Posts Tagged ‘poker’
July 25th, 2009
This chapter will introduce you to Texas Hold'em, commonly referred to as "Hold'em," the most popular poker game in the world today. The chapter should teach you enough to allow you to sit down and play the game without needing to ask your fellow players a lot of what feel like embarrassing questions. (Beginners, by the way, shouldn't feel embarrassed about asking questions; everyone has to start somewhere.) Later chapters will guide you through the subtleties of beginning, intermediate, and advanced strategy.
Learning the basic structure, or format, of Texas Hold'em (Hold'em) is easy. This doesn't mean, though, that there isn't a great deal of strategy involved: there is. But the way the game is constructed is fairly simple, compared with a game like chess, where you must learn how to move many different pieces, or even compared with many wild home poker games, where the rules for a game often take way too long to explain. ("SevenCard Stud, threes and nines are wild, but if you catch a three face up you must match the size of the pot to keep the card or else fold. You can buy an extra card on the end for $20 or replace a card on the end for $10, and if you catch a four face up you get an extra card free.")
If you were to walk into a card room or a friend's house to play Texas Hold'em, and hadn't seen Hold'em before, you would want some explanation. But once you understand the pattern of the deal, whose turn it is to bet, how much that player can bet, and what all of the options are (checking, calling, betting, raising, and folding) during the play of a hand, then you'll have a solid foundation for understanding the basic strategy tips you'll find in the later chapters. After reading (and absorbing) this chapter, you'll be able to introduce Hold'em into your own Saturday night poker game, although I wouldn't recommend playing it for much money until you've learned some strategy!
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July 24th, 2009
I'm proud to say that I was the all-time leading money winner in WSOP history in 2001, having won more than $2,800,000. (Unfortunately for me, Johnny Chan and T. J. Cloutier both passed me in 2002. But there is no one within $600,000 of the three of us.) As I write this in 2002, only six people have won more than $2 million in their WSOP "careers" (that is, on the all-time list); and Johnny Chan just crossed the $3 million mark in 2002. (He beat me there! But I'll win the race to $7 million!) Although the same people don't win all the poker tournaments, by the time year's end rolls around, the same people always seem to end up having won several tournaments, year in and year out. This is one of the appealing aspects of poker tournaments: the record is out there for everyone to see; some players are consistently successful, and others are not. (The side games, though very lucrative, keep no records.)
If serious poker were a game where luck predominated, this would not and could not happen. Everyone involved would win about the same number of tournaments as everyone else (as tends to happen in slot tournaments or craps tournaments), and no one would make (or lose) any serious money. But that's not what years and years of proven, recorded results show.
One last note: Beware of playing in the small stakes poker games in Las Vegas or other casinos. No matter how good you are it is very hard to beat the "rake" (the money that is taken out of every pot each hand). It's best to avoid the $2-$4 limit games and below, and watch the rake-if it seems like it's too much, then play with shorter money in a higher limit game that is beatable.
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