Poker Strategy Guides

Math-first guides you can read in ten minutes and use at the table tonight. Every one of them starts from the actual numbers — combinations, equity, pot odds — and turns them into decisions you can make in the two seconds you get in a real hand.

If you're starting out

Read them in this order. Learn the hand rankings until they're automatic, then which hands to play before the flop, then where the odds come from. Those three cover most of the money most players lose. The single biggest winrate improvement available to a beginner isn't a clever bluff — it's folding the bottom 60% of hands before the flop.

The guides by type

• Texas Hold'em — the best starting hands and the trap hands that quietly drain bankrolls (7-2 offsuit isn't the expensive one — the pretty-looking hands are).
• Poker math — hand probabilities from scratch: the 2,598,960 possible hands, outs, and the rule of 4 and 2.
• Other variants — 5-card draw and Seven Card Stud, the game that was American poker before Hold'em took over.
• Casino table poker — 3-card poker and Ultimate Texas Hold'em. These are house games where no skill makes you a long-term favourite, but correct play cuts the edge substantially.

A note on what we don't cover

There's no "system" here, and nothing that promises guaranteed profit. Poker is a game of incomplete information and real variance: correct decisions lose all the time, and the only thing you control is whether the decision was right. Anyone selling certainty is selling something else.