Contents
Intro to Texas Hold’em
Hands and Hand Rankings in Texas Hold’em
How Texas Hold’em Game Play Works
How to Bet in Texas Hold’em
Limit, Pot Limit, and No Limit Texas Hold’em
How to Start Hands to Play
Hands to Play After the Flop
How to Use Pot Odds in Hold’em
Texas Hold’em Strategies
How to Play Position in Hold’em
How to Read Other Hold’em Players
Texas Hold’em Tournament Strategies
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- How to play limit, pot limit, and no limit Texas Hold’em
- How to bet, bluff, and master other winning strategies
- How to read your opponents and profit from their mistakes
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Intro to Texas Hold’em
In the last decade, Texas hold’em, called hold’em for short, has grown from an obscure form of poker to the most popular poker game in the world. Texas hold’em is now a staple of televised poker games, tournaments, casinos, and home games.
Texas Hold’em Essential Concepts
You can play Texas hold’em with 2–12 players, though a good game requires at least 5 or 6 players. Like all poker players, Texas hold’em players are dealt cards that they use to form hands. The players then bet based on their hands and attempt to win the pot.
- Dealing: Texas hold’em is a community poker game, which means that the players’ hands include cards that are shared among all players. More specifically, each Texas hold’em player is dealt two cards, called hole cards or pocket cards, which belong only to that player, and which only that player can see. Five community cards are then dealt face up on the table; these cards belong to all the players. The cards are not dealt all at once but in rounds, with betting occurring between each round of dealt cards.
- Hands: Your hand is made up of the best five-card combination that can be made out of your two hole cards and the five community cards. “Hand” also refers to the dealing and bidding for a single pot (see below). After someone wins the pot, a new hand begins.
- Betting: A player either bets money or folds (drops out of the hand) based on the quality of his hand versus his estimation of the quality of the opponents’ hands. Occasionally, a player might bluff. Bluffing happens when a player makes a big bet in order to scare other players into thinking he has a good hand, though he actually has a weak hand.
- Winning the pot: Every player’s aim is to win the pot, which contains all the money bet during the hand. The winner of a hand takes the pot either by having the best hand or by betting more than anyone else is willing to bet, forcing every other player to fold.
After a player wins the pot, the cards are redealt and a new hand begins.
Poker Chips
In most poker games, betting is done with chips rather than cash. The first step in a typical poker game is buying in, or exchanging cash for chips of equal value. If you lose all of your chips while playing, you may be allowed to buy more chips, depending on the house rules. When you’re finished playing, you cash out by exchanging your chips for their cash value.
Chip Value
Chips are sometimes marked with their dollar value. More often, they’re marked simply by color and then assigned a dollar value by the casino or person hosting the game. The colors can correspond to any value, though common values for the colors are:
- Black: $100
- Green: $25
- Blue: $10
- Red: $5
- White: $1
Chip values don’t always correspond to the money you pay to join the game. For instance, you might pay $10 and get $100 in chips, so each $1 chip would actually be worth $0.10.
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