Mathematics is a vital component in the poker machine, but it does not mean that you have to be Rain Man in order to be a great poker player. Poker players generally fall into one of two distinct groups: the feeling players and the mathematical players. If you fall into the feeling category then you need to learn a few math fundamentals in order to become a good player and anyone with a Betfair poker welcome bonus should remember this.

Probability is one of those fundamentals, and it is the percentage of the time that something is likely to occur or has already occurred. Probability is can be expressed as a percentage or a ratio. It is the ratio that is often coined as odds in the poker lingo. Anyone playing Betfair Poker Welcome Freerolls can practice calculating things.

Let’s imagine you have a hand like [Ac] [5c] and you have hit a flop like [8c] [Tc] [Qc] what is the probability that you will hit your flush draw? There are 52-cards in the deck and 13 of them are clubs. You have two of them and there are three on the board making five clubs in total. This means that of the existing cards in the deck eight of them are spades. So the probability of you hitting your flush on the turn is 8/47= 17%. You also have to calculate the fact that you have a river card to come as well so 8/46 = 17.4%. This means that you have a 31.4% of hitting your flush should all the money go in on the flop (17 + 17.4%).

When you understand this basic probability you can now make the correct mathematical decision based on the size of your opponents bet, by comparing the odds given by the bet with the odds that you will hit your hand.

One of the advantages that you have when you play cash game poker is you can sit down and leave whenever you choose. Cash game poker fits into the schedule of life perfectly, unlike the soul crushing 15-hour sessions of tournament poker that are dished out by the WSOP each year in the freezing cold temperatures of the Rio.

For a player to gain an advantage there must be someone somewhere being disadvantaged and here are a few examples. First let’s focus on the short stack specialists in the game. It is not much fun sitting in a game full of short stackers. There simply isn’t really a game of wits going on when you do battle with these players.

They have a pretty straightforward strategy and you have a pretty straightforward counter strategy.  The short stacker has an advantage because he can double up quickly and then exit the game before returning after a period of absence. You are disadvantaged because the player has just left – not only with your money – but also with a stack he is not equipped to play with. You need to bear this in mind when playing Betfair Cash Games.

Another disadvantage comes when you have a mix of skill levels in the game. Maybe there is a little baby fish, a barracuda and a shark. The little baby fish leaves the game because he has just had a stack sized chunk bitten out of him by the barracuda, and then the barracuda also sits out of the game. This leaves the shark swimming around on his own without any way of being fed.

One way of evening up the scales a little bit would be to have a minimum time limit that you had to stay put! Maybe 30-40mins of necessary action before you could sit out or squirrel away?