Although it might sound cool and dominant to proclaim that nobody tells you the odds, this is rather foolish to yell for online poker, as you are alone in the room. Using apps to assist you in your game can be both fun and beneficial to your streak, if not a guarantee.
Especially with online poker that can’t be cheated, the chance always exists for anyone to win. The lack of certainty is what makes the game fun and enduring for so long.
But, playing fair doesn’t mean going in blind and hoping for luck alone to be on your side. You want to take any type of edge that you can. For IRL poker that used to be reading people’s faces and trying to figure out if they have a good hand.
For online poker, it is having a quick way to tell your own chances and how probable it is that you will win from calculating the cards that you can see. Having such an advantage will make you play smarter, avoid bleeding chips, and know when to press your advantage.
Knowing and Doing is not the Same
Knowing what your odds are can be very beneficial. But, there is no app that will make you consistently win at poker. If there ever was such a device, it would make its creator a very wealthy person.
All of the guides, calculators, and external apps can do is to tell you what would be the reasonable thing to do. When you think that you will surely win, they can tell you that your odds are closer to 5%.
What they can never do is play in your stead. You will need to be the one playing the cards and placing the bets.
Once the hand is done, nobody will care if you have a 5% chance to win and still won, or that your unbeatable hand was beaten on a high-card. And no app will feel remorse for guiding you wrongly.
Strategy Guides
These are probably the oldest type of apps and existed long before people were playing poker on mobile phones. Guides are different from books in the aspect that they don’t aim to inform you why something is happening, but rather to give you practical advice.
With a practical guide on poker rules, you can have a general idea of what to expect from different hands.
Because they are usually just text and references, you wouldn’t be able to learn your odds directly. This is because the guide doesn’t know how many players are out there, or if the deck is different than standard.
But, you might find out when is a good time to press your hand and push for more, or when it might be more prudent to fold.
Odds Calculator
If you are playing with a single deck, there are only a limited number of possibilities that might happen. A poker odds calculator is there to predict which are more likely to happen, informing your decision on what to do.
With a single deck of 52 cards, there are 1326 possible hands in total. This doesn’t include winning by a simple high-card, which would be the epitome of both luck and guts to play.
For a regular human, it is next to impossible to calculate these chances in the time it takes to bet, call, or fold. But, for a calculator, this is very easy and done in seconds.
The app will take your hand into consideration, anything that might be on the table, as well as the number of players. Using this method, it will tell you exactly how high are the chances of some hand coming up, and thus the chance of you winning.
If you follow poker tournaments online or on the TV, these stats will usually be shown on the screen to let the audience know who is most likely to win.
Throw-Keep Calculator
Not applicable to hold’em poker, a throw/keep calculator doesn’t focus on what others might have in their hands. Rather, this type of app will tell you which cards are better to keep or exchange when playing regular poker.
By having this type of information, you will be able to form the best possible hand with what you have. Basically, it is similar to a ranker, or a Fortnite tracker, where you don’t know exactly what will happen, but you can get stats on the likelihood.
Now, would that hand be a winner is up to you and your luck.
You Can Win by Playing Fair
The greatest benefit of online poker is not in the additional apps that will measure your chances and give you the statistics. These are just tools meant to make the game more fun for you.
And because the internet opened the playing field for so many players, operators of these games are more than willing to host games with minimal stakes, and even give bonus credit for new players.
If you like playing poker and can draw joy from the thrill, you might be a winner without ever winning a single hand. Because of the low stakes and high bonuses, you might spend less on a poker night than you would for a movie ticket, and get a better show while you’re at it.