Getting Started

You can learn to play poker right here, and learning to play is easy. We’ll begin by teaching you Texas hold’em, the world’s most popular form of poker—the game you see played on television for enormous sums of money and the game used to determine the world champion each year at the World Series of Poker.

Poker is really a group of related games that have a number of common elements, including hand rankings, checking, betting, calling, folding, raising, bluffing and a few other things too.

Betting is full of strategic ploys, designed to make money with good hands and save money with weaker ones. Although this is a complex topic, we’ll let you in on a few betting tips right here at the beginning, so you can keep them firmly in mind as you wind your way through these lessons.

Bankroll management Money management and bankroll management might sound like the same thing, but they’re not. If you haven’t paid attention to this vital topic, or are confused by some of the things you’ve always heard, like the suggestion to “quit while you’re ahead,” but you don’t know why, you’ll learn all the ins and outs in short order.

No-limit and fixed-limit hold’em are completely different games, although the only significant difference is in the betting. But that changes everything, and successful strategies in one won’t necessarily work in the other.

Poker is a game of decisions. While you cannot control either the way the cards fall or your opponents’ actions, decisions are how your skills are exercised in a poker game.

The most important decisions you make playing fixed-limit Texas hold’em are made before the flop. Choosing to see the flop with the wrong cards can lead you down a primrose path and you’ll find yourself trapped in a hand when you catch part of the flop, but not enough of it to carry you to victory.  

The flop is hold’em’s defining moment. It’s the critical moment in each hand you play. It’s important to realize that hold’em is a very front-loaded game. When you see the flop in hold’em, you’re looking at five-sevenths of your hand. That’s 71 percent of your hand, and the cost is only a single round of betting.

  If you see the turn, you probably have a hand with some intrinsic value, such as a big pair, or you have a draw to a straight or a flush. And while the turn does not play itself, you shouldn’t get into too much trouble unless you’ve already made the mistake of seeing the turn when you shouldn’t have. If that’s the case, you’re chasing — and probably throwing good money after bad.

If you’re still contesting the pot while awaiting that river card, you should have a strong hand, or a draw to what you believe will be the best hand if you make it. What may have begun as a confrontation between many opponents before the flop probably will be reduced to two — or perhaps three of you — once all the board cards are exposed. Realized versus Potential Value

The accepted rule in Bankroll Management is that you should have about 300 times the Big Bet (BB) in your bankroll. The BB is the minimum amount that can be bet on the River or the Turn round and so is twice the size of the big blind: at a $0.10/ $0.20 limit table, the BB is $0.20. Therefore, to play at this table you should have a bankroll of approx $60.