The risk of making your hand and then being in a situation where you are drawing dead is not worth it. So treat nut gutshot straight draws, and non-nut draws differently, and be more willing to fold the latter one most of the time. However, the scenario where you are not very likely to hit your draw, combined with a fact that when you do hit your “magic” card, it can easily make you the second-best hand is a recipe for disaster. One of the main motivations for chasing a gutshot straight is the implied odds, i.e., the amount of money you can get from your opponents when you do make your hand. What I am saying, though, is that you need to be very careful chasing inside straight draws that don’t make the nuts. I’m not saying that you should never play in these scenarios. Now, poker isn’t an exact science, and the unknown element is what makes the game fun to play. Anyone with T6 or JT will have made a better straight. To make things even worse, when you do get lucky and get one of those cards you need, you’ll only have the third nuts. You need any 7 to complete your draw, and you already know the odds of that happening aren’t exactly favorable. However, the situation can become even worse if the gutshot you’re trying to make is not the nuts.įor example, let’s say you’re holding 56, and the board comes 4 8 9. Now that I’ve explained some basic numbers, it should be pretty clear why chasing your inside straight draws is often not a very good idea. Gutshot straight draw is, in fact, one of the weakest draws in poker, and you need to treat it as such. People often get way too involved with these hands despite the fact the numbers simply don’t add up. Knowing what is inside straight and what the inside straight draw odds are is essential for any further discussion. Whether you’re 8% or 9% to make your straight with one card to come doesn’t make that much difference in your actual strategy. While these numbers aren’t 100% precise and will depend on other backdoor options, they’re a very good approximation. Chances of making your straight by the river: 4 * 4 = 16%.Chances of making your straight on the turn: 4 * 2 = 8%.There is no need to make things too complex here, and I will stick to the straightforward “Rule of Two and Four.” You take the number of outs you have and multiply it by two to get your odds for the turn or by four to get the odds for the river.įor the inside straight draw, you’ll always have four outs, so: So, what are the actual inside straight draw odds, and how likely are you to make your hand on the turn or the river? Every time you think about strategies for a certain poker scenario, you first need to know the basic math behind it and understand poker odds.

Poker gut shot and open ended