Texas holdem is taking over the world, but believe it or not there are many other poker games you can play. Most of them fall into one of three categories:
- Stud Games (for example 7 card stud)
- Draw Games (for example 5 card draw)
- Shared Hand Games (for example Texas Holdem)
There are also some other obscure games that don’t fit into these categories, some of the more popular of which are high/low pig, bid poker and guts. In almost all types of poker game the hand rankings are the same, with a very few minor exceptions which have become more or less “home-madeâ€? rules.
by Stanley Majors
Reading Poker hands will dramatically increase your win percentages, but learning this skill is not an easy task. It takes hours of play, a good memory and an attentive eye.
Reading poker hands is not the most important part of any poker armoury, and it’s not very useful for low stakes poker rooms either. Players at this level are not very skilled making them unpredictable and harder to read.
But as you become more experienced and start to move up to higher stakes games you’ll begin to find that your opponents will actually be reading your play. And if you don’t learn to read their hands you’ll be at a big disadvantage.
This skill can only be developed through experience but by following these tips you should be able to accelerate your learning.
Everyone who plays Texas Holdem knows that Ace-King is one of the very best starting hands. But, it is just that, a starting hand. It’s only 2 cards of a 7-card equation. In nearly every situation, you want to come out firing with A-K as your hole cards. (The exception would be when faced with a big raise from an early position bettor.) When the flop comes, you need to reassess your hand and think things through before you just assume your overcards are best.
by Donnie Piper
All of the online poker rooms offer you the opportunity to play poker without risking a penny of your own money. You just download and install the software, open an account and then login. You don’t have to give any payment details to do this. If a poker room does ask you for a credit card number, just to open an account, leave and choose another one.
When you create the account you are given a certain amount of play chips. If you lose them all you will be given more.
One of the advantages of Fun money, is that you can learn to play, without risking your own money doing so. Or if you join a new poker room you can get used to the software before you have to put hard cash on the table.
These concepts aren’t for advanced players, and they’re not for total newbies either. They assume you know how to play and some of the jargon, but you’re not winning consistently because you have no strategy concepts…
Concept #1 – Pot Odds
Long-term profits in holdem come from making bets with a positive expectation. You only have a positive expectation when your payoff is higher than your risk. Casinos make money from negative expectation games like roulette. The single number bet in roulette pays off at 35 to 1, but the odds of winning the bet are 37 to 1. The difference between the 37 and the 35 is the casino’s profit margin.
Party Poker has long been known as the place to go to catch unsuspecting poker “fish”. What are fish? Well they are the players who are just starting to learn to play poker or who have been around for a while but just aren’t very good. They are the prey of the poker “sharks” and the traditional hunting ground for the last while has been Party Poker.
Well the bad news for the sharks is that the fish pool seems to have dried up! It just isn’t as easy as it used to be to clean up at Party Poker.
There are a few possible reasons as to why this might have happened and they are outlined below.
More competition from other sites.
by Ian McIntosh
Freeroll poker tournaments are daily events that happen on a lot of the best online poker websites. Freerolls are much loved by the poker playing community as they offer the poker players the chance to win some real money without losing any. The entry to these freerolls is – as the name suggests – free and prize money can range from a few dollars for a placing to hundreds of dollars for winning the big freeroll Texas Holdem poker tournaments.
So why do the poker sites have freerolls? Is it because of their extremely generous nature and the fact that they make vast sums of money so they feel a moral obligation to give some of it back?
What do you think!
by Ian McIntosh
The origins of the phrase “poker nuts” are uncertain although it is thought to have come from old slang meaning “delightful thing, practice or experience”. It is a “delightful thing” of course, because in Texas Holdem the poker nuts is the best possible hand that you can have at any point in the game.
If you have the nuts, you can’t be beaten…at that point in the hand. This is the crucial factor that a lot of inexperienced players fail to take account of, the nuts can move from one player to another and your hand which was the nuts earlier on can end up being crushed!
The 2005 World Series of Poker event is scheduled to begin June 2, 2005 in Las Vegas and an estimated 7,000 players are expected to participate in the $10,000 buy-in, no-limit Texas Hold ‘em main event.
The event will be held at the Rio Hotel and Casino from June 3rd to July 15th, with the last two days taking place at Jack Binnions Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas.
The buy-ins for the 2005 WSOP events range from $1,000 to $10,000 and most of the final tables are taped and televised by ESPN.
To be successful at poker you should, at any time during the play of a hand, be able to calculate the odds of catching your hand to the odds the pot is giving you.
Knowing the probability of making a specific hand in poker can be done by calculating hand odds. Figuring out how many outs you have will give you the possibility of calculating the number of times you will hit your hand by the river.
Lets say your’e dealt A-9 of hearts in Texas Hold’em and the flop comes up showing two hearts. Your hand odds for hitting another heart by the river will be approximately 36% or 3 to 1. (you will hit your hand 1 out of 3 times)
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