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Poker in 2018 is as competitive as it has ever been. Long gone are the days of being able to print money playing a basic ABC strategy.

Today your average winning poker player has many tricks in their bags and tools in their arsenals. Imagine a soldier going into the heat of battle. Without his weapons, he is practically useless, and chances of survival are extremely low.

If you sit down at a poker table without any preparation or general understanding of poker fundamentals, the sharks are going to eat you alive. Sure you may get lucky once in a blue moon, but over the long term, things won’t end well.

The basic idea of poker is to play the strongest poker hands in early position, good hands in mid-position and a few more hands in the late (aka strongest) position. Over time, you'll naturally want to shake things up a bit. For now, stick with this and you'll never find yourself in trouble holding 7-2 off-suit. 1 day ago  How Many Six Card Poker Hands Contain Exactly 2 Pair? This question hasn't been answered yet Ask an expert. How many five-card poker hands are there? Suppose we want to play a strange kind of poker where are you dealt 6 cards. How many ways can you be dealt six cards? How many six card poker hands contain exactly 2 pair? How many poker hands are there? The total number of poker hands in a game of poker is 2,598,960. Since a game of poker uses a 52-card deck of French cards, there are 2,598,960 different possible.

How many poker hands are there? Expand There are 10 possible 5 card poker hands: royal flush, straight flush, four of a kind, full house, flush, straight, three of a kind, two pair, one pair, high card.

With the evolution of poker strategy, you now have many tools at your disposal. Whether it be online poker training sites, free YouTube content, poker coaching, or poker vlogs, there’s no excuse to be a fish in today's game.

Some of the essential fundamentals you need to be utilizing that every poker player should have in their bag of tricks whether you are a Tournament or Cash Game Player are concepts such as hand combinations (Also known as hand combinatorics or hand combos).

Hand Combinations and Hand Reading

If you were to analyze a large sample of successful poker players you would notice that they all have one skill set in common: Hand Reading

What does hand reading have to do with hand combinations you might ask?

Well, poker is a game of deduction and to be a good hand reader, you need to be good at correctly ranging your opponents.

Once you have assigned them a range, you will then need to start narrowing that range down. Combinatorics is one of the ways we do this.

So what is combinatorics? It may sound like rocket science and it is definitely a bit more complex than some other poker concepts, but once you get the hang of combinatorics it will take your game to the next level.

Combinatorics is essentially understanding how many combos each of your opponent's potential holdings are and deducing their potential holdings utilizing concepts such as removal and blockers.

There are 52 cards in a deck, 13 of each suit, and 4 of each rank with 1326 poker hands in total. To simplify things just focus on memorizing all of the potential combos to start:

• 16 possible hand combinations of every unpaired hand
• 12 combinations of every unpaired offsuit hand
• 4 combinations of each suited hand
• 6 possible combinations of pocket pairs

Here is a short video example of using combinatorics to count the number of ways a non-paired hand AK can be arranged (i.e. how many combos there are):

So now that we have this memorized, let's look at a hand example and how we can apply combinatorics in game.

We hold A♣Q♣ in the SB and 3bet the BTN’s open to 10bb with 100bb stacks. He flats and we go heads up to a flop of

A♠ 5♦ 4♦

We check and our opponent checks back with 21bb in the middle

Turn is the 4♥

We bet 10bb and our opponent calls for a total pot of 41bb

How Many Different Hands In Poker

The river brings the 9♠

So the final board reads

A♠ 5♦ 4♦ 4♥ 9♠

We bet 21bb and our opponent jams all in leaving us with 59bb to call into a pot of 162bb resulting in needing at least 36% pot equity to win.

Our opponent is representing a polarized range here. He is either nutted or representing missed draws so we find ourself in a tough spot. This is where utilizing combinatorics to deduce his value hands vs bluffs come into play. Now we need to narrow down his range given our line and his line. Let's take a look at how we do this...

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Blockers and Card Removal Effects

First, let's take a look at the hands we BLOCK and DON’T BLOCK

Since we hold an Ace in our hand and there is an Ace on the board, that only leaves 2 Ace’s left in the deck. So there is exactly 1 combo of AA.

We BLOCK most of the Aces he can be holding, so we can REMOVE some Aces from his range.

We do not BLOCK the A♦ as we hold A♣Q♣, and the A on the board is a spade, so it is still possible for him to have some A♦x♦ hands.

We checked flop to add strength to our check call range (although a bet with a plan to triple barrel is equally valid in this situation SB vs BTN) and because of this our opponent may not put us on an A here.

If he is a thinking player his jam can exploit our thin value bet on the river turning his missed straight/flush draws into a bluff to get us to fold our big pocket pairs and even make it a tough call with our perceived weak holdings.

The problem in giving him significant credit for this part of his bluffing range is the question of would he really shove here with good SDV (Showdown Value)?

These are the types of questions we must ask ourselves to further deduce his range along with applying the combinatoric information we now have.

Now, let's look at all the nutted Ax hands our opponent can have.

If he has a nutted hand like A4 or A5, and we assume he is only calling 3bets with Axs type hands, the only suited combo of those hands he can have are exactly A♥5♥. He can’t have A♦5♦ or A♦4♦ because the 4 and the 5 are both diamonds on the board blocks these hands.

Lets take a look at all of this value hands:

There is only 1 combo of 44 left in the deck, 2 combos of A9s, 3 Combos of 55, 3 Combos of 99, 2 Combos of 45s - some of these hands may also be bet on the flop when facing a check.

So to recap we have:

1 Combo A5s, 2 Combos of A9s, 3 Combos of 55 (With one 5 on board, the number of combinations of 55 are cut in half from 6 combos to 3 combos), 1 Combo of 44, 2 Combos of 45s, 3 Combos of 99

Total: 12 Value Combos

Now we need to look at our opponent's potential bluffs

Based on the villain's image, this is the range of bluffs we assigned him:

K♦Q♦(1 Combo), J♦T♦ (1 Combo), T♦9♦ (1 Combo), 67s (4 Combos)

He may also turn some other random hands with little showdown value into bluffs such as A♦2♦/A♦3♦

Total: 9 Bluff Combos

9(Bluff Combos) + 12(Value Combos) = 22

9/21 = 42% of the time our opponent will be bluffing (assuming he always bets this entire range)

11/21 = 58% of the time our opponent will be value raising

Now, this is the range we assigned him in game based on the action and what we perceived our opponents range to be.

We are not always correct in applying the exact range of his potential holdings, but so long as you are in the ballpark of that range you can still make quite a few deductions to put yourself in the position to make the correct final decision.

According to the range we assigned him, he has 11 Value Combos and 9 Bluff Combos which gives us equity of 42%. This would result in a positive expected value call as we only need 36% pot odds to call.

However, unless you are playing against very tough opponents you will not see someone bluffing all 9 combos we have assigned - most likely they will bluff in the range of 4-6 combos on average which gives equity in the range of 20-30% equity. This is not enough to call.

We ultimately made our decision based on the fact that we felt our opponent was much less likely to jam with his bluffs in this spot. Given that it was already a close decision to begin with, we managed to find what ended up being the correct fold.

Now this all may seem a bit overwhelming, but if you just start taking an extra minute on your big decisions you’d be surprised how quickly you can actually process all this information on this spot.

A good starting point is to simply memorize all of the possible hand combinations listed above near the beginning of the article.

Get access to our 30-minute lesson on Combinatorics and PokerStove by clicking on one of the buttons below:

Conclusion On Combinatorics

Eventually accounting for your opponent's combos in a hand will become second nature. To get to the point that , a lot of the work needs to be done off the table and in the lab. As you spend more time studying it and reviewing hand histories like the one above, you will find yourself intuitively and almost subconsciously using combinatorics in your decision making tree.

But the work will be worth the effort, as being able to count combos on the fly will add a new dimension to your game, allow you to make more educated decisions, become a tougher opponent to play against and move away from playing ABC poker.

Want more content like the ones in this blog post on poker combinatorics? Check out our Road to Success Course where we have almost 100 videos like this to help take your game to the next level. You can also get the first module of the Road To Success Course for Free - for more details see the free poker training videos page by TopPokerValue.com.

Knowing your hands per hour is important for planning your sessions and figuring out your hourly rate. I dove into the statistics and did a bit of research and this is what I found out.

How many hands per hour in poker? Online you will play around 75 hands per hour on a 6-max table and about 62 hands per hour on a 9-max table. In online fast fold games like Zoom, Zone, or Snap you will play 200 to 250 hands per table hour. Live poker players will typically average 25 hands per hour.

Of course, these numbers can vary based on where you are playing. Let’s take a look at the factors that can effect your hands per hour experience.

There Are Fewer Hands per Hour in Soft Games

As the VPIP goes up the hands per hour tends to go down. For comparison sake, let’s take a look at Bovada/Ignition versus the Winning Poker Network (WPN). I have played hundreds of thousands of hands on both networks and checked my database to compare the numbers.

For 6-max games on Bovada and Ignition I average 68 hands per hour. On WPN I average 77 hands per hour. In 9-max games the numbers are 55 and 62 respectively.

Why the discrepancy?

It’s because the VPIP is quite a bit higher on Bovada and Ignition. I mean it makes sense. If more people are limping and seeing flops then, of course, the games will play slower. I am not a live player but I can imagine 5/10 players enjoy a higher hands per hour than 1/2 players.

What Are Your Exact Hands per Hour on Each Site?

Hold’em Manager has a handy multi-table report that shows exactly how many hands per hour are played based on how many tables are played at once. Here are my numbers:

6-Max

9-Max

Surprisingly, the more tables I played the higher my hands per hour is. I guess this makes perfect sense since game selection pretty much goes out the window when you are mass multi-tabling.

Hands per Hour Dealt Is Different Than Hands per Hour Played

If you look around the web you will see much higher numbers than I am writing about here. That’s because they are talking about hands per hour when you are actually dealt into the hand.

Raw hands per hour when actually being dealt in is like 90 per hour for 6-max and 75 per hour for 9-max. However, unless you are staying on the same table and playing for hours, lower numbers are more realistic.

What they fail to take into account that some of the time that you are sitting at a table you are not being dealt in. Hands dealt per hour does not include time players spend getting on and off the tables and sitting and waiting on big blinds. Therefore, actual hands played per hour is what you should use when trying to figure out your hourly win-rate.

What About Hands Per Hour in Live Games?

Live dealt in numbers tend to be much closer to reality since there is no multi-tabling and a player will typically stay at the same table for hours. Even so, the number of hands played per hour is still much lower than online.

Hands per hour in live games can range anywhere from 20 to 30. Besides almost exclusively being 9 or 10 handed, it takes time for the dealer to shuffle and deal. That leaves little time to actually playing poker. I have a ton of respect for the patience and mental toughness of live grinders.

Aggressive Table Selection Affects Hands per Hour

The longer you stay on a table the more hands per hour you are dealt. This is because you have to pull up a new table, sit down, and then wait for the big blinds. This takes time. Therefore, switching games often lowers your hands per hour.

Now I am not saying you should stop game selecting. In today’s tough poker environment, robust table selection is how money is made. One way to remedy this issue and still maintain your desired number of hands per hour is to just add one more table. If you normally two table, try three.

Mass Multi-Tablers Slow down the Games

I have noticed a direct correlation between the maximum number of tables allowed on a site to how many hands per hour is played. This is due to mass multi-tablers, who tend to time bank often and hold up the games.

For example, Bovada and Ignition also only allow 4 cash game tables to be played at once. WPN still allows people to play 24 tables at the same time. Get two or three guys playing 24 tables on one table and it becomes time bank city. Watch your hourly rate shrink due to atrophied hands per hour.

Why Does Full Ring Play Slower Than 6-Max?

Full ring has a lower hands per hour because there are more players on the table that have to act during each hand. Also, 9-max games tend to play more passively than 6-max. Therefore, 6-max games tend to play about 20% faster than 9-max games.

What If I Mix in Full Ring Games and Want to Have the Same Hands per Hour?

If you want to play the same amount of hands per hour at 9-max that you do at 6-max you will simply just need to add more tables.

Let’s say you currently play 8 tables of 6-max and average 600 hands per hour. Since the average hands per hour at 9-max is 62, you simply divide 62 into 600 and that gives you your optimal number of full ring tables.
In this case, it is 9.68, or 10 tables.

• 600/62= 9.68

Fast-Fold (Zoom/Zone) Poker Hands Per Hour

In the last few years, the popularity of fast-fold poker has increased substantially due to the increase in hands per hour attainable. No longer do you have to sit back and watch a hand play out after you have folded. With the click of a button you are moved on to another hand.

This allows people to play between 200 and 300 hands per hour on each table.

What this means is that a player can use less real estate on his or her desktop and just focus on one or two tables at the time, while still achieving a substantial number of hands per hour.

Drawbacks of Fast-Fold Poker

Fast-fold poker is not for the feint of heart. In fact, it takes a completely different strategy than you would play on a regular table. Maximizing hands per hour can actually be a big factor in determining how to play.

Personally, I dislike fast-fold poker not because of the strategic differences or the speed of play. Rather, I believe that the game is not really poker at all.

Observing opponents and then adjusting your strategy based on what they do is at the heart of poker. Fast-fold poker takes this away since every hand will find you in a different mix of opponents. So much for using gameflow considerations to your advantage.

Poker Hands What Beats What

Final Thoughts

If you are reading this article so that you can start mass multi-tabling because you think it will increase your hourly rate substantially, I have to warn you. As hands per hour increases, ability to focus on what is going on and game select correctly tends to go out the window.

So unless you are at least a 6bb/100 winner playing one or two tables, I would not even consider trying to maximize your hands per hour yet. Your growth as a poker player is much more important than trying to increase your hourly rate.

However, once you are ready you now know how many hands per hour you can expect to play at the tables. I hope this information allows you to figure out your optimal number of tables to play to achieve your hourly rate goals. My optimal number of tables is about 6, what’s yours?

Poker Hands Chart

Related Questions

How Many Hands In Poker Possible

How do I calculate hourly rate in poker?Tocalculate your hourly rate you divide your total profit by the number of hours you have played.

What is a good poker hourly rate? What can be considered a good hourly rate in poker will vary from player to player based on their goals. It will also depend on the stake being played. It is much better to focus on win-rate instead of hourly rate. A good online win-rate will range from 2-4 big blinds per 100 hands for multi-tablers and from 4 big blinds to 10 big blinds per 100 hands for single tablers. However, due to the extreme softness of some live games, live players will often enjoy a win-rate much higher.

How Many Different Hands In Poker

How many hands per hour in tournament poker? Hands per hour in tournaments will be higher than cash games since there is no table selection involved. Online you can expect to play 90 hands per hour for 6-max and 75 hands per hour for 9-max. As the blinds increase, hands also tend to play faster since the game evolves into push-fold. Live tournament players play around 30 hands per hour.