Understanding the flop is the key to knowing how much to bet—and whether to bet at all.
You pick up A♠️ A❤️—the best starting hand in poker. You raise, one player calls, and the flop comes down. Easy, right? You have Aces! Just pile chips in and win a big pot.
Maybe. But should you bet big and try to get paid on the flop? Bet small and lure your opponent into building the pot gradually? Could checking even be the best play?
The answer depends on the flop. The right play on a flop of 7♦️ 7♠️ 2♣️ is not the same as the right play on K♠️ T❤️ 8❤️. And if you play them the same way, you’re leaving chips on the table (or worse, losing them).
In our last two articles, we talked about when to bet on the flop and why you’re betting. Now it’s time to look at the board itself. The character of those three cards—what poker players call the “board texture”—affects everything: how likely your opponent has a strong hand, how safe your hand is, and ultimately how you should bet. Learning to read the board is what separates a player who just looks at their own cards from one who understands the whole picture.
Over this article and the next, we’re going to look at two important qualities of every flop. This article focuses on the first: how connected the board is—that is, how likely it is that the flop helped someone.
What Makes a Board Connected or Disconnected?
The first question to ask when the flop comes down is: How likely is it that this flop helped someone?
For the purpose of this article,1 a connected board is one where the cards relate to each other in ways that create lots of strong hands and strong draws. Cards that are close in rank (like 8-9-T), cards that share suits (like two or three hearts), or high cards that people commonly play (like K-Q)—these are all features that make a board more connected. On connected boards, it’s more likely that your opponent has hit something—a pair, two pair, a straight, a flush draw, or a straight draw.
A disconnected board is the opposite: the cards are spread apart, are mostly not cards that players are likely to have in their hands, and they don’t share suits. On disconnected boards, it’s much less likely that anyone has connected with the flop in a meaningful way.
Let’s take a look at two extreme examples.
Connected Board: K♠️ T❤️ 8❤️
This board is very connected. The K, T, and 8 are all relatively close in rank, and two of them share a suit. Think about how many common hands have connected with this flop in some way:
- K❤️ Q❤️ has top pair plus a flush draw
- Q♠️ J❤️ or J♠️ 9❤️ has an open-ended straight draw
- K♣️ T♦️ or K♠️ 8♠️ has two pair
- K♦️ J♠️ has top pair with a strong kicker
- A❤️ 5❤️ has the best possible flush draw
In fact, almost any two cards 8 or higher have connected with this flop in some meaningful way—some kind of pair, straight draw, flush draw, or combination of those. That’s fully 1/4 of all hands—and, more importantly, the most likely hands that your opponents will play—that have something good on this flop. Even the weakest of these hands, something like A♦️ 9♣️, is still Ace-high.
That’s a connected board—most hands have “something going on.”
Disconnected Board: 7♦️ 7♠️ 2♣️
Now look at this board. The cards are low, spread far apart, and they don’t share a suit. Think about the hands that people typically play—hands with high cards like Aces, Kings, Queens, Jacks, and Tens, or hands with two cards close in rank. How many of those hands connect well with 7-7-2? Almost none.
- Your opponent would need to hold exactly a 7 to have hit this flop hard—and there are only two sevens left in the deck since two are already on the board
- A player holding a 2 made a very weak pair, but most players don’t play many hands with a 2 in them
- There are no straight or flush draws
Unless your opponent happened to have one of those very few hands that improved—or already had a strong pocket pair like Kings or Queens before the flop—they simply don’t have anything right now. That’s a disconnected board—most hands have “nothing going on.”
How Connectivity Shapes Your Betting
So how should this change the way you play? Here’s the key insight:
Connected boards mean more opponents have strong hands or decent draws. Many of them have a real reason to stick around. That means you often want to bet larger.2 And here is the key: you want to bet larger with both your strong hands and your bluffs. You want to get more value from the many decent hands that will call, and you want to make it harder for those hands to continue when you’re bluffing.
Disconnected boards mean fewer opponents have connected with the flop. Most of them are holding weak hands with little reason to call a big bet. That means you often want to bet smaller—to squeeze at least a little value out of those weak hands that might call a small bet but would fold to a big one, while also not needing to risk very much to get some of those weak hands to fold when you’re bluffing.
Think of it this way: on K♠️ T❤️ 8❤️, your opponents have lots of hands worth calling with, so you need to charge them more (would you fold to a 1 big blind bet with a hand like 8♦️ 7♦️ or Q♠️ 9♠️ ?). On 7♦️ 7♠️ 2♣️, your opponents mostly have nothing, so a small bet accomplishes everything you need—it gets a little value when they call with overcards and costs you very little when they fold.
Your Challenge
At our next game, every time the flop comes down, ask yourself: How connected is this board? Are the cards close in rank? Do they share suits? Are there high cards that people commonly play? The more connected the board, the more likely someone has a strong hand or a strong draw—and the more you should consider betting larger.
You don’t need to be perfect—just get in the habit of reading the board before you look at your own hand’s relationship to it. You’ll be surprised how quickly it starts to feel natural.
Coming up next: Connectivity tells you how much the flop helped your opponents right now. But what about the future? In our next article, we’ll look at the second key quality of every flop—how dynamic the board is—and why the same strong hand can be completely safe on one board and sweating on another.
- In poker jargon, a “connected” flop usually refers to one where the cards are so close together that it is possible for a player to hold a straight on the flop; a “disconnected” flop is one where the cards are so spread out that it is impossible for a player to hold either a straight or an open-ended straight draw. The concept we are discussing in this section is sometimes referred to as “range connectivity” or how “wet” or “dry” a flop is. But to keep things simple for this article, we will consider a “connected” flop to be one where players are very likely to hold strong hands or good draws because the cards connect well with each other and with the starting hands that most players are likely to play. And we will consider a disconnected flop to be one where players are unlikely to hold many strong hands or good draws because the cards do not connect well with each other or with the stating hands that most players play. ↩︎
- Technically, this is mostly true only when you are more likely than your opponent to hold the very best possible hands on a particular flop, something poker players refer to as “nut advantage.” Even if the board is very connected, if your opponent is the only one who is likely to hold the best hands (like the available straights, sets, or two pairs), then betting big would be a mistake. But this occurs mostly when the two players in the hand “should” be playing very different types of hands. This occurs frequently in GTO poker, but is not (yet) a realistic assumption in our games. ↩︎