Texas Hold 'Em: The Real Deal

Aside from the fact that you can stare at other people playing it virtually round the clock on cable TV, what are best things about Texas Hold 'Em?

1. The number of chairs around the table: Usually ten (not including the dealer's.)
2. The number of betting rounds: Five, unless you're playing the much less common six-card variant of Hold 'Em, which has only four betting rounds.

By allowing for more players and betting rounds than most forms of poker, a typical Hold 'Em hand, whether played at an online casino or an offline one, can generate extremely large pots relative to the amount of each bet. Assuming that seven people stay in the game all the way through the river (seventh) card, a ten-dollar bet on each round would net the winner $350 against a wager of only $50. Those are pot odds that any poker addict can appreciate.

To put it another way, you can accumulate substantial winnings very rapidly playing Hold 'Em. The downside is that you can also burn through your bankroll quite quickly. With five rounds, the minimum bet doubling on the last two, and a lot of raising and check/raising it's very easy to reduce a tower of chips to rubble in one hot-and-heavy hand. Because of this. Hold 'Em, more than any other form of poker, demands that you rigorously adhere to the basic principle of only playing the cards you have.

Texas Hold 'Em is not a game for trying to draw to an inside straight or hoping to complete a flush when you've got a spade in the hole and two of them turn up on the flop. The results of failing to draw out on such long shots can be way too expensive. There are, of course, exceptions. There are always exceptions.

If you're sitting in a game where you know the players are very conservative, prone to do a lot of checking, and only raise when they've really got something, you can afford to play and pray for that inside straight down the river. If somebody else makes a big bet or a check-raise before you get there, accept that they've arrived where they were going and fold. Also, remember that one of the ways in which online poker rooms are superior to brick-and-mortar ones is that they make it easier to lurk and observe the other players' betting strategy. Curbing your impulse to immediately take a seat when clicking into a game and observing a number of hands first can pay off big time in enabling you to recognize players prone to bluffing and sandbagging.

Speaking of sandbagging, here's another Hold 'Em tip: When you got 'em, bet 'em. True story. Long before Texas Hold 'Em became the national past time, I was playing in a $2/$4 Hold 'Em game at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. The hole cards went down and I had two aces. Everyone checked around, the flop was turned and there, in plain site of everybody, were the other two aces. So there I was with four aces. Sure that at least some of the other players would be dazzled by the display and giddy at the thought of another ace turning up, I checked, planning to raise after somebody else's opening bet. Except everybody else folded. What I won, with four aces in my hand in the first five cards, was the ante.

Perhaps understandably, I was somewhat bitter about it all for a couple of hours until I realized what had happened. I just happened to be sitting in with some pretty decent, intelligent poker players. Everyone at that table except me, who was in a state of shock over my good fortune, recognized that two aces on the table did them absolutely no good unless they had a pair in the hole. Think about that. Where do you go with two aces showing in Hold 'Em? Since they're obviously different suits and the same value they're not going to help you make a flush or fill a straight.

Let's say aces appear on the next two turns. In that case, the pot would go to the holder of the highest hole card. But what person holding a single king is going to bet on that virtual impossibility. A sloppy player looking at that layout might wager on drawing two cards to fill a boat, but no smart player would. Which is why all I won was the ante.

What I should have done was bet the maximum before the flop. That would have drawn in any players who had two cards to a straight or flush. With them needing three good cards to fill their hands and me needing only one to make three of a kind or two to make two pair (both of which are very powerful hands in Hold 'Em) the odds would have been in my favor. But I didn't do that, I hesitated in an attempt to sandbag. And in poker, as in so much else, he who hesitates is, if not entirely lost, not a very big winner.