Poker for Dummies (Mini Edition) (3 page)

Plotting a strategy:
If you aspire to play winning poker you need a plan to learn the game. Although the school of hard knocks might have sufficed as the educational institution of choice 20 or 30 years ago, most of today’s better poker players have added a solid grounding in poker theory to their over-the-table experiences.

Discipline:
All the strategic knowledge in the world does not guarantee success to any poker player. Personal characteristics are equally important. Success demands a certain quality of character in addition to strategic know-how. Players lacking self-discipline, for example, have a hard time ever winning consistently regardless of how strategically sophisticated they might be. If you lack the discipline to throw away poor starting hands, then all the knowledge in the world can’t overcome this flaw.

Knowledge without discipline is merely unrealized potential. Playing with discipline is a key to avoiding losing your shirt — or your shorts.

If you can learn to play poker at a level akin to that of a journeyman musician, a workaday commercial artist, you will be good enough to win consistently. You don’t have to be a world champion like Doyle Brunson, Phil Hellmuth, Johnny Chan, or Tom McEvoy to earn money playing poker. The skills of a good journeyman poker player enable you to supplement your income, or — better yet — earn your entire livelihood at the game. If you go on to become the very best poker player you can be, that should be more than enough to ensure that you’ll be a lifelong winning player.

The object of the game

The objective of poker is to win money by capturing the
pot,
which contains bets made by various players during the hand. A player wagers a bet in hopes that he has the best hand, or to give the impression that he holds a strong hand and thus convince his opponents to
fold
(abandon) their hands. Because money saved is just as valuable as money won, knowing when to release a hand that appears to be beaten is just as important as knowing when to bet. In most poker games, the top combination of five cards is the best hand.

Number of players

Any number of players, typically from two to ten, can play, depending on the game. Most casino games are set up with eight players for a seven-card game like Stud poker or Razz, and nine or ten players for Texas Hold’em.

The deck

Most forms of poker involve a standard 52-card deck. For Draw poker and Lowball, a joker, or “bug,” is sometimes added to the deck. It’s not a wild card per se, but it can be used in Draw poker as an additional Ace, or to complete a straight or flush. In Lowball, the joker is used as the lowest card that does not pair your hand. For example, if you held 7-6-2-A-Joker, it would be the same as if you held 7-6-3-2-A.

Poker chips

Whether you use pennies or peanuts to bet with at home, nothing beats the feel of real poker chips. Originally made of clay, chips now come in a durable composite or plastic. (The plastic ones are a bit more slippery than the composite and, thus, are more difficult to handle.)

Chips are available in a wide range of colors and patterns. The designs and “edge spots” you see on casino chips vary because of security reasons, but the colors generally follow a set of traditional dollar values:

If you want to add a dose of Vegas-style playing to your home game, try using real chips. Following is a list of the number of chips you’ll need:

The Basics of Play

Poker is a simple game to learn, although you can spend a lifetime trying to master it. You win money by winning
pots
— the money or chips wagered during the play of each
hand
(or round) of poker, from the first cards dealt until the showdown. A hand also refers to five cards in the possession of a player.

You win hands in one of two ways:

You
show down
(reveal) the best hand at the conclusion of all the betting rounds.
When two or more players are still active when all the betting rounds are done, they turn their hands face up. The pot goes to the player who holds the highest hand during this showdown.

All your opponents fold their hands.
No, this doesn’t mean they politely clasp their fingers on the table in front of them.
Folding a hand
(or, more simply,
folding
) means that a player relinquishes his claim to the pot by not matching an opponent’s bet.

In this case, you may have had the best hand or you may have been bluffing — it doesn’t matter. When opponents surrender their claim to the pot, it’s yours.

In games like Seven-Card Stud and Texas Hold’em the best hand is a high hand. (For more detail about high hands, see the “Hand Rankings” section, later in this chapter.) In other games, like Lowball and Razz, the best hand is a low hand. (The best possible low hand is 5-4-3-2-A; the next best is 6-4-3-2-A.)

In
split-pot games,
two winners split the pot. For example, in Seven-Card Stud, High-Low Split, Eight-or-Better (mercifully abbreviated as Seven-Stud/8) and Omaha High-Low Split, Eight-or-Better (or just Omaha/8) the best high hand
and
the best low hand split the pot (provided that someone makes a low hand composed of five unpaired cards with a rank of 8 or lower). The worst possible low hand would consist of 8-7-6-5-4. The best of all low hands is 5-4-3-2-A (known as a
wheel
or
bicycle
). Though a high hand always will be made in split-pot games, there won’t necessarily be a low hand. And when there’s no low hand, the high hand wins the entire pot.