Flop

The flop is the first three community cards, turned face up together after the opening betting round. It is the moment a hand stops being two cards and becomes something, and more money is won and lost on the decisions it triggers than on any other street.

How it is dealt

In hold'em and Omaha the dealer burns one card face down, then deals three face up in the middle of the table. All three arrive simultaneously, which distinguishes the flop from the turn and river and is why those are single cards and this one is a set.

Betting then proceeds from the player to the left of the dealer button — the opposite of pre-flop, where the blinds acted last. From the flop onwards they act first for the rest of the hand.

Seven-card stud has no flop, because it has no community cards at all. Draw games do not either.

Why the flop decides so much

Three of the five community cards appear at once, so roughly sixty per cent of the board is revealed in a single moment. A hand's prospects change more here than at any other point.

It is also where the first real information about an opponent's holding emerges. Pre-flop actions are made from ranges with almost no board to interact with; a flop decision reveals how a player's hand connects with specific cards, and every street afterwards is read against it.

Board texture

Texture describes how the three cards interact, and it governs almost every post-flop decision.

- **Dry or disconnected** boards are unpaired, unsuited and spread apart. Few draws are possible, so made hands are relatively safe, continuation bets succeed more often, and small sizing tends to be enough. - **Wet or coordinated** boards are suited, connected, or both. Many draws exist, strong hands are vulnerable and need protection, and the correct sizes are larger. - **Paired** boards remove flushes and straights as the nuts and introduce full houses and quads, which compresses the range of hands worth a big pot. - **Monotone** boards — all three of one suit — mean any player holding one card of that suit has a draw to the nuts, and anyone without one is in trouble.

The practical use of texture is to ask which player's range the board favours, rather than how good one's own hand is. A board of low cards favours the player who called from the blinds; a board of high cards favours the pre-flop raiser.

Some useful frequencies

A few flop probabilities come up often enough to be worth knowing. A pocket pair makes a set on the flop roughly one time in eight. Two suited cards flop a flush draw about one time in nine, and complete a flush immediately far more rarely. Two unpaired cards flop at least one pair about one time in three.

These are approximations that hold well enough for decisions at the table, and together they explain why speculative hands need either implied odds or cheap flops to be worth playing.

The continuation bet

The habit of betting the flop after raising pre-flop is near-universal, and it works because the raiser's range contains more strong hands and because the caller has missed the board most of the time. It stops working when it becomes automatic: an opponent who notices a player betting every flop regardless of texture can simply call or raise wider, and the bet loses the credibility it depends on.