Can board analysis be simplified?
In Texas Hold'em the flop is considered to be the most difficult street. This the point where you see 5 of the 7 cards that will make up your hand or draw.
The first step is relatively simple, figure out what hand or draw you have.
The second step is much more difficult, the Flop board. This will help you determine what your opponents might have either as a made hand or a draw.
The third stem is to make an educated guess as to what your opponents range might be.
There are a lot more steps, but let's start with the flop board and how to simplify evaluation. It's not all that simple but if we have a methodical method for this simplification it becomes manageable.
Flop board analysis:
1. Mentally sort the cards in order, high to low. So 7cKs9c bocomes Ks9c7c.
2. The 19,600 possible flops ( your hole cards removed ) are reduced to 10 buckets. HHH to LLL. H = A-T, M = 9-6, L = 5-2. Now you have a much better chance of analyzing any Flop.
3. For each of the 10 possible Flop buckets look for the following:
- Rainbow No cards of the same suit.
- Pair Any 3 cards the same rank.
-Ace High Any Ace.
-Two suited Two cards of the same suit.
-Gap 0 Connected cards. 8c7d.
-Gap 1 One gap between cards. 7c9c.
With this, we have a manageable framework that we can use for evaluation.
4. Now we can categorize Flops as Wet Dry None or Static Dynamic None. A wet flop is one with lots of draws. A dry flop is one with few draw possibilities. None is in between.
A static flop is one where the winning hand is likely already made. Dynamic flop is one one where the winning hand has not been made yet.
A couple of general guidelines:
1. A monochrome flop board is almost always wet.
2. A paired flop board is almost always dry.
3. HHH is almost never dry but can be neutral.
4. LLL is almost never wet but can be neutral.
Wet / Dry and Static / Dynamic flops overlap a lot. I believe that Static / Dynamic is the most useful. More on that later.
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