This part will introduce you to Texas Hold’em, commonly referred to as "Hold’em," the most popular poker game in the world today. The chapter should teach you enough to allow you to sit down and play the game without needing to ask your fellow players a lot of what feel like embarrassing questions.
(Beginners, by the way, shouldn’t feel embarrassed about asking questions; everyone has to start somewhere.) Later chapters will guide you through the subtleties of beginning, intermediate, and
advanced strategy.
Learning the basic structure, or format, of Texas Hold’em (Hold’em) is easy. This doesn’t mean, though, that there isn’t agreat deal of strategy involved; there is. But the way the game is constructed is fairly simple, compared with a game like chess, where you must learn how to move many different pieces, or even compared with many wild home poker games, where the rules for a game often take way too long to explain.
(“Seven-Card Stud, threes and nines are wild, but if y0u catch a three face up you must match the size of the pot to keep the card or else fold. You can buy an extra card on the end for $20 or replace a card on the end for $10, and if you catch a four face up you get an extra card free.")
If you were to walk into a card room or a friend’s house to play Texas Hold’em, and hadn’t seen Hold’em before, you would want some explanation. But once you understand the pattern of the deal, whose tum it is to bet, how much that player can bet, and what all of the options are (checking, calling, betting, raising, and folding) during the play of a hand, then you’ll have a solid foundation for understanding the basic strategy tips you’ll find in the later chapters. After reading (and absorbing) this chapter, you’ll be able to introduce Hold’em into your own Saturday night poker game, although I wouldn’t recommend playing it for much money until you’ve learned some snrategy!
The Role of the Dealer
In most poker games, including Texas Hold’em, the deal rotates clockwise. When you’re playing at home, you simply change dealers after each hand, moving the deal around the table clockwise, one player to the next, but in a casino there is a professional dealer at the table who deals every hand. The dealer will
shuffle, deal, keep the bets right, and help control the tempo of the game. A good dealer will keep things moving, both by dealing quickly and reliably and by diplomatically encouraging action from the slower players.
The Role of the Button: Whose DealE It?
In "casino-style" I·Iold’em, the dealer uses a white plastic puck roughly 2 inches in diameter, called the button, to indicate who the dealer would be if the game were being played without a professional dealer. Usually, the puck has the word “dealer" printed on each side. Instead of simply passing the deck one player to the
left after each hand, as you do in home poker games, you sit still while the professional dealer moves the button one spot to the left after each hand, and then deals. Why bother with this step?
For one thing, no one has to wonder, or ask, whose deal it is. More important, the "dealer" (the player sitting behind the button) acts last in Hold’em in each round of betting and thus has a significant positional advantage, because (among other things) that player has more information available to him when it’s his turn to bet than the players who had to act Hrst. The use of the button ensures that each player—though never actually dealing
the cards—gets a chance to enjoy that advantageous position once in each round of hands. And of course with eight or more players at the table, next—to-last is a pretty good spot to be in too.
The button also enables us to determine the order of play for each hand. The player seated to the left of the button acts first (except on the very first betting round), and the player who owns the button acts last (with that same first-round exception). We turn to those exceptions next. By the wayg I recommend that you
use a button even when you’re playing Hold’em in your home poker game, and dealers are truly dealing. It helps remind people who dealt, and whose turn it is to deal next, andl think it also makes for an easier transition to casino Hold’em.
The Two "Blinds" to the Left of the Button
Before the first round of betting, and before any cards are dealt, those Hrst two players, directly to the left of the button, post (place in front of them) what we call the blinds. We call these the "blind" bets because those two players must invest them in the pot, in preset amounts, before they can look at any cards. Immediately after the button, we have the small blind, which is usually, but not always, set at half the size of the next blind, which is called the big blind.
The size of the blinds is determined by the size of the game. The small blind is usually half a small bet, and the big blind is usually a full small bet. In a hypothetical $2-$4 game, the small blind would be $1 and the big blind $2. Limit Hold’em games are thus dehned by their bet sizes. For example, you might play $2-$4 Hold’em, or $10—$20 Hold’em, or whatever.
In the $2-$4 game, all bets and raises during the first two betting rounds are made in $2 increments, and all bets and raises during the final two betting rounds (the third and fourth rounds) are made in $4 increments (you can’t bet, say, 50 cents, or $3 on any round). As you might expect, in the $10—$20 game all bets and
raises during the first two betting rounds are made in $10 increments, and all bets and raises during the final two betting rounds are made in $20 increments. In Las Vegas, the maximum number of bets is five, unless there are two players left in the pot they can then raise and reraise until the money in front of one of them is gone.
Two Cards Are Dealt , Facedown
Once the blinds are posted in the pot (directly in front of the players), the dealer deals two cards facedown to each player, one card at a time. The position of the button and the two blinds determines whose turn it is to act first during a hand of Texas Hold’em. (The illustration shows a poker table with players sitting around it, the blinds posted and two down cards in front of each player.) The cards that have been dealt are your own “private” cards, often called hole cards; take care not to let your neighbors see them. They belong to you and you only for the duration of one hand, and as soon as you see them, you should begin assessing the strength of your hand. Later on in the hand, the dealer will be dealing cards faceup in the middle of the table, where everyone can see them. This isn’t a mistake: these later cards are community cards, and I’l1 explain how they fit into the dealing and the betting in just a moment.
The Player to the Left of the Two Blinds Acts First
Now the blinds have been posted, and the dealer has dealt out each player’s Hrst two cards. Then, to begin the Hrst round of play, the player to the left of the big blind acts Hrst. Technically; the two blind bettors have "acted" first, by posting their bets, but because their “action” is involuntarjg the player sitting to the left of the
big blind is really the first player who faces a decision, and the first who will take some kind of voluntary action, as he sees fit.
Note that the blinds are posted only before the very first betting round. After that, the player closest to the button’s left (the one who had posted the small blind on the first round) is the first to act, if he is still in the hand.
During the first betting round, the player to the left of the posted blinds has just three options: calling the bet (matching the big blind), raising the bet (to exactly double the big blind), or folding his hand. (All calls or raises are placed in front of the player, in the pot, so that you can keep track of who has put in what: when the betting on a round is done, then you drag it all into the pot.) Usually; players fold by gently tossing or sliding
their cards into the middle of the table facedown, without com-ent; but a verbal declaration—saying simply, "I fold"—is also acceptable and is considered binding: you must then release your hand. Although poker involves a great deal of deception, if you state that you’re taking an action, you must follow through.
You can’t say “I fold" and then, after hearing a sigh of relief, push chips into the pot to make a bet. Similarly, you can’t say “I raise” and then toss in your cards instead.
The next player to act has the same three options as the preceding player: he may call, raise, or fold. The next player to act also has the same options—call, raise, or fold—and so on until the action in the first round of betting is complete. Once the action is completed, the first round is over. (By the way, if you follow my advice in the chapters on strategy, you will be folding frequently on the first round of betting, as I·lold’em is a real
game of patience.)
One More Circumstance of the First Round of Play
The only other betting rule you need to know about in the first round is that the two players in the blinds have the option of raising the bet, just as anyone else in the hand does when it is his turn to act. In an unraised pot in our hypothetical $2-$4 game, the small blind may come into play by adding $1 to complete his bet to the full $2 size, or $3 ($3 + $1 = $4) to complete one full raise, and the big blind, even though he already has his $2 in, has the option of raising the pot another $2. In fact, a pro dealer will always ask the big blind if he wishes to raise it if the big blind hasn’t made a motion one way or the other. I know that this may sound complicated at Hrst, but after you’ve played about four hands it will seem very simple. (My parents played in a poker
tournament the day after I taught them how to play in September 2000.) Put more simply, when it’s your turn to act during a Hold’em hand, you will always have the option of betting (when no one else has bet yet), checking (when no one has bet and you don’t want to bet either), calling, raising, or folding.
Second Round of Betting
After the first round of play is complete, the dealer flips three community cards faceup in the middle of the table. These are available for use by everyone (as we shall see), and they stay there throughout the hand. We call the three community cards (and the moment they are dealt) the Hop. In every hand of Hold’em, the flop is a signal moment; for each player still in the hand, these three new community cards are likely to confirm his high hopes for the hand or all but shatter them, since there are just two cards still to come. Since the blinds are used only during the first round of betting, the first remaining player who is closest to the left of the button begins the action in the second round. You might suppose that this is the same player who had to post the small blind before any cards were dealt, but it’s quite possible, even likely, that the small blind, the big blind, and other players have folded during the Hrst round because the early-position players didn’t like their own hands or because someone raised.
This person, the one who begins the second-round action, may now check (make no bet at all, but not fold his hand either; in effect, he is saying, “I’m not betting right now, butl retain my option to call bets or even to raise, later in the hand"), fold (you should never fold until someone has made a bet that you would otherwise have to at least call), or bet. lt’s possible that everyone will check, the pot remaining just as it was; in this case, too, this round of play is complete. But the appearance of the three flop cards on the table will change everyone’s view of the hand.
Third Round of Betting
After the second round of play is complete, the dealer flips up a fourth community card faceup. This card, which also stays on the table throughout the hand, is usually called either the turn or fourth street. Then the third round of betting begins. Again, the person closest to the left of the button who still has a live hand
(hasn’t folded) begins the betting, and, take note, the stakes are now doubled. (The bets are larger, but there are, in nearly all hands, fewer players—the others have folded.)
Fourth Round of Betting
After the third round of betting is complete, the dealer flips up the fifth and last community card, faceup in the middle of the table. This card is usually called either Hfth street or the river (much more often). Now we have the Hve community cards in the middle of the table plus the two that you have in your hand; seven cards total. Each of you will settle on the best Eve cards out of the seven available to you (including one, two, or neither of the cards in your hand) to make your best possible poker hand.
