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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.
Tags: online poker, poker gameRelated posts
The Poker Journey Begins
I have tried every game on the main floor of the casino. When a new game comes along I at least give it a cursory try. Although I had played poker, I had never played in a casino poker room.
I had the misconception that casino poker was mostly no-limit games for professional players. This perception was bolstered by stories in the media about high stakes tournaments like the World Series of Poker in which players put up thousands of dollars just to enter. The truth is there are many low-limit games being played by average people every day in cardrooms around the country.
Poker is a game of skill. In the casino you are playing against the other players instead of the house. You will find all types of players in the cardroom. The skill levels of the players vary from the beginner just having fun to the skilled professional. By practicing and gaining experience some players win consistently.
I firmly believe that a player of average intelligence can learn to be successful playing in the casinos if he takes the time to educate himself about the casinos and the games. In my articles, I advocate that players take the time to learn all about the game they wish to play before venturing into the casino and risking any money at the tables.
Since I had never played casino poker, I thought this would be a good opportunity to practice what I preach. I planned to show that by using a disciplined approach I could be successful. I started to document the process that I used to learn how to play Texas Hold'em. I had originally planned to write a few articles about the experience, sharing the knowledge that I learned, including my successes and mistakes, with my readers.
After achieving success with playing Texas Hold'em it was suggested that I publish a detailed account of how I learned to play the game. This book is more than a text about how to play Texas Hold'em. It is also a journal of my journey from the kitchen to the cardroom
I was not sure which poker game I wanted to learn to play first, so I took a ride to the casino to check out the poker rooms. I live close to Foxwoods and the Mohegan Sun in Connecticut, so I had the opportunity to observe players in two poker rooms in the same afternoon. Both casinos offered two games for low limit player. Seven-card stud with $l-$5 limits and $3/$6 Texas Hold'em. I was familiar with seven-card stud but Texas Hold'em was completely foreign to me.
I took the time to talk with a few players of each game and I was given conflicting opinions about which game is better for new players to learn. As expected, each player thought his particular choice was the best. I decided to hold off choosing my game until I could gather some more information.
Tags: casino poker, online poker, poker game, world series of poker