Poker For Dummies

by Richard D. Harroch

Richard Harroch is a well-known high-stakes poker player from the San Francisco Bay area who has written other books on a variety of topics. Lou Krieger is a columnist for Card Player Magazine and wins his share of money in the card casinos of Southern California. He recently was named one of the 100 best gaming authors of the 20th century by Casino Player, an honor accorded to only nine poker writers.

Another picture of poker comes right out of the movie, The Sting. Imagine 1930s Chicago mobsters, a round table, a low-hanging lamp illuminating the thick cigar smoke rising from the ash tray, guys with shoulder holsters and snub-nosed 38s, a bottle of cheap Scotch on the table, and someone the size of an NFL linebacker stationed by the peep-hole at the door.

If you’ve never played poker seriously before, you might wonder why you need a book about it. Why can’t you just sit down at the table with a few friends, or visit that friendly casino nearby and learn as you go? Well you can learn poker that way, but there are better ways to go about it. The school of hard knocks can be expensive, and there’s no guarantee you’ll ever graduate.

A profusion of western movies and gunfighter ballads has convinced the world that poker is a quintessentially American game, yet its roots go back hundreds of years. The Persians were said to play a poker-like game centuries ago. Germans played a bluffing game called Pochen as early as the sixteenth century; later, there was a French version called Poque. The French brought this game with them to New Orleans and its popularity spread — aided by the paddle wheelers that traveled the Mississippi. Poque soon became known as poker, and the rules were modified during the Civil War to allow cards to be drawn to improve one’s hand. Stud poker, still very popular today, appeared at about the same time.

Like the American Dream, poker is good for you: It enriches the soul, sharpens the intellect, heals the spirit, and when played well — nourishes the wallet. Above all else, poker forces the player to face reality and deal with it head-on.

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, then try using real chips. Following is a list of the number of chips you’ll need:

Each time a round of cards is dealt, players have an opportunity to check, bet, fold, call, or raise. Any time a player decides to forfeit his interest in the pot, he may release his hand when it is his turn to act (to do something related to betting: raise, fold, check, or call). When a player folds a hand, he is not required to place any more money in the pot. If a player bets or raises and no one calls, the pot belongs to that player, the cards are collected and shuffled, and the next hand is dealt. If there are two or more players still active at the end of the hand, the best hand wins the pot. While there are different rules for each specific version, poker really is this simple. Yet within its simplicity lies a wonderfully textured game structure that is always fascinating, frequently enjoyable, and, for some, a lifelong source of pleasure.

In a fixed limit game, no one may bet or raise more than a predetermined number of chips. This limit, however, usually varies with the round of the game. In Stud poker, betting limits usually double when the fifth card is dealt. Thus, a $10–$20 game means that the first two rounds of betting are based on limits of $10, while the last three are in increments of $20. In Texas Hold’em, with four betting rounds, betting limits usually double on the third round.

If you don’t have enough to cover the bets and raises, you are said to go all-in, and are simply contesting that portion of the pot your money covers. Others who are active in the hand can still make wagers, but those bets constitute a side pot. At the hand’s conclusion, the side pot is decided first, then the main pot. You are not eligible to win the side pot since you invested no money in it, but you can win the main pot.

Avoid splashing the pot: Don’t toss chips into the center of the table where they mingle with the others. Instead, stack your chips neatly on the table about 18 inches in front of you. The dealer will pull them into the pot when the action has been completed on that round of betting.

Dealers — and decks — generally rotate every half-hour. In addition, players unhappy with their run of cards are prone to holler “Deck change!” Most card rooms permit a change once a deck has been in play for an entire round.

Casual recreational players love the game, but when push comes to shove, they are not that concerned about winning or losing. They play for the fun of it. It is simply a hobby, and no matter how much they lose, it is less expensive than keeping horses, restoring classic automobiles, or a hundred other hobbies that devour money. Naturally, you’d love to play exclusively with recreational players. If you can’t beat a table full of these players, you just might want to find something else to do in your spare time. No one, however, will come right out and admit to being a casual recreational player. If someone does, watch out. He probably is not, and you’re forewarned: Take heed when he fires a raise at you.

Home game players are usually unfamiliar with the mechanics of a good shuffle, and many lack the manual dexterity to perform one. Well-trained casino dealers assemble the deck so the cards face the players, frequently preceding that by scrambling the cards on the table. This is followed by a four-step procedure of shuffle, shuffle, riffle, and shuffle. Finally, the dealer cuts the deck and deals. The procedure is efficient, quick, and designed so that no cards are flashed in the process.

While there is seldom a spoken agreement to play every hand in a home game, because of the chummy atmosphere, many players simply play lots of hands. That’s not the case in a casino. Players are more selective. Still, the biggest mistakes most players make is playing too many hands and calling on early betting rounds when they should have folded.

Since it will take you some time to get familiar with cardroom play, give serious consideration to starting in very small-limit games. You’ll probably be paying for lessons the first five or ten times you play in a public cardroom, and there is no reason to make these lessons any more expensive than they need be.

Bobby Baldwin, former World Champion of Poker and now president of the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, reflected on his early days at the table: “I was floating around, trying to figure out which hands were playable, which hands called for a raise, which hands should be thrown out. Without standards, he said, “you have to use 90 percent of your concentration deciding each time what to do with a given hand. All that mental energy should be devoted to studying your opponents and trying to decipher the small things which made this hand slightly different from familiar hands you’ve seen in the past.” Baldwin’s advice is succinct. “Never sit in a game without having a preconceived set of guidelines [starting standards] telling you what your minimum calling hands and raising hands should be.”

For now, it’s enough to remember that you should fold more hands than you play.

So the objective of poker is to win money. And that means tempering enthusiasm with realism by being selective about the hands you play. There’s no need to play every hand. The very best players play relatively few hands, but when they do enter a pot they are usually aggressive and out to maximize the amount they win when the odds favor them. This is the essence of poker: Anyone can win in the short run, but in the long haul — when the cards even out — the better players win more money with their good hands, and lose less with weak hands, than their adversaries.

When you listen to great jazz musicians, you are hearing improvisation at its best. That improvisation, however, is based on a solid grounding of music theory. Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Sonny Rollins, Gerry Mulligan, Charles Mingus, Thelonius Monk: These jazz giants are masters of improvisation, but their innovation and creativity stood on a platform of musical theory, knowledge of time signatures, an understanding of harmony, skill in ensemble playing, and an ability to use rhythm to underpin melodic themes and harmony. Without possessing these basic skills, innovation would not have been possible. The price wasn’t cheap, either. It took lots of playing, lots of years, and more clubs, sessions, and after-hours joints than those musicians would want to count. But the product was sweet, free-flowing music: riffs that seem to possess a life of their own, springing unbounded from horns, keyboards, and strings, and filling the night with magic.

Andres Segovia, the greatest classical guitarist of his generation, did not spend the majority of his practice time learning new pieces or practicing his concert repertoire. He spent four to six hours per day playing scales and études. Segovia spent 75 percent of his practice time on basics, and did this every day.

Strategy is situationally dependent. Skilled players realize they need to be aware of the big picture while simultaneously paying attention to small details. Understanding strategic concepts is only part of the battle. How, and under what circumstances to apply them, are equally important. If you can do this, you will find that you have become a better player and a more creative one, too.

The big winner in the confrontation between Players X and Y was Player Z. He went from a virtual tie for second/third place to a guarantee of second-place money — a difference of $59,800. Player Z, who had absolutely nothing at risk in that confrontation, would have been a winner regardless of the result. With Player Y knocked out of the tournament, Player Z guaranteed himself a payoff that was $59,800 more than he could count on before that hand was played. If Player Y won the hand, then Player Z would have still been in third place, but Player X would no longer have a big chip lead and would no longer be in a position to hammer away at the shorter stacks.

Tactical opportunities that occur all the time are important. Even when the amount of money attributed to a wrong decision is small, it will eventually add up to a tidy sum if that error is made frequently. Always defending your small blind in Hold’em, for example, is a good example. You have to decide whether to defend your small blind every round — and that’s frequent. If you always defend it, you are investing part of a bet on those occasions when it is wrong to do so. At the end of a year, those mistakes add up.

No matter how skilled a player you eventually become, you’ll never reach the point where you always make these decisions correctly. Don’t worry; that’s not important. Just err on the side of protecting yourself from catastrophic mistakes, and you’ll be on the right track.

If you make a mistake by calling when you should have folded and your opponent wins the pot — that’s an error, but not a critical one. It cost only one bet. But if you fold the winning hand, that’s a critical error, since the cost of that error was the entire pot.

Make an incorrect move up front and you run the risk of rendering each subsequent decision incorrect, regardless of whatever else you might do. That’s why the choice of which hands you start with in poker is generally a much more critical decision than how you play on future betting rounds. If you adopt an “ . . . any cards can win” philosophy, you have set yourself up for a disaster that even the best players could not overcome on later rounds.

Hand selection is one of the most important keys to winning. Most of us play too many hands. I’m not referring only to beginners. Some players have been at it for years, and the single most important flaw in their game is that they still play too many hands. After all, the majority of poker players are recreational players. They’re not playing poker to make their living; they play to enjoy themselves — and much as they’d have you believe their goal in playing is to win money, that’s really secondary to their main objective: having fun. The difference between a player who has come out to have fun and another who is playing to win money is that the recreational player will look for reasons to play marginal hands and to continue playing them even when subsequent betting rounds are fraught with danger. The money player will look for reasons to release hands, avoid unnecessary danger, and dump speculative hands whenever the potential reward is overshadowed by the risks.

Patience is certainly related to the “be selective” portion of the “be aggressive, but be selective” mantra. Few players dispute the need to be selective. Nevertheless, most aren’t very selective about the hands they play. After all, poker is fun, and most aficionados come to play, not fold. When the cards aren’t coming your way, it’s very easy to talk yourself into taking a flyer on marginal hands. But there’s usually a price to be paid for falling off the good-hands wagon. Sometimes it all boils down to a simple choice. You can have a lot of fun, gamble it up, and pay the inevitable price for your pleasure, or you can apply the patience required to win consistently.

When you’re losing, consider gearing down. Way down. This is a time for lots of traction and not much speed; a time for playing only the best starting hands. Not marginal hands, not good — or even very good — starting hands, but only the best hands. That means you’ll be throwing away hand after hand, and it takes discipline to do this, particularly when some of these hands would have won.

When you’re winning, your table image is quite different than when you’re losing. Win, and you can sometimes bluff with impunity. It’s a lot tougher when you’re losing. After all, your opponents have watched you lose hand after hand. They believe you’re going to keep losing. When you bet, they’ll call — or even raise — with hands they might have thrown away if you had been winning steadily.

Texas Hold’em is the most popular game played in casino poker rooms. Although playing expertly requires a great deal of skill, Hold’em is easily learned and deceptively simple. It is a subtle and complex game, typically played with nine or ten players to a table and is a faster, more action-filled game than Stud or most other games. Texas Hold’em is also the fastest growing poker game in the world, and it is the game used to determine the world champion at the World Series of Poker.

Before cards are dealt, the first two players to the left of the dealer position are required to post blind bets, which are used instead of antes to stimulate action.

71 percent of your hand is defined on the flop. As a result, your best values in Hold’em are found up front; you get to see 71 percent of your hand for a single round of betting.

Because casino games are dealt by house dealers, a small disk — called a puck, a buck, or, most commonly, a button — is used as a marker to indicate the player in the dealer position. That player is always last to act. The button rotates clockwise around the table with each hand that’s dealt. The expression “passing the buck” does not refer to dollar bills, but to poker. And President Harry S. Truman, an avid poker player himself, had a sign on his desk in the White House that read, “The buck stops here.”

If you take our advice, you will seldom, if ever, play hands that are four-gapped or worse unless they are suited — and then only under very favorable circumstances.

In late position you have the advantage of acting last or next-to-last. As a result, you can add a variety of hands to your arsenal. Most are bargain basement specials, however, that should be played only if the pot has not been raised. Moreover, you should be disciplined enough to release them if the flop brings anything less than an abundant harvest of friendly cards.

A hand like K♥2♥, while playable in late position, is a pretty sorry excuse for a Hold’em hand. If you flop a king and there’s any appreciable action, it’s fairly apparent that someone else has a king with a bigger kicker than yours. If you flop a 2, you’ve guaranteed yourself the lowest pair on board.

President Harry Truman was a poker player. Here was his advice on the stakes of a home game: “Poker among friends and colleagues should not drive anyone to the poorhouse, but should be expensive enough to test skill and make it interesting.”

Before the game starts, set a time when the game will end and stick to it. By setting the time limit, everyone is on notice and whining can be avoided by people who are losing and want to continue playing past a reasonable hour.

Here is our favorite poker food: Chips and dip Pizza Pigs in a blanket Licorice Cashews Beer and soda

The Rules of Neighborhood Poker According to Hoyle, by Stewart Wolpin Thursday-Night Poker: How to Understand, Enjoy — and Win, by Peter O. Steiner How to Win at Strip Poker, by Herbert I. Kavet (Yes, there really is a book with this title.)

Suppose the pot contains $90, and your opponent makes a $10 bet. That pot now contains $100, and the cost of your call is only $10. Even if you figure your opponent to be bluffing only one time in ten, you should call. By calling, the laws of probability suggest that you’d lose a $10 bet nine times, for a loss of $90. Although you’d win only once, that pot would be worth $100. After ten such occurrences, you’d show a net profit of $10. As a result, you could say that regardless of the outcome of any particular hand, each call was worth one dollar to you.

A successful poker player has to adopt a middle-ground strategy. This means that sometimes you’ll be called when you bluffed and lose that bet. Other times you will release the best hand because an opponent successfully bluffed you out of the pot. Neither scenario is enjoyable. Just remember that making errors is inevitable when you deal with incomplete information. One can call too often or not enough. One can bluff too often or not at all. And the only way to eliminate errors at one extreme is to commit them at the other. Very cautious players, who never call unless certain of winning, avoid calling with a lesser hand, but often relinquish a pot they would have won. Players who call all the time win just about every pot they can possibly win, but find themselves holding the short straw far too often when the hands are shown down.

The paradox is that good players make both kinds of errors some of the time to avoid being a predictable player at either end of the bluffing-calling spectrum. After all, there’s a relationship between risk and reward. If you are never caught bluffing, you are either the best bluffer in the history of poker or you are not bluffing often enough. If you are caught almost every time you bluff, you’re bluffing much too frequently.

If you call all the time, you will never lose a pot you could have won, and if you seldom call, your opponents will learn that they can win by betting and driving you o...

Straus fired out a bet: $18,000. As his opponent paused to consider whether Straus had a hand or was bluffing, Straus leaned forward, saying: “I’ll tell you what, just gimme one of those $25 chips of yours and you can see either one of my cards — whichever one you choose.” After another long pause, Straus’ opponent tossed over a single green chip and pointed to one of the two cards that were face down in front of Straus. Straus flipped over the 2. Now there was another long pause. Finally Straus’s opponent concluded that both cards were the same, and that Straus made a full house — 2s full of 3s — and threw the winning hand away. “It was just a matter of psychology,” Straus was reputed to have said later. But to most observers it wasn’t psychology at all. It was magic, pure and simple.

On the quiet evening of April 29th, 1998, Doyle “Texas Dolly” Brunson returned home after winning a major poker tournament. Doyle is a two time winner of the World Championship of Poker. He had $85,000 in uncashed casino chips in his pocket. Brunson was startled by two robbers who were waiting for him at his doorstep. The masked men forced Brunson and his wife, both in their late 60s, into their Las Vegas home and demanded all the cash and jewels in the house. The Brunsons were tied up together and forced to lie on the living room floor while the two robbers made repeated threats to kill both of them if they refused to cooperate and hand over the money and jewels. But Brunson had other ideas. Drawing upon his vast poker experience, Brunson outfoxed the bandits. He feigned a heart attack, clutching his chest. As the two robbers watched in horror, Brunson gasped for air. Fearful of a possible murder rap, the robbers panicked. They ran out the door and were never seen again. Doyle Brunson may have bluffed many poker players in high-stakes poker games. But he most certainly would agree—this was his greatest bluff of all.

Strive for a tight, aggressive image by playing the kinds of starting hands recommended in this book. This kind of image has a much better chance of running a successful bluff than a player with a loose image. If you are seen as selective, tight, and aggressive, your opponents will not suspect a bluff when you bet. When you have a license to steal, use it.

You’ll save lots of money over the course of your poker-playing career by following this simple rule: If you’re not playing at your best, go home. If you quit the game, it will still be there tomorrow, but if you stay too long at the dance, your money might be gone.

Take a break if you feel yourself losing emotional control. Players call this feeling going on tilt, an expression that harks back to losing your hard-earned quarters by hitting the pinball machine too hard. Having a bad beat or two can make you do crazy things in an effort to win back your losses right away. If you feel that urge, take a ten-minute break and catch your breath.