Poker players often talk about the long run when analyzing their play slot. To help understand “the long run”, try flipping a coin ten times. We know that the odds of the coin landing on heads is fifty percent.

However this does not mean that the coin will alternate between heads and tails on each consecutive flip. You are very likely to see the coin land tails a few times in a row. In those ten flips, the coin might land on heads sixty or seventy percent of the time. In reality, the results of any small sample size are likely to differ from the expected results.

It is only through repeating the process over “the long run” that we begin to achieve the expected results. If you were really bored one weekend and flipped the coin a million times, you would find that heads will land much closer to 50% than in your sample of ten coin flips.

Understanding the concept of odds and how they relate to poker will help you analyze your game and hopefully will help you deal with the emotional ups and downs of the game. As poker players we can calculate the odds of us hitting our draws.

We know that if we hold a flush draw on an unpaired board, the odds of us completing the flush on the river are 4:1. That means that if we call for one big bet after the turn, there needs to be more than four big bets in the pot for our play to be correct.

If we only call the bet if we have the correct pot odds, we know that in the long run it will be a profitable play. Obviously we won’t hit our draw on each and every hand, but we can feel good knowing that we made the right decision.

Continuing with the flush draw example, our success in any given session will often depend on us actually hitting the draw. If a player has eight flush draws in a row and doesn’t complete his draw on any of them, it is very likely he will have a losing session.

During the next session, if the same player completes five out of eight nut flush draws, he will be very likely to have a winning session. During both sessions he played great poker, but his results were dependant on the short term fluctuations of the game. After playing a million hands, this player will have hit his flush draw very close to 20 percent of the time.

Poker can be a frustrating game when we do not hit our draws despite playing correctly, due to great pot odds. Don’t be discouraged when you feel that you are not hitting your draws because if you make the right decisions, you will be a winning player in the long run.