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How To Play Texas Hold Em
The rules of the game are fairly easy to learn. Limit Hold'em has structured betting, and the lowest limit you will find in most casinos is a $2/$4 or $3/$6 game. Other limits you may find are $5/$10 or $10/$20 or higher. I will be using the $3/$6 game as an example in this book. That means the minimum bet is $3 during the first two rounds of betting and the minimum bet is $6 during the last two betting rounds. These same limits are used when you raise as well.
The Dealer
Since the casino supplies a dealer, one player must be the "designated" dealer who will act last during the betting rounds. A disk or "button" is used to identify the dealer and this is rotated to the left after each hand. Unlike stud, all the players do not ante each round. Blind bets are posted to generate a starting pot.
The Start
To start a new hand two "blind" bets are put up or "posted." The Player immediately to the left of the player with the dealer button Puts up or "posts" the small blind which is approximately half the mmimum bet. Since there are no 50c chips, the small blind for the $3/$6 game is one dollar.
The player to the left of the small blind posts the big blind which is equal to the minimum bet which is $3 for this game. The rest of the players do not put up any money to start the hand. Because the button rotates around the table, each player will eventually act as the big blind, small blind and dealer. It will cost you $4 every time the deal makes a complete rotation around the table.
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Why Texas Poker Hold Em?
Coast to coast, from the Connecticut casinos to the cardrooms of California, Texas Hold'em is rapidly becoming the most popular poker game among low-limit players. There are several reasons for its popularity.
Texas Hold'em is fast-paced, and easy to learn. The game can be played with more players, which means bigger pots, making it very exciting and quite profitable for those players who make the effort to learn to play correctly.
The basic concepts of Hold'em are easy to learn and understand. Each player is dealt two personal cards and then five community cards are dealt face up in the middle of the table. Since there are five community cards you do not have to keep track of all the dead cards that were folded by your opponents as you do in stud. You can easily learn guidelines for which starting hands to play and which to fold.
Hold'em is a positional game. A dealer button rotates to the left after each hand. The player to the left of the dealer button acts first. You will always act in the same order for the entire hand. If you have the dealer button you will act last during each betting round. The later you act, the more information you will have to help decide whether you should enter the pot or fold your hand.
There are no antes. The player to the left of the dealer button puts up a blind bet usually equal to half of the minimum bet for the first round and the player to his left puts in a bet equal to the mini-mum bet. These are called the blinds. The rest of the players do not have to put any money in the pot unless they are calling the blind bet. This means that in a ten-handed game you will get to see eight hands for free. If you don't have a playable starting hand you can toss it in and wait for your next hand.
Hold'em is a faster game than seven-card stud. You can play a hand in about two minutes. This means you will see more hands during your playing session. This allows you to be more selective which should lead to profitability if you capitalize on the poor play of your opponents.
The use of five community cards, called "board" cards, means that more players can play. A full game will have ten, or sometimes, 11 players. Since many players will enter a hand, there is a potential for bigger pots in Hold'em. There are a wide variety of hands that can be made from the five community cards and the player's two pocket cards. All of the players are using 71 percent of the same cards to make their hands. This means that there is no way to immediately determine who has the biggest hand. When you are playing stud, if you saw that your opponent had two Aces showing, you could determine if he had you beat and then fold. Since this is not the case in Texas Hold'em, more players will stay in the hand longer, adding to the total size of the pot.
In a low-limit $3/$6 game, there could be $30 in the pot before the first community cards are revealed. It is not uncommon to see pots in the $50-$100 ranges. In this game, if there were five players entering the pot and staying to the end, making minimum bets with no raising, the pot would be $90. You can afford to be selective in your starting hands because it is possible that winning one hand can cover the cost of your blind bets for the entire evening.
You always know how the strength of your hand stacks up against the best possible hand during each betting round. A pair of Aces is the best two-card starting hand. This changes once the first three community cards are flopped and again when the fourth and then the fifth cards are turned over. You can tell the best possible hand by looking at the board cards. Although it is not certain that one of your opponents will actually have the best hand, you can assess the strength of your hand in relation to the best theoretical hand and determine if you have a chance of winning the pot. This is known as reading the board and will be discussed in detail later in this book.
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