A dumb question, A legitimate question.

[afk]

Hi, I'm a biology major, and doing that I was required to take a stats course - I loved it (and did well), and a lot of the math I've seen here seems right in line with most of what I learned. So I decided I'm going to learn how to do the math associated with hold'em, which brings me to my questions:

The dumb question (or at least I feel dumb for asking it): Why is it in hold'em calculations (even simple pot odds) that you don't have to actively take into account the chances that your card has already dealt and is thus not available as a valid card left in the deck? Is it because the deck is assumed to be random and you can't determine the chances of a card being there or not on a trial by trial basis? What am I missing here? I feel dumb for asking - but for the life of me I can't come up with an answer that satisfies me.

Legitimate question: It's been 5 months since I finished that stats course and the knowledge is slowly seeping away. I still have my text to help me, but what are some resources I could use to learn the theory behind various calculations used to determine poker probabilities? Is there a nifty website somewhere that would help? Or am I better off just reading this forum like a maniac and picking it up that way?

Thanks for any help you guys can offer!

[chaos]

Without more information, any unseen card is equally likely to be the next card. So with 2 hearts in your hand and two hearts on the flop there are 9 hearts unaccounted for. You have seen 2 cards in your hand and 3 cards on the flop. That leaves 52-5=47 unseen cards, 9 of which are hearts. So the odds of catching a heart on the next card would be 9 out of 47, or 38 to 9 against. If you happen to see another heart because someone's hand got accidentally exposed you could take that into account. In that case there would be 45 unseen cards and 8 hearts.

You might want to check out Mike Petriv's Hold "em Odds Book. It explains how to calculate the odds for most of the situations that come up.

[afk]

[ QUOTE ]
Without more information, any unseen card is equally likely to be the next card. You might want to check out Mike Petriv's Hold "em Odds Book. It explains how to calculate the odds for most of the situations that come up.

[/ QUOTE ]

Thanks for your help. I think it's mainly the point that you don't have any more information to base your judgement on that I missed, which makes a whole lot of sense now that I think about it more. Thanks for the book recommendation too.

[TomCollins]

Think of it this way. The odds of the cards on the very bottom of the deck have an equal chance of being dealt as the cards in someone elses hand.