Texas Hold’em Fever

Normally, a Texas Holdem game ends with showdown, unless all but one player fold during one of the previous betting rounds. In this case the only remaining player is awarded the pot without revealing his pocket cards. Otherwise, after the last betting round all players open their cards to compare hands and decide the winner. At the showdown, each player presents the best hand of five cards he can form from the seven available cards (2 pocket cards and 5 community cards). In order to form a winning hand, a player can use his 2 pocket cards and any 3 community cards, or his 1 pocket card and 4 community cards, or even none of his cards, but all five community cards. If someone is using just the community cards to form a winning hand, then this player is said to be “playing the board”, but though the community cards are shared by all players at the table, those, who “play the board” can only hope for a share of the pot. Read the rest of this entry »

Just like in the other games, in Texas Holdem you can face different kinds of play. Sometimes the game is loose and juicy, but some are really tough. Luckily, there are some strategies and tricks that’ll help you to win even in tough games with skillful and aggressive opponents. Once you start out playing Texas Holdem, you’ll find yourself in many loose games with number of players in preflop that have truly weak hands and make a lot of foolish mistakes. The style of play applicable in this situation is just to wait for good starting hands and hit the the pot with an aggressive play. Playing this way you will miss a lot of games folding poor hands, but in the long run your advantage over loose players will be obvious. However, as you enter tough games, the same tricks won’t work out anymore. In a tough Texas Holdem game all players are usually skilled, there are just a couple or just a bit more players in preflop and often there is a raise and re-raise preflop with lots of aggression and tight play. In this kind of games, if you keep to the previous strategy, your opponents will just avoid your raises and on the other hand, play tightly and aggressively when you don’t have good cards, forcing you out of the pot. In fact, your opponents will have all means to defeat you, while you will have no means to beat them. Read the rest of this entry »