FUN WITH POKER

In most poker books the part about how to play each hand is usually at the front of the book. I deliberately chose to put this part at the end because I thought it important to first explain all of the elements that go into the playing of a hand.

When I advise you how to playa certain hand in a certain position you will already have a good understanding of the concepts of position, raising, check-raising, slowplaying, bluffing, semi-bluffing, reading hands, tells, and adjusting to game conditions. This final chapter is meant to help you bring it all together in your mind so that you can see how all of these abstract concepts work in actual practice.

I am going to give you some specific advice about how to play specific hands and I’ll try to tell you everything that you’ll need to know about the hand. I don’t want you to say a few years from now, “Boy, I wish he’d told me that could happen when I had Ad. Ac. in the pocket,” or whatever the hand is. As I said in the introduction, I’ll try to tell you everything that I wish someone had told me when I first started playing this game.

I am not going to discuss all 169 different possible hands.

I believe that if you’ve read the book this far, you will already know how to play hands like Kd. 5s. Js. 3c. 7c.  2d.  and hands like this. There is almost no difference in how you would play a flopped set of eights or sevens, and the same general principles hold when you flop the nuts, whether you’re holding Ad. Qh. or Tc. 9c. There is also almost no difference in how  We will concentrate on those hands that have a positive expectation and you would at least see the flop with most of the time. Here goes:

1. Ad. Ah.

A pair of Aces in the pocket is the best hand you can have in  Texas Hold’ em. There is no other hand that will win more money hand in and hand out in the long run. You should usually raise pre-flop every time you get them from any and all positions and you should definitely reraise if possible. If you’re not willing to put in the maximum number of bets with the best hand in Texas Hold’ em, then you should ask yourself why you’re even playing the game. Anyone who calls you is definitely taking long odds to beat you. Here is a list of things to keep in mind regarding Aces in the pocket:

A. You are about a 4 to 1 favorite over any other player holding a pocket pair if you both play to the river. You will flop another Ace 10.5% of the time and you will flop a full house about 1 % of the time.

B. You are a 2 to 1 favorite against a single opponent on a straight or a flush draw. You are a slight favorite over two players who are trying to make straights or flushes against you. If you hold Ac, As. and flop two more c S or .s s, you will make a backdoor flush only 3.33% of the time.

C. Most low limit players who have Ah. Ac, in the pocket will raise before the flop and then carefully watch each player call the raise in turn. He will often actually bounce his head up and down in a clockwise motion as the action goes around the table. He’s doing this to make sure that each player puts the correct amount of money into what he thinks of as “his” pot. This is a reliable tell in low limit.

D. Most players will call all bets and raises on the flop when they hold As. Ad. in the pocket, even when they know that they’re beat. This is especially true if the player is on a rush, is winning, or is drinking.

I think that all of you in this whole world like to play poker game. Some of you love to play this game in the free time or as one of your hobby. But some you has adopted this game as your business to earn money. This is a  favourite game of many of the people who really like to have fun in life. This game has become a money making machine for many of the people in the world. This game of jeux poker is really a fun with money.   

You see now that you may be playing with a fool, but if he has ten or twenty times as much money as you, his being a fool may not help you at table stakes. You get him in a $2-limit, dealer’s-choice game and you11 shred him like cabbage. A few personal comments. I started the poker bit almost thirty years ago at my mother’s elbow, whenever I was permitted to watch. From her I first learned the mysteries and fascinations of online poker and the dignity of people and card games requiring skill and imagination. Later as a teen-ager I played wherever I could-in cellar clubs, in hallways, the sand pile at Lawson Playground, Chicago . In the Army days, I played for high stakes. An Australian pound was $3.20 in U. S. money, but we treated it like a dollar. Japanese yen had the stature of paper. In November 1945 we were quartered in a huge ware¬house called the Silk Mill. A five-card-stud, pot-limit poker game was in progress. As the going price for a carton of cigarettes in Tokyo and Yokohama was 200 yen, everyone in the game was loaded. The first bet was normally 50 yen. The final bet in the average pot was usually between 500 and 1,000 yen. The funny little papers were changing hands rapidly. The rate of exchange was 15 yen to $1 U. S. The opening bet was almost $3 and the final bet was usually in the $40-to-$70 range. Most of the guys in the outfit had been overseas for two years. We had been relieved of duty and were leaving for the States in a few days. The men in the outfit were called to exchange our Japanese money for U. S. currency in preparation for our departure. The game was interrupted for maybe an hour. We reassembled and the cards were dealt. A young fellow from Springfield, Massachusetts , was high. He reached into his pocket: “Bet a half dollar.” A little while ago he had been betting wildly45, $10, $5O-but in yen. Now it was the real green stuff and he and all the rest of us settled down to conservative betting. played a little tournament bridge from 1946 to 1949. I couldn’t find a poker game. Since 1949 I have played poker regularly. I never played high-low games until that year, but I immediately enjoyed them better than the standard brands of poker. I realized that the high-low games required more skill

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So remember, poker is a great game. It is even greater when you win. It become more enjoyble when you earn money out of funtime. So this game is called having fun and earn money when you win.