This article talks about Texas Hold’em only simply because of the very fact which it is now the most popular type of online poker worldwide. Likewise if you would enter any off-line casino and sit down on a poker table it really is very more likely to be Texas Hold’em again. Within Texas Hold’em you have the options of playing tournaments or cash games, limit or no limit. Playing tournaments in usually not very different from playing cash games in terms of the poker rules applied, yet your poker strategy has to be quite different if you ever plan to be a successful player in the future. Further known poker games are Card-Stud, Omaha High/Low, Draw-Poker and Razz where any of these game types would need to be described in a separate article.

My personal perspective is the fact that Texas Hold’em is the most exciting and easiest to learn variation of poker and thus ideal for a beginner. You get a lot of action and there is a huge number of possibilities to win or lose a hand. A famous saying is: “You only need one minute learn Texas Hold’em but you need your whole life to understand it”.

Dealer, hole cards and blinds

The dealer shuffles a deck of 52 cards without Joker. The game can be played with at the least two and also a maximum of 11 players. The dealer is usually a player himself. The dealer button moves clockwise from round to round. The dealer button is a big chip that lies in front of the dealer. The button also defines the 2 players that will be forced to place a bet (blinds). The dealer also another function: He needs to push the game and ensure that everything is running correctly. He is responsible for the correct bets and that the two players left from the dealer place the small and big blind prior to the start of almost every round. Then each player is given two cards (hole cards) by the dealer as well as the first betting round is about to start.

The first betting round begins with the player left of the big blind. In the first betting round only the 2 players with the small and big blind are skipped as their first bets are the blinds. The very first player after the big blind is under the gun. What that means is the fact that he is forced to do the first move without having any opportunity at all to gather information from other players.