Poker for Dummies (Mini Edition) Read online

  Poker For Dummies®, Mini Edition

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Why You Need This Book

  Icons Used in This Book

  Where to Go from Here

  Chapter 1: Poker Basics

  Before You Put on Your Poker Face

  Planning and discipline

  The object of the game

  Number of players

  The deck

  Poker chips

  The Basics of Play

  Hand Rankings

  Royal flush; straight flush

  Four-of-a-kind

  Full house

  Flush

  Straight

  Three-of-a-kind

  Two pair

  One pair

  No pair

  Low hands

  Betting

  Rules of the Road

  Going all-in

  The forbidden string raise

  How to raise

  No splashing

  Protecting your hand; cards speak

  Table stakes

  Timeout

  Decks and dealing

  The finer points: Etiquette

  Chapter 2: Texas Hold’em

  Basic Rules

  Blind Bets

  Hold’em in General

  Hold’em only looks like Stud — it plays differently

  The first two cards are critical

  Position, position, and position

  The flop should fit your hand

  Beyond the flop

  Hold’em in Depth

  Small gaps make more straights

  Gapped cards

  Acting last is a big advantage

  Starting Hands

  The Art of Raising

  You’ve been raised

  When someone’s raised after you’ve called

  When should you raise?

  Playing the Flop

  Fit or fold

  Flops you’re going to love, and flops to fold on

  Overcards

  Flopping a draw

  Multiway possibilities

  Playing the Turn

  What to do when you improve on the turn

  What to do when you don’t improve on the turn

  Should you continue with a draw?

  Should you checkraise or come out betting?

  Bluffing on the turn

  Playing the River

  Realized versus potential value

  What do I do when I make my draw?

  Top pair on the river

  When the Pot Gets Big

  Poker For Dummies®, Mini Edition

  by Richard D. Harroch and Lou Krieger

  Poker For Dummies®, Mini Edition

  Published by

  Wiley Publishing, Inc.

  111 River St.

  Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774

  www.wiley.com

  Copyright © 2011 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

  Published simultaneously in Canada

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  ISBN: 978-0-470-05565-6

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Introduction

  Poker has always been America’s game, but poker is changing these days. In a big way. Ask a friend or neighbor with only a casual knowledge of the game to offer an image of poker, and one of three pictures is likely to appear:

  Poker is a game played by Mississippi riverboat gamblers with pencil-thin moustaches, fast hands, and a derringer hidden up their ruffled sleeves, or it’s played by gunfighters of the Old West (men like Doc Holliday, Wild Bill Hickok, and Bat Masterson). Welcome to Dodge City, pardner. Check your guns at the marshal’s office and pull up a chair.

  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.

  There’s a kinder, gentler version too. This is a picture of Uncle Jack and Aunt Gertie playing poker around the kitchen table for pennies, and somehow all the nieces and nephews always come away winners.

  Poker has been all of these things, and more. Although your authors are far too young to have gambled with Doc Holliday or played cards with Al Capone, both are familiar with the kitchen table introduction to America’s national card game.

  Since the late 1980s, poker has undergone a renaissance, a greening, if you please. Today’s poker is clean, light, and airy, and decidedly middle class. Like bowling and billiards before it, poker has moved out from under the seedier side of its roots and is flowering in the sunshine. No matter where you live, you probably live within a few hours drive of a public card casino. Poker is all around you. Seek and ye shall find, and these days you don’t have to look very far either.

  Why You Need This Book
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  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.

  Poker’s been around for a long time, and it’s never been more popular. With the advent of personal computers, a great deal of research about the game has been done in recent years and some of the tried-and-true concepts have been changing. Players who don’t keep their knowledge up to date will be left behind.

  A reference book like Poker For Dummies explains the basic rules of the most popular variations of poker and provides a sound strategic approach so you can learn to play well in the shortest amount of time.

  Icons Used in This Book

  A signature feature of For Dummies books, besides top-notch authors and the catchy yellow-and-black covers, is the use of icons, which are little pictures we like to throw next to pieces of important text. Here’s what the icons mean:

  A suggestion that can help you play better.

  A note that will keep you out of trouble.

  A more general concept that you shouldn’t forget.

  Where to Go from Here

  You’ve got your copy of Poker For Dummies — now what? Consider the basics of poker with Chapter 1, or head straight to Chapter 2 to get the lowdown on Texas Hold’em. If you want even more advice on poker, from participating in poker tournaments to making the most of video and Internet poker, check out the full-size version of Poker For Dummies — simply head to your local bookseller or go to www.dummies.com!

  Chapter 1

  Poker Basics

  In This Chapter

  Getting a feel for poker basics

  Looking at hand rankings

  Building a strong foundation for winning

  Getting acquainted with general rules and etiquette

  Poker is America’s national card game, and its popularity continues to grow. From Mississippi and Michigan to New Mexico and North Dakota, you can find a game in progress everywhere. If you want to play you can find poker played on replicas of 19th-century paddle-wheel riverboats or on Native American tribal lands. You can play poker in two-table, no-frills cardrooms and elegant Los Angeles County megaclubs where 150 games (with betting limits ranging from $1–$2 to $200–$400) are in progress ’round the clock.

  This book targets readers who are new to poker. Even if you consider yourself to have a pretty good hand at the game, this book is bound to improve it.

  Before You Put on Your Poker Face

  Like a house, poker requires a foundation. Only when that foundation is solidly in place can you build on it. When all the structural elements are in place, you can add flourishes and decorative touches. But you can’t begin embellishing it until the foundation has been poured, the building has been framed, and all the other elements that come before it are in place. That’s our purpose here: to put first things first — to give you a basic understanding of what you need before you begin to play.

  Planning and discipline

  Some poker players (and it’s no more than a handful) really do have a genius for the game — an inexplicable, Picasso-like talent that isn’t easily defined and usually has to be seen to be believed. But even in the absence of genius — and most winning players certainly are not poker savants — poker is an eminently learnable skill. Inherent ability helps, and though you need some talent, you really don’t need all that much. After all, you don’t have to be Van Cliburn to play the piano, Picasso to paint, or Michael Jordan to play basketball. What you do need to become a winning player are a solid plan to learn the game and discipline:

  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.