What percentage of hands are won by at least one flop card?

Replay Poker Poker Discussion
1

I am interested in knowing what percentage of hands are won by at least one card in the flop. Obviously this may affect your decision about when it is worth continuing if you do not happen to have cards that match one of those 3 cards in your hand. I haven’t been able to find an answer by searching. Thanks

2

You can’t make a 5 card hand without using at least 1 card from the flop, so 100% of all winning hands will have at least 1 card from the flop. In a bizarre coincidence, so will all the losing hands.

4 Likes
3

Some bluffs might be won without any cards in the flop, for example I raise preflop and everyone folds.

1 Like
4

I think it’s fair to say that if you win with a Pair, even though the other three cards in your hand “count” as being part of your hand, that’s not what the OP means by coming from the flop if your paired cards come from your hand or the Turn or River streets. They asked about the winning card, not the winning hand. Which cards in your hand made it the winning hand? The pair, maybe the kicker. Or you may win with a 3, 4, or 5-card hand if you hit trips, two pair, quads, a straight, flush, or full house.

Say you hold pocket AA, the flop misses you, and you win the hand with your Aces never improving. You still take the next 3 highest cards, one of which must be from the flop technically, but it doesn’t make your hand.

I think it’s an interesting question. Intuition tells me that most of the time the hands are won in the flop, simply because that’s where the most cards come. Most of the time when a player stays in to see the flop, if the flop misses and someone bets, they fold, so for the player who hit the flop and bet, they will have won with cards from the flop.

Conversely, suck-outs happen, but it’s less common, because to get to that winning Turn or River card, you need to hold up to all the betting ahead of it. And you’re only going to call if you are getting good pot odds, or if you have a made hand but stand to improve to an even better hand through the final two streets. Or if you’re just dumb but end up getting lucky.

So yeah, I’d say probably most of the time the flop is a very big part of the hand. Except when the hand closes preflop due to everyone mucking but the winner. Which can happen a lot, depending on how people are betting, and happens much more in certain circumstances, when the blinds are bigger relative to stack size, and when the table is short-handed.