Saturday!

So since we’re playing tonight instead of Friday night (I was at work until after 8 on Friday and thought I missed Poker), I figured that I’d put down everything I could possibly remember about playing Hold-’em in prep for tonight’s game with strangers.

1st off: Position. There is the little blind, the big blind, under the gun (the first guy to bet after the big blind), before the button, and the button. Everybody else is in the squishy middle somewhere.

In most poker games, the majority of players just call. They don’t fold that often. They want to see the flop. They want to see the turn. They daydream about seeing the river turn over that *ONE* card, like in Maverick.

In a game where just everybody always calls, position doesn’t matter much because you know that everybody is going to call anyway. So your best bet is to fold when you don’t have good cards but, hey, might as well see the flop because you never know. (But *THEN* fold unless you’ve got three of a kind or something because the turn never helped anybody and the only person ever helped by the river was that one guy on television.)

Don’t look at your cards after you first get them. Look at everybody else. THEN look at your cards. Don’t constantly have to look at your cards. Come up with a way to remember them easily. A big letter/number for the card and a small letter for the suit should do it. A pair of nines could be remembered with 9ch. Suited 78 could be remembered with 78d. If you’re consistently playing hands that require 4 characters rather than 3, you shouldn’t be consistently waiting to see the turn.

In a game where some people know how to play, position matters. The guy who is under the gun probably has something. A pair, maybe a suited face card. The guy who is the button probably has crap but just wanted to raise to see who he could knock out. The Big Blind could have anything. Anything at all. This makes the Big Blind very dangerous.

If everybody notices that you fold all the time, this makes them more likely to fold when you happen to stay in. So you should open the game by staying in a handful of times with crap. “I was going for a straight!” or something. Make a big show of losing little pots. Make a little show out of winning the big ones.

Seriously. K8o? What are you hoping for? A pair of 8s with a good kicker? A pair of Kings with a crappy kicker?

So… what are you playing?

(Picture is HG Wells playing a war game from Illustrated London News (25 January 1913[/efn_note]