You’ve heard professionals and bloggers talk a lot about how so much of learning poker is understanding the probabilities. That’s it more straight math than it is gut feelings.

OK, so you’re on board with that. You believe it for the most part, but you don’t know where to start. Well lucky for you, you can always just memorize much of what you need to learn instead of doing the math live at the rakeback poker table every hand. So here’s a handle little rundown of percentages of different hands for you to keep track of, study and refer to when you’re playing. I’ll get through what I can here and keep adding more in future articles.

You know why it’s such an exciting moment when you hit pocket aces before the flop? Because the odds of it happen are 0.45%, literally next to nothing. And there no being “due” for pocket aces. It’s 0.45% each time, every time.

What about all the other pairs? The odds of getting any pocket pair are a slim but attainable 5.9%.

The chance of getting Ace, King suited is actually slimmer than getting a pair of bullets, coming in at a minuscule 0.3%. And the chance of getting Ace, King off-suited is 0.9 percent. That’s the one that caught my eye. You’d figure there’s be enough combination of the off-suit to ramp it up into at least the low single-digits, but that’s not the case. Again, an eye-opener as to why these hands are bet as strong as they are off the deal. The two Ace, King possibilities combined are still only 1.2% chance of hitting.

Now, the probability of getting any two suited cards before the flop soars to 24%. Every time this happens, somebody zeroes in hardcore on that flush draw, and unless you know these percentages, it’s one of the biggest traps you can fall into, calling and calling until you’ve got nothing left.