for there is to trip the board at some point and your odds of doing that by your fourth card are one in 23. Sudenly that doesn’t seem like such a brilliant move, huh? Now suddenly you realize your $1 bet on that pair needs to be backed up by $23 in the pot to even make it worth the effort…….

Are there exceptions to the above? Well, of course. But if you know the exceptions, you’re already a great player, and don’t need to be reminded of the pot odds.

And remember – bad beats happen to everyone. Even though it seems like the guy who goes all in with a 5J pulls it out every time.