It’s “after the flop”
Does the Grays Sports Almanac have hand results from the future also?
“Don’t draw to an inside straight” is like “don’t take any wooden nickels”; it’s kind of a cliché piece of advice that you might give to a poker player. I think Lennie said it on Law & Order when Ed was getting ready to go on a trip to Atlantic City. It does have a basis in fact, though, as has already been explained.
I thought it was a man called “Pops”.
Never eat at a place called “Mom’s”.
“Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.”
-Nelson Algren, A Walk on the Wild Side, 1956
I knew it was from somewhere, but I remember it from Harry Anderson who adapted (or if you prefer, stole) it for the three card monte routine in his magic act. One version is here.
In TV Land, it’s quite common to come up with a full house, only to be beaten by someone just happening to hold four of a kind, even if there are no wild cards.
If, after the flop, you have an open-ended 4-straight, then you are seeing 5 cards and 39 of the remaining 47 will not complete your straight. Assuming the next card is one of those 39, you now see 6 cards and 38 of the remaining 46 will not complete you. Thus the odds that neither will are (39/47)*(38/46) which comes to .6854… so yes you have nearly 1 chance in 3 of completing your straight.
I think “small straight” is just one in the lower half, say a straight starting 6 or below, but there is no formal definition.
Only for very large boundaries of the word “often.”
Still, it’s probably true that one is more than twice as likely to bet on completing the open-ended straight, simply because the likelihood that such a bet CAN be made reasonably happens more than twice as often, especially just after the flop, when amounts in the pot are lower.
A simple rule-of-thumb way to evaluate how good a hand you’re holding is to count how many “outs” you have: That is, how many different cards could come up that would give you a decent hand. Just how decent is “decent enough” will depend on the variety of poker you’re playing, but it doesn’t have to be very much: Many’s the hand that’s won with just a pair. So right from the start, any card that matches one of the four you already have is going to be an out (or any that matches a relatively high card you already have, if you’re playing a variant where pairs are common). Yes, yes, everyone knows that a royal flush is really good and beats everything, but it’ll almost never win you any more money than a plain ordinary straight or flush would have.
Oh, and speaking of the actual rules, a “royal flush” isn’t actually something distinct in the rules, either. The highest hand in standard, no-wild-card poker is a straight flush. A royal flush is just a straight flush that happens to have the highest possible high card.
Where are these rules? Is there a single governing body that has set out written rules for various varieties of poker?
When playing strip poker, do you have to take off both socks or is it one per losing hand?
I don’t think there’s a governing body for poker - there are just dozens of variations of various popularity (and the popularity changes over time - “Texas Hold’em” is a popular variation of poker these days, but back when I was younger “Five-Card Draw” was the one that seemed most popular). You can find books that describe various variations (often these books are called “Hoyle’s”), but no variation is more “official” than any other.
There are some rules about how you can conduct yourself during a game that go beyond just the particulars of the type of poker you’re playing. One thing you see in movies is when the action gets to a player, he might say something like “I’ll call your $100, and raise you $300.” That’s called a string bet, and can be prohibited. When it’s phrased that way, the player may be trying to elicit a reaction by saying “call”, and only then deciding whether to raise or not. If you want to raise, you have to announce it first.
Some other interesting rules are here.
These are all House Rules. If it’s a legal commercial gambling establishment they’ll be written down somewhere. Otherwise it’s the consensus of the players, sometimes established by who has the biggest gun.
Thanks. Sounds like the string-bet rules are similar to “touch-move” rules for chess.
The most obscure tournament rule I think I’ve seen is in some houses if you have the nuts on the river you MUST bet it.
Well, that depends, how cold is the river? And how deep? And are my nuts encased in a swimsuit, or “skinny”, as it were?
Is there a rationale for having that rule, and a way to enforce it?
Actually, enforcement might not be the problem I though it would. A player with the nuts could check, then raise, and not have to show his cards unless he was called, so he could get away with it. But, he wouldn’t know that for sure at the time he checked. So a player who breaks this rule runs a risk of being exposed every time they do it.
Strange rule though. It may be showing my novice-ness, but to me in some situations I might not even realize I had the nuts. So to speak.
I mean, I might make the error of thinking victory is virtually certain, instead of certain (well, apart from a tie)
I expect I’ll get some PMs to join some no-limit poker games now 
That’s strictly a house rule, which must be called before a game is played, and cannot be referred to after some slick has played his 4 Queens as a pair of ducks. Hoyle is the most definitive authority.