Burning Cards and Odds of Hitting

Hi,

I play every week along with some friends. In one of our recent games, we had a debate, a misunderstanding. Well in our group, we do not burn cards to avoid dealing errors and of course to speed up the game. Everyone knows this. However, one guy just joined in and said that if you burn cards you decrease the odds of possibly hitting what you need, as there are less cards left in the deck. For an instance, if you have a pair KK and there are 4 players, then there are 44 cards left in the deck before the flop. In case a card is burnt, deck decreases to 43 before you flop.

I don’t actually agree with what the guy said. I know the number of unknown cards is still set at 44 and even if you burned 5 cards, the odds of you hitting would still be the same as random cards selected to the flop are still up. I believe burning cards changes the result but not the odds of hitting. Thoughts on this?

Hope to hear from you soon.

Regards,
Vinze
Vinze,

You are right. Burning cards do not change the odds of hitting your hand. Odds are calculated based on the number of unseen cards. Burned cards make no difference. They are still unseen cards. You don’t know what cards you are burning so taking them out the equation will skew the results.

Tags: burn, burned cards, cards, flop, odds

• Print