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Poker for beginners.
You are dealt two cards of your own. Five shared cards arrive in three steps, and there is betting after each one. At the end the best five card hand wins, built from your two cards and the five on the table. That is the whole game; the rest of this page fills it in.
1. the ten hands, high to low
You need this order without thinking about it. It runs from rare to ordinary: the harder a hand is to make, the higher it sits. If two players hold the same kind of hand, its own rank decides first and after that the highest loose card alongside it.
| Hand | Example | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Royal flush | Ten through ace in one suit. | |
| 2 Straight flush | Five cards in sequence, all one suit. | |
| 3 Four of a kind | Four cards of the same rank. | |
| 4 Full house | Three of a kind plus a pair. | |
| 5 Flush | Five cards of one suit, not in sequence. | |
| 6 Straight | Five cards in sequence, suits mixed. | |
| 7 Three of a kind | Three cards of the same rank. | |
| 8 Two pair | Two pairs at once. | |
| 9 Pair | Two cards of the same rank. | |
| 10 High card | None of the above. The highest card counts. |
Each of the ten is worked through with the ties and the edge cases in the full poker hand rankings, and memorising goes faster with repetition than with staring: the hand ranking trainer drills this table until you no longer have to think.
2. how a hand plays out
Preflop
no shared cards
Two players post a forced bet: the small and the big blind. Everyone is dealt two cards of their own and decides, clockwise, whether to fold, call or raise.
Flop
three shared cards
Three cards are turned face up at once, and they belong to everyone. Each player still in the hand now has five cards to work with, and the second betting round begins.
Turn
fourth shared card
One more card, and the bets grow because the pot has grown too. This is the round where it becomes clear who actually has something.
River
fifth shared card
The last card. Nothing can improve any more, so anyone betting is doing it to get paid or to push you out. If two players remain after that, the cards go face up.
An example. You hold and the flop comes . You now have the top pair with the best possible side card, and on this board that is a strong hand. If a heart arrives on the turn you pick up a flush draw on top of it. Who has to post what, and in which order the betting goes, is set out in the rules of Texas Hold'em. What exactly you do in each of these rounds gets its own page later in this series.
3. you have four choices, no more
Fold
You throw your cards away and you are done with this hand. It costs you nothing extra, and it is the action you use most often.
Check
Nothing is owed, so you pass the turn along without betting. The next card for free.
Call
You put in exactly what was bet in front of you and stay in the hand.
Raise
You increase the bet. Anyone who wants to stay in now has to match your amount, and the turn goes around again.
Raising is the action beginners use least and the one that pays most. Just matching the big blind, which is called limping, gives away two things at once: you build no pot with your good hands, and you remove the chance that everyone folds right away. Raise or fold is nearly always the better habit.
4. which hands you play
From 52 cards there are 1,326 different two card combinations to deal. Because the suits do not matter against each other, those play out as 169 distinct hands, and at the start you want to see only a handful of them. Begin with pairs of sevens and up, ace with king or queen, and an ace with a second card of the same suit.
Two cards of the same suit play noticeably better than the same two cards in different suits. And a pocket pair arrives about once every seventeen hands; it flops three of a kind about 11.8 percent of the time, and that is exactly the hand you win a big pot with. Once it does, the glossary calls it a set.
More important than which cards you hold is where you sit. The same hand is an easy raise from the last seat and an easy fold from the first, and why that is true is set out in the lesson on position at the table. Which hands you open from which seat is covered in full in the lesson on playing preflop.
5. one sum, and you stop guessing
You hold and the board is . You have nothing yet, but any heart makes your hand. Four of the thirteen are visible, so nine can still come. The chance that at least one arrives before the river is 34.97 percent, roughly one in three.
If your opponent bets 50 into a pot of 100, you pay 50 to win 200: you need 25 percent for this to break even over the long run. You have nearly 35 percent, so calling is right. That is the entire decision, and the free pot odds calculator does it for you while you play.
next step
The practice: one real decision a day.
Reading fixes nothing in place. The hand of the day archive holds one hand for every past day where something is genuinely at stake, with the solution alongside it and with what each option costs in big blinds.
beginner questions
How do you play poker as a beginner?
You get two cards of your own, five shared cards arrive on the table in three steps, and there is a betting round at every step. You make the best five card hand from your two cards and the five on the table. On your turn you have only four options: fold, check, call or raise.
Which hands should a beginner play?
Start small: pairs of sevens and up, two high cards such as ace king or ace queen, and an ace with a second card of the same suit. Early in the betting order, play only those. Late in the order you can add suited connectors. As a rule of thumb you fold more than half of your hands immediately.
How many starting hands are there in poker?
From 52 cards there are 1,326 different two card combinations. Because the suits do not matter against each other, that comes down to 169 distinct starting hands. You are dealt a pocket pair about 5.9 percent of the time, so roughly once every seventeen hands; two aces are rarer, about once every 221 hands.
What do the blinds mean?
Two players have to put money in before the cards are dealt, so there is always something to win and nobody can wait forever for a good hand. The big blind is the unit everything is measured in: a bet of three big blinds means three times that forced amount.
Should a beginner bluff?
Almost never. At low stakes opponents rarely fold, so a bluff works worst exactly there. Your first profit comes from patience: play good hands big and put bad hands down. Bluffing becomes interesting once your opponents are capable of folding.
What is the difference between a cash game and a tournament?
In a cash game your chips represent real money and you can get up at any moment with whatever you have. In a tournament you buy in once, the bets keep rising, and you play until your stack is gone or until you reach the prize money.
Back to the overview of learning poker.