The full house in poker is the biggest hand you will see on a semi regular basis, and a hand that you would very rarely, if ever be expected to fold. A full house is a combination of two poker hands we have already spoke about; a pair and three of a kind. The three of a kind part of the hand is the most important part to the full house. When two full houses in poker run into each other (which isn’t very common) the hand with the higher three of a kind wins out. If both hands have the same three of a kind as part of their full house then the player with the largest pair wins the hand.
If both players have the same full house then the pot is simply split. The odds of making a full house by the river in No Limit Hold’em is surprisingly low and you can only expect to make one about once every 1000 hands. Thankfully with Online Poker you can now get through that many hands in only a few hours so you should be able to see them on a daily basis, but still, with odds that low you can understand why people are hard pressed to ever fold them! For a full house to occur the board must pair in some way and this creates a lot of interesting dynamics in the hand and requires a lot of thought from both players, not only to determine if they have the best hand, but how to convince their opponent to put more chips in the pot! Taking a look at a K Q T T 8 board can show just how interesting some poker hands involving full houses can get.
If one player were to hold KT here he would have made a full house and a very strong hand as he is now beating other full houses such as QT and T8 as well as straights from AJ and J9, three of a kinds from the hands AT and JT, and every type of flush that is possible. Finally the hand is also behind to two bigger full houses, a pair of Kings and a pair of Queens which have made King and Queen high full houses as opposed to the Ten high full house the player has. As seen from this list it the full house beats far more than it loses to and it is the player's job to take all this information in and try to determine what the correct bet size is to make your opponent call with his worse hands and that is no easy task at all.
When you add to the mix that that your opponent may raise you with better or worse hands then all of a sudden you can see all the complexity unfold! However because you have a King and a Ten in your hand already it makes it far less likely that your opponent will similar cards in their hand since there are very few of them left in the deck so this only increases the chances that you have the best full house on the board. Getting a full house in poker is a very exciting thing and will certainly get the adrenaline pumping and your heart beating fast so enjoy it when you make one and do your best to win the biggest pot possible with it!
