Ultimate Texas Hold'Em Tips

Yesterday I received a request to analyze Ultimate Texas Hold'em (UTH). This isn't the first time I've had this particular request. I wrote the code to analyze UTH a couple of years ago when an online casino company asked me to independently verify the house edge. To say that this is a big game is an understatement. For practical use, running a cycle is only the first step. The information must then be culled into rules that can be effectively used. For hole-card analysis, the computations get even bigger.

In poker rooms at live casinos and at online poker sites, Texas Hold’Em is by far the most popular game.

Away from the poker rooms, players can enjoy the excitement and intrigue of Hold’Em in online casinos and in the table games pits of live casinos. Ultimate Texas Hold’Em translates that Hold’Em experience to table games play against the dealer.

Ultimate Texas Hold'em (UTH) is among the most vulnerable novelty games to hole-card play. Between the dealer's two cards and the five community cards, the player has seven opportunities to get some extra information. With the ability to make a Play bet that is 4x the player's original Ante bet, any extra information can be leveraged into a big edge. In this post I am going to examine the case when the player knows one of the two dealer's hole-cards before making his pre-Flop decision.

When an AP finds a dealer on Ultimate Texas Hold'em (UTH) who is vulnerable to hole-carding, it is not unusual for her to expose the bottom card of every packet of cards she delivers (see this post for an introduction to UTH). This includes exposing one of her two hole-cards as well as one of the common cards. Depending on how the common cards are spread and turned over, the exposed common card will then either be a Flop card or it will be a Turn/River card.

When an AP finds a dealer on Ultimate Texas Hold'em (UTH) who is vulnerable to hole-carding, it is not unusual for her to expose the bottom card of every packet of cards she delivers. This includes exposing one of her two hole-cards as well as one of the common cards. Depending on how the common cards are spread and turned over, the exposed common card will then either be a Flop card or it will be a Turn/River card. This post considers the situation when the AP sees one dealer hole-card and one Turn/River card.

Ultimate Texas Hold'em (UTH) has a significant hole-card problem (see this post and this post). I've wondered for a long time if it also has a collusion problem: if players are allowed to share their cards at the table, can they get an edge? For the would-be colluder, players don't have many cards to share. A full table with six spots only gives players a total of 12 cards to work with.