1. Ultimate Texas Hold'em
2. Free Texas Hold'em Poker Download
3. Ultimate Texas Hold Em Online
4. Ultimate Texas Holdem House Edge
5. Ultimate Texas Hold Em Poker Practice
6. Ultimate Texas Hold Em Practice

• House edge for Ultimate Texas Hold’em This game is much harder to play ‘perfectly’ compared to other casino table games. While the headline house edge is around 2.2% for your Ante and Blind bets, that assumes a perfect decision every time. You also need to consider the variable amounts you are betting.
• Practical Collusion for Ultimate Texas Hold’em Posted in collusion, ultimate texas hold'em by stephenhow on January 15, 2010 Most casinos that spread Ultimate Texas Hold’em don’t really mind when players discretely show their hands to their neighbors, or even flash the entire table.
• Huntington Press. 3665 Procyon St. Las Vegas, NV 89103. Local: 702-252-0655. Toll-free: 800-244-2224. Fax: 702-252-0675. Email: email protected Business Hours.

Ultimate Texas Hold'em (UTH) is one of the most popular novelty games in the market. For that reason, it is important to understand the multitude of ways that UTH may be vulnerable to advantage play. Many of my recent posts have concerned some of these possibilities. But the computations are tedious. It took my computer 5 days to run the cycle where the AP sees one dealer hole-card (see this post). Then my computer spent 8 days analyzing the situation where the AP sees one dealer hole-card and one Flop card (see this post). After that, my computer crunched hands for just over 2 days considering computer-perfect collusion with six players at the table (see this post). After all of this time spent on more advanced plays, I decided to take a step back to compute the house edge off the top, using perfect basic strategy and no advantage play. It took my computer three days to run the pre-Flop cycle and another two days to run the Flop cycle. Finally, I have some basic strategy data to present.

House edge of Texas holdem poker. In raw terms, the house edge of Ultimate Texas Hold’em poker is just under 2.19 per cent. Thus, with optimal strategy, you can expect to lose about $2.19 out of every $100 you wager on the Ante bet over the course of a session.

Ultimate Texas Hold'em

This analysis has been done before and has been done better by both Michael Shackleford and James Grosjean. In particular, Michael Shackleford's extraordinary page on UTH includes a practical strategy for the Flop (check / raise 2x) and Turn/River (raise 1x / fold) bets, which I will borrow here in my presentation. In light of what has been done before, if I had nothing new to offer here, I would forgo this post. However, as the reader will soon see, this work includes megabytes of new fun.

As a reminder, here are the rules for UTH (taken from this document):

1. The player makes equal bets on the Ante and Blind.

2. Five community cards are dealt face down in the middle of the table.

3. The dealer gives each player and herself a set of two starting cards, face down.

4. Players now have a choice:

   1. Check (do nothing); or

   2. Make a Play bet of 3x or 4x their Ante.

5. The dealer then reveals the first three community cards (the 'Flop' cards).

6. Players who have not yet made a Play bet have a choice:

   1. Check: or

   2. Make a Play bet of 2x their Ante.

7. The dealer then reveals the final two community cards (the 'Turn/River' cards).

8. Player who have not yet made a Play bet have a choice:

   1. Fold and forfeit their Ante and Blind bets; or

   2. Make a Play bet of 1x their Ante.

9. The dealer the reveals her two starting cards and announces her best five-card hand. The dealer needs a pair or better to 'qualify.'

Now what? Well, either the dealer qualifies or she doesn't. The player beats, ties or loses to the dealer. Either the player's hand is good enough to qualify for a 'Blind' bonus payout, it doesn't. The following table hopefully clarifies all of these possibilities and gives the payouts in every case:

The final piece of the puzzle is the Blind bet. As the payout schedule above shows, if the player wins the hand, regardless if the dealer qualifies, then the player's Blind bet is paid according to the following pay table:

• Royal Flush pays 500-to-1.

• Straight Flush pays 50-to-1.

• Four of a Kind pays 10-to-1.

• Full House pays 3-to-1.

• Flush pays 3-to-2.

• Straight pays 1-to-1.

• All others push.

Combinatorial Analysis
The following spreadsheet contains my full combinatorial analysis. It presents the 169 unique starting hands, together with the edge for checking and raising 4x. The sheet also gives the number of hands equivalent to the listed hand (the suit-permutations). For example, because the starting hand (2c,7d) is equivalent to (2h, 7s), only the hand (2c,7d) was analyzed.

In particular:

• The house edge for UTH is 2.18497%.

• The player checks pre-Flop on 62.29261% of the hands.

• The player raises 4x pre-Flop on 37.70739% of the hands.

• The player has a pre-Flop edge over the house on 35.29412% of the hands.

• The player should never raise 3x pre-Flop.

Pre-Flop Strategy
Here is a summary of pre-Flop basic strategy taken from the spreadsheet above:

• Raise 4x on the following hands, whether suited or not:

  • A/2 to A/K

  • K/5 to K/Q

  • Q/8 to Q/J

  • J/T

• Raise 4x on the following suited hands:

  • K/2, K/3, K/4

  • Q/6, Q/7

  • J/8, J/9

• Raise on any pair of 3's or higher.

• Check all other hands.

Flop Strategy
A Flop decision to check or raise 2x is only possible if the player checked pre-Flop. By reference to the pre-Flop strategy above, it turns out there are exactly 100 equivalence classes of starting hands where the player checked pre-Flop. I re-ran my UTH basic strategy program to consider each of these 100 hands and each possible Flop that can appear with that starting hand. For each starting hand where the player checked pre-Flop, there are combin(50,3) = 19,600 Flops to consider. Thus, altogether, I had to evaluate the Flop decision to check or raise 2x for 100 x 19,600 = 1,960,000 situations.

The following four spreadsheets contain the analysis for each of these 1,960,000 possibilities. Each spreadsheet contains the full data for 25 starting hands for the player. Note, these spreadsheets are each approximately 20M in size:

To understand the data in these spreadsheets, the following image gives the first few Flop decisions for the player starting hand (8c, Jd) (see spreadsheet #3):

For example, consider the hand player = (8c, Jd), Flop = (2c, 3c, Jc). Then the EV for checking is 1.267304 and the EV for raising 2x is 1.848414. As is intuitively obvious (because the player paired his Jack), raising 2x is correct here.

Now look at the hand right below that, player = (8c, Jd) and Flop = (2c, 3c, Qc). This is also a hand where the player should raise 2x (the decision is very close), but I have very little intuition for why this might be the case. Perhaps because there is a runner-runner straight draw and a flush draw.

Now look at the very next row. When the player holds (8c, Jd) and the Flop is (2c, 3c, Kc), then it is correct to check. The runner-runner straight no longer exists.

Any attempt to quantify such subtleties into a full strategy must surely be a painstaking task. The reader is invited to cull these four spreadsheets (approx. 80M) and create such a complete strategy for himself: I am going to forgo this exercise.

Michael Shackleford's approximation to Flop strategy is simple and smart. The player should raise 2x with two pair or better, a hidden pair (except pocket 2's) or four to a flush with a kicker of T or higher. We see that the hand given above, where player = (8c, Jd), Flop = (2c, 3c, Qc), violates Shackleford's strategy. It is four to a flush with kicker 8c. Shackleford's incorrect strategy for this hand corresponds to a very small loss of EV (0.377%). This small loss of EV is well worth the investment, given the strategic simplicity it yields.

Turn/River Strategy
One can certainly use Shackleford's very easy Turn/River strategy for the final Turn/River decision: The player should raise 1x when he has a hidden pair, or there are fewer than 21 dealer outs that can beat the player, otherwise he should fold.(see the thread on WizardofVegas.com for a discussion about the meaning of '21 outs.') One can also use Grosjean's more complex strategy from Exhibit CAA, that I won't repeat here. Good luck getting a copy of CAA. (James, make your book available! Please!).

My complete method here, were I to do it, would be to post spreadsheets containing computer-perfect play so that the reader could devise his own Turn/River strategy. By reference to the Flop strategy spreadsheets given above, of the 1,960,000 Flop possibilities, exactly 1,273,842 of them correspond to the player checking on the Flop. Each of these checking possibilities yields an additional combin(47,2) = 1,081 Turn/River hands to complete the board, where the player then has to then choose to either fold or raise 1x on each. That is, the complete spreadsheet analysis of the Turn/River decision would mean posting a total of 1,960,000 x 1,081 = 1,377,023,202 hands for the reader to consider.

Yeah, well ... at any rate, for the curious, here is my derivation of Shackleford's result concerning playing hands with 20 or fewer dealer outs:

Clearly if the player folds, then his EV is -2.

Let N be the number of outs under consideration for the dealer to beat the player. Then the probability that the dealer's first card is an out is p = N/45. For his second card, the dealer who whiffed on his first card most likely has 3 additional 'pair outs' to pair his first card and beat the player. He may also generate new straight or flush outs (call these 1 additional 'out,' so-called 'runner-runner'). So, the probability of the dealer beating the player by hitting an out on his second card is approximately (N + 4)/44.

Overall, the probability that the dealer beats the player is then,

p = N/45 + [(45 - N)/45]*[(N + 4)/44].

Simplifying, we get:

p = (-N^2 + 85 N + 180)/(45*44)

Note that if the dealer doesn't hit an out, then he won't qualify. It follows that the EV for the player who raises 1x on the Turn/River bet is:

EV = p*(-3) + (1-p)*(1) = 1 - 4p.

We make the raise whenever EV > -2. That is, 1 - 4p > -2. Solving for p gives

p < 3/4.

That is, the player raises 1x when his chance of beating the dealer is 25% or higher.

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Combining the two expressions for p, we see that EV > -2 whenever

(-N^2 + 85 N + 180)/(45*44) < 3/4.

Simplifying gives the quadratic equation,

N^2 - 85N + 1305 > 0

Solving this quadratic equation gives roots:

• (1/2)*(85 + sqrt(2005)) = 64.9

• (1/2)*(85 - sqrt(2005)) = 20.1

For the quadratic equation to be positive, N must be either larger than both roots or smaller than both roots. That is, either N ≥ 65 or N ≤ 20. The first case is the 'impossible solution,' leading to the conclusion that there can be at most 20 dealer outs that can beat the player.

Conclusion
Here is a summary of the edges for the strategies referenced above:

• Computer-perfect strategy for UTH yields a house edge of 2.18497%.

• Shackleford's practical strategy for UTH yields a house edge of about 2.43%.

• Grosjean's strategy for UTH in Exhibit CAA yields a house edge of 2.35%.

Ultimate Texas Holdem Strategy Guide: Rules for Winning

Don’t let the above title fool you – there’s no way to guarantee a profit in any casino game. But if you play your cards right, a good Ultimate Texas Holdem strategy can drop the house edge to 0.526%. Play it wrong, and the house edge will start at 2.85%, increasing with every bad decision made.

The first thing you need to know is that there’s a big difference between Texas Holdem Poker and Ultimate Texas Holdem. The former is a player-vs-player game that often involves bluffing and outwitting your opponents through mental aptitude.

Despite its similar appearance, Ultimate Texas Holdem is completely differently. This is a house-banked game that offers to such psychological advantage. It’s player-vs-dealer, and only the best hand wins. Therefore you’ll need a completely different Ultimate Texas Holdem strategy to win more often.

Ultimate Texas Holdem Rules

The rules of the game are simple, especially if you already know how to play Texas Holdem poker. Here’s a quick rundown of game play.

– 1 standard 52-card deck I used, reshuffled after every hand.
– Player makes equal Ante and Blind bet to start.
– Player and dealer each dealt 2 hole cards (face down); player may look at own cards.
– Player will either Check or Raise, with Raise equal to 3x or 4x the Ante.
– Three community cards are dealt (face up).
– If Player checked before, he may Check again or Raise 2x the Ante. If a Raise was already placed, no further bets can be placed.
– Final two community cards are dealt.
– Player must Raise equal to Ante if he’s checked on both previous rounds, or Fold. If a Raise was already placed, no further bets can be placed.
– Player and Dealer set highest ranking hands from their own hole cards and community cards.
– Highest ranking hand wins. Dealer must have Any Pair or better to “qualify”.

Ultimate Texas Holdem Payouts

Remember, there are three bets that may (or may not) win here; the Blind, the Ante and the Raise. The relative payouts and dealer hand qualifications are as follows.

– If the Player wins and the Dealer qualifies, Blind, Ante and Raise bets win.
– If the Player wins and the Dealer does not qualify, Blind and Raise bets win; Ante is a push.
– If the Dealer wins and qualifies, Blind, Ante and Raise bet are lost.
– If the Dealer wins and does not qualify, Blind and Raise bets are lost; Ante is a push.
– In the case of Tie, all bets push regardless of dealer qualification.

Blind Bet Pays: Ante and Raise bets are always paid even money. Blind bets pay according to the following pay table, based on the player’s progressive hand ranks.

Ultimate Texas Hold Em Online

– Royal Flush Pays 500 to 1
– Straight Flush Pays 50 to 1
– Four of a Kind Pays 10 to 1
– Full House Pays 3 to 1
– Flush Pays 3 to 2
– Straight Pays 1 to 1
– All Others are a Push

Ultimate Texas Holdem Strategy

The biggest takeaway from the rules section is that the amount a player is allowed to Raise will decrease with each passing round of play. Either way, a Raise (aka Play Bet) must be made at some point, or the player must fold.

There’s a very basic chart players can use to ensure they are always making the right move. Note that this is an Ultimate Texas Holdem strategy for beginners, and that more advanced tactics can be applied later.

Note: If you’re dealt a pair in the hole, always Raise pre-flop unless they’re 2s (Raise after flop if 2s). For all other hands, follow this Ultimate Texas Holdem strategy chart. If your hand still falls into the “N” column after all community cards are dealt, fold.

Ultimate Texas Holdem House Edge

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