Heh. I assure you he is. If he isn’t, I remind him that I just barely beat him out in most of the games.
Ok, at about the time the first two cards are dealt, two players have to put chips into the pot. These bets are called “Blinds” there is a Big and a Small blind, the big blind being twice that of the small blind.
Blinds are enforced, essentially to keep the game going. Kinda like a shot clock on basketball. If there was nothing to force chips into the pot, the game could in theory stall out. Then again, there is the entire school of thought that you can play your big blind for “free”, and that small blinds come at a discount. – That is some players believe that you can play more hands while on a blind than not, the chips are still going in regardless, and if no one raises, you can stay in the pot with out adding additional chips, before the flop.
Raising is usually a sign that a player has a better hand than those players still in the round. Therefore, someone with an average hand, or not wanting to suggest there hand is better would simply call the hand. Calling is a neutral move, that keeps you in the round of play. As it is the most common move, for the most common hands, you can expect to see it often.
Again, pocket Aces are real, real strong. Strong hands being above average need to be bet with, most of the time.
I can understand wanting to play alone for a start. It’s a pretty involved game, a lot to take in all at once. I like to learn things in kind of an orderly manner. First let me learn the mechanics, the order of betting and so on. Then I can start to make decisions about my own play; what hands are worth betting and how much. And then I can try to figure out other players, what’s their style how can I play against it?
A seven deuce is the worst possible hand. A pair of jacks is the second worst.
(PS: have wandered into the SDMB poker room…I think. Screwed it up, came late, but anyone got exhaustively detailed instructions how to get that set up so’s I can just walk in at the appropriate time?) Historical addenda: Texas Hold 'Em was, in fact, invented in Texas, but it was known as “Hold 'Em and Fuck 'Em”. Scholars have yet to conclusively prove that poker itself was invented in Texas, but efforts continue.
and if nothing else you could just watch the carnage and get in on the discussion. but i also promise you that playing is way much cooler and funner. and since it’s free you really don’t lose anything other than time. and the greybeards seem to have a thing for the mafiates so maybe a third party can slip under the radar. kind of like sequin.
Heh, I feel your pain. A dry recitation of the odds doesn’t really help, since you can figure that most players who don’t have a decent hand of some kind will immediately fold, anyway, greatly reducing the pool of hands Jacks (or Queens) can beat.
That said, I withdraw my earlier remark - Jacks can indeed be a bad hand, in that anything lower (usually) gets mucked, leaving them at the bottom.
Please do, Quasi, and ignore Meek and Peek, the evil Bobsey Twins. You two, back to your corners!
Listen to Robot Arm - he’s somewhat sane.
When you’re playing online it can be difficult to find tells, but they are there. You get to know a persons playing style and can take advantage of it. As Meek said, it’s as much a game of skill as luck. Yes, 27o may be a crud hand, but not if you play it like it was AA. I’ve had more AA’s broken than I care to admit due to my slow play habits.
My two penny opinion: Find your style of play. That may take some time. In our weekly tourney we have people who play very guardedly and some who would throw chips at a moving car if he thought one or two chips would roll back at him. Not mentioning any names. cough Some change it up just to confuse everyone.
Obviously, if you want to stay around a bit, you start slowly. Only call with decent hands. Once you begin to feel comfortable, try a bluff - but do so with okay cards (low pair? off suit runners?) and don’t blow your stack.
Please join us. You’ll see what perfectly crap poker looks like!
Here’s the instructions to the SDMB game (for elucidator & anyone else who wants to play).
Show up early, say 9:30 ET ish (Game starts promptly at 10 ET, you need to be registered and signed up for the game before 10 ET or else you wont get in the game), you’ll need a few to get registered, etc.
i’ve never seem a big blind that i wasn’t in love with.
and maybe you could break out that freackishly huge avatar head that you had going on for a while. that would certainly make points with any newbies that show up.
Hey! Look, I don’t mind the tease, but you know, I think we should ratchet it down for the noobs. I mean, if my sound advice gets tossed out the window because of it…
The first time I ever got Pocket Aces, I had it totally fall apart on me. I remember the hand, because I thought that Pocket Rockets were a guaranteed win. So yeah, I agree with you that Aces fail, and seem to fail* quite often. Based on the OP, I figured it would be better to simply state that Aces are that strong, as indeed pre-flop they are, to avoid checking it pre-flop.
I say fail, there is some Psychology term for it, where we only look and complain about things that are negative, and never remember the good times. There is a reason why we give directions with ““stop lights”” instead of ““go lights””.
If the table checks around to you, pre-flop, and you hold Aces, you are going to tell me you wouldn’t raise?
7-2 off sucks. Pocket Jacks have to be in the top 10 of hands. I think 3-4 off is second worse.
Crap poker?
Well, I think there have been a LOT of suck outs. but, for all of the Luck V. Skill debate, we can’t forget that we are using Cards, and not some perfect information abstract board game.
Remove the mechanic that allows for suck outs, and you remove ““poker”” from Poker.
FWIW, Hold’m players will lose more money having premium starting hands then they will with bad starting hands. But they also win more by playing premium hands than they do with bad starting hands.
Reason: They play premium hands while they muck the 9-4 off-suit. I was playing hold’m and the guy told me that he doesn’t like getting A-K because he loses too much with it.
we use aim to converse/heckle each other. so it helps to have that loaded as well. i’m sure someone smarter than me knows how to invite folks. there is a talk function inside of the game but is really not used much. i think it’s because of the nsfw links that most of the derelicts provide. also, i have potty mouth so it’s probably not real cool to have your seven year old unless you are exceedingly liberal. however, even i can be on good behavior until that lying, cheating piece of shit meeko hits an inside straight on the river or some such nonsense to break me.
of course total aside. i let my dad play a couple of hands a while back. first go he gets 9 5 suited. i’m like i’ll go take a leak while he folds this puppy. come back and the bastard is going nuts. i think he flopped a boat or some such nonsense. quickly remove mouse from nutcase’s hands and proceded to bust out in about 10 minutes.
The one time I was ever at a cash table in a casino, the only playable hand I got was A-K. I bet, one other guy called. The flop was A-K-7. Bet, raise, re-raise, etc., nothing on the turn, nothing on the river, and the other guy shows pocket sevens. (For the noobs, three-of-a-kind beats two-pair.)
Sometimes I think the answer to Texas Hold-'Em is that there ain’t no answers. The game drives me nuts on a fairly consistent basis.
but, rootietootie. how many times do we remember when we got donkeyed or sucked out against as opposed to the times that we win with the percentages. i mean i can remember a hell of a bunch of bad beats against me. but the times when i was on the giving end it was more along the lines of stuff happens and they really are not that memorable. and for every time that i can remember losing starting with a k i can assure their are more times that i won. just not as memorable as the losing.
Oh, I’ve sucked out a few times myself. Hell, just last week in our game I had one foot in the grave, got some decent cards to survive some desperation all-ins, and won the game. But I also play fairly tight; not a lot of opportunities for suckouts if I’m not playing very many hands with the worst cards.
I was just commenting on my experience at live tables. I’ve played in one cash game ($1-$2, which were the lowest stakes the casino had) and two tournaments and pretty much got my ass handed to me every time.
Yep, you are going to run into situations like that. a few years ago, I was playing in a tournament at the final table. Paying five places, 6 people left and I was short-stacked. I had about 10 big blinds in my stack. Was dealt A-K offsuit and went all-in. The Big Stack called me with 9-10 Hearts. Flop was A-K-3 with one heart. He needed runner-runner flush cards, straight cards, running 10’s or 9’s.
Yes, he hit the flush to knock me out.
he apologized for calling. I told him i wanted him to call, it was the only way I was going to get back into the tournament. In hind sight, I should have just called or min raised while UTG with A-K, and went all-in after the flop. He probably would have folded as he really didn’t have a hand or a draw.
In a nutshell, the basic strategy of texas hold 'em is to win the hand. Winning the hand involves holding better cards than your opponents, or forcing them to give up the pot by folding. The next layer of strategy involves odds. When you are guaranteed to win, you want to maximize the amount you are going to win. If you might lose, you want to minimize the amount of money you risk trying to force the other person to fold, or you want to fold before committing any more money to the hand.
After this, there’s a lot of math involved, but these are the basics.
A simple example (sorry if the numbers are off, I haven’t played in years):
Let’s say you are holding a possible straight, and your opponent has made two pair on the flop. You have a 1 in 7 chance of making the straight and winning the hand outright. Your opponent, if s/he is smart, will bet and try to get more of your money into the pot. If you call it all the way down, 1 time out of 7 you will win, while 6 out of 7 times you will lose. When you win, you need to win more than 7X what you bet to break even or profit in the long run, not including those times your opponent hits a full house making your straight meaningless.
The goal here is to beat the odds through careful mathematical consideration and controlling bet sizes.
Then, there’s the people factor. Even though we think we’re playing randomly, nobody is. In general, people play the same way in the same situation all the time. The best players in the world have two common traits: a good head for math, and an even better memory. Bad players are so stuck in their systems that they might as well be playing with the cards face up.
