Ali Mohammad

I'm a Muslim, so let me preface this by saying that I'm against gambling. So don't play poker with money. It's just a game. If you want to make money, get a job. If you want to lose money, give it to me. If you want to risk money, get a job and flip a coin: if it comes up heads, send me your pay check. Pleasure doing business with you.

All the same, I do like poker. It's hard to get a game going without playing for money, though, so I'm kind of inexperienced. The only variant that I know with any degree of familiarity is Texas Hold 'Em, and since I'm not playing with money, I play only no limit.

If you don't know the rules of any poker game, I recommend this (fairly exhaustive!) page (local mirror). Here are some Card Tricks and Chip Tricks.

I'm forever forgetting the poker hands, so here they are for my convenience:

Five of a Kind (when possible) — five cards all of the same rank.
Straight Flush — five consecutively ranked cards of the same suit.
Four of a Kind — four cards all of the same rank.
Full House — a pair and three of a kind.
Flush — five cards of the same suit.
Straight — five cards of consecutive ranks.
Three of a Kind — three cards of the same rank.
Two pair — two pairs.
Pair — two cards of the same rank.
High card

I wrote a little python library for poker games and a python script for “hot-cold” comparison of poker hands (try it online!!). Here are statistics for a million trials and the expected values for each:

                     measured    expected   error
1.         no hand     500995      500000   0.20%
2.            pair     422777      421576   0.28%
3.        two pair      47477       47427   0.11%
4. three of a kind      21030       21079   0.23%
5.        straight       3998        3915   2.12%
6.           flush       2048        1961   4.44%
7.      full house       1402        1437   2.44%
8.  four of a kind        258         240   7.50%
9.  straight flush         15          14   7.14%

runtime: 6m23.173s

Poker