Here are some basic poker tips for anyone looking to enhance their gameplay and increase their chip stack. Even though it involves elements of luck, poker is a game of skill.
Tip 1: Play to Learn
Poker is one of the most popular games in the world, not only for its intrinsic connection to money, but also for the multitude of strategic nuances that come with the game’s intricate balance of math and chance.
The best poker players will still tell you that they don’t know everything about the game. To some degree, the more you play, the more there is to learn.
“The more you know, the luckier you get in poker.”
-Doyle Brunson, poker champion and best-selling author
Doyle Brunson played professional poker for over six decades, until his death in May of last year at 89 years old. If you want to learn poker from a master from the absolute pinnacle fof the game, check out his books, Super System and Super System 2.
The moment you start thinking of yourself as an experienced poker player, you’re opening yourself up to untold vulnerabilities. Don’t get cocky– It never hurts to acknowledge that you could be missing something, especially in a game that’s so deceptively complicated.
Tip 2: Play the Opponent
You may have heard the standard poker advice, “Play the opponent, not the cards.” This is more than just stock advice – It’s a system to live by. Poker is not a game about your hand. Your hand is merely a single aspect of your strategy, while your opponent has the power to bring you victory or defeat depending on how you deal with them.
The “Showdown” event in which players must reveal their cards to determine a winner is rarer than it seems, especially on a player by player basis.
Consider that an average player in a Texas Hold’em ring game (9 seats occupied), will only participate in 2 showdowns per 100 hands dealt– That’s only 2%. But the other 98% of the time, that player still had cards in their hand. What they did with their chips in those other 98 hands matters far more than the showdown hands.
When you’re able to spot the patterns in your opponent’s betting habits, you can truly start to play the opponent. You can always make guesses about the cards they’re holding, but you’ll never know for sure until the rare moment of showdown. With your hands, the best you can do is to play aggressively when the odds are in your favor.
In the same way that you want more chips in the pot when you have the nuts, you want to see more cards with fewer chips when you think you might have a losing hand. More community cards (turn, river) might turn your hand around and make you a winner, but no matter what you’re doing to the pot, you don’t want your opponent to know your position. Assume that every player is playing from that same place of mathematical responsibility, betting hard when their hand is strong and softening up when their hand is weak while also trying to hide their intentions.
Remember – Chances are that neither you nor your opponent will have a chance to see one another’s cards. That means that whoever played the other more effectively will take down that non-showdown pot. Only 20-25% of hands in a ring game will even make it to a showdown at all, so patterns tend to matter more than hands.
Tip 3: Chase with Caution
Whether you’re calling preflop with a couple of low suited connectors or holding out to see the suit you want on the turn, chasing a draw is generally a risky move.
“Chasing” in this context means that you have most of a good hand. If the cards you want fall, then you’ll almost always have the winning hand. If they don’t, you’re sure to lose if it comes to a showdown.
Some draws are worth chasing. For example, let’s say you have 5♠/6♠ and you get to see the flop with no preflop raise. If you see a flop of 3♥/4♣/10♦, you’re in a good position to chase your straight if the price is right.
Any 2 or 7 will make your straight, so if you can see the turn, go for it. Additionally, there’s currently no chance of someone drawing out a flush on you to beat your straight. However, by calling instead of raising, you’d run the risk of revealing that you’re on a draw and trying to minimize the bet. Therefore, when chasing a straight like this, you’d better be ready to commit some chips to the chase, then ditch the cards if it loses economic reasonability.
Be very careful with draws in every situation. Someone with a made hand is almost certainly looking to price you out and take the pot before your draw hits, and they’ll almost always recognize when you achieve the hand you were drawing for.
With straight and flush draws, it’s better to play against others who are chasing draws than to chase them yourself. If you are chasing, present your betting actions as having the made hand already.
One unlikely advantage to chasing straights and flushes can come from playing in early positions on the table. This will help mask your intentions, lending legitimacy to your check and waiting to see how the rest of the players will act before you decide to pay for your draw.
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Poker isn’t a complicated game. The rules and mechanics are pretty basic, but the nuance runs deep. The origins of poker go back more than a thousand years by some estimates, in large part because of this simple elegance.
We like to get under the hood of games here at Gala, so we’re going to take some time in this series to delve deep into some specific mechanics and ideas that make poker poker.
While it may seem simple from a player-perspective, the “engine” powering poker is amazingly powerful… so that’s a good place to start. The classic deck of playing cards… one of the most useful analogue randomness engines ever created!
The Magic of Playing Cards
The possible combinations of deck order in a 52-card deck is equal to 52!, or 52 factorial. This means 52x51x50x49, etc. Factorial growth can get out of hand very quickly, so 52! is a MASSIVE number.
There are 1326 different possible combinations of hole cards you can be dealt in Hold ‘Em
There are 2,598,960 possible combinations the five cards on the table can be in as they are revealed
There are 9,122,409,676,719,740,029,270,368,190,464,000,000 (9.122 undecillion!) possible combinations for how the entire 23-card board could play out for a game with 9 players.
There are roughly 8×1067 possible combinations for a deck of cards to be shuffled in – that’s roughly 80unvigintillion!
Let’s use an analogy to illustrate the above… after all, 80 unvigintillion is more atoms than are in the entire Earth… or more molecules in the entire universe! We could use a better way to visualize it.
Let’s say hypothetically that every solar system in the universe has 100 planets on average (crowded, right?). Each of these planets has 100 billion people on them, and there’s 1 million solar systems in each of 1 billion galaxies across the universe. Every person on each of those planets has 1000 decks of cards that they shuffle 1000 times every single second since the beginning of the universe.
On average, each of those 10 octillion people (1028) shuffling cards will NEVER have shuffled to the same deck setup twice in the ~ 436,117,077,000,000,000 seconds since the universe began. In fact, they’d be way off.
All those people would’ve theoretically explored around 4×1051 possible combinations (4 sexdecillion). They would need to repeat the entire experiment around 20 quadrillion times (2×1016) before they had enough repetitions to even possibly cover all combinations. Unfortunately, that’s probably long after the heat death of the universe.
Looking to have your mind blown by some more card math magic? Check out this oldie, but goodie!
Fifty Two Cards
The standard deck of playing cards has 52 cards – 13 of each suit: 2-10, jack, queen, king and ace. For our purposes we will ignore joker cards, as they are a non-standard addition to the deck and aren’t used in many games.
Playing cards themselves have unclear origins, but it’s widely thought that they began to emerge as dominoes in the 10th century in China. The classic tiles were eventually replaced by more decorative paper cards, which people crafted games around. The silk road spread the cards first to India and Persia, eventually winding all the way across to the far edges of Africa and Europe.
It’s important to note that these weren’t deck of cards as we know them, and there was no standardization for what was a playing card deck. People simply played games made for the cards they had access to. They’d adapt existing games to their deck or make new ones. Since gaming often happened in small communities or families, this was perfect at the time.
In the 16th century in Europe what we think of as a standardized deck began to surface. First there were many different decks, but popularity began to focus on a 52-card deck with four suits created in France – largely resembling the one we still use. Spurred by the spreading of coffee houses across the continent, standard decks were massively helpful as gaming left the home and often found its way to a cafe table.
Poker and the Standard Deck
Poker also has an unclear origin, but we do know that it began to gain popularity in the 19th century. There were lots of different rules and games, but many of them were designed around the most popular type of deck at that time… that’s right, the 13×4, 52-card standard!
The rest is all about industrialization creating worldwide standardization. On June 28th, 1881, the Russell, Morgan, and Co. printing company manufactured their first 52-card deck featuring a familiar design on the back with filigree embellishments and two bicycles. The company would rebrand their company name to the popular name of their Bicycle line of cards before long.
It was their printing that popularized the inclusion of two jokers and two advertising cards (later one would be swapped out for a rules card).
This pretty much brings us to where we are today, with the amazing 52-card analogue game engine that is a deck of cards being spread the world over.
Thinking Cards
It’s easy to forget in these days of digital calculation and instant algorithmic analysis that we were very clever for millennia before computers. There are tons of games that use the 52-card deck of playing cards, and it’s not hard to see why.
Playing cards ensure fairness and pure randomization across a wide variety of game mechanics. Not only are they so amazingly random, but every card looks the same. This creates the opportunity to make games with incomplete information mechanics that don’t sacrifice any of the power of randomization.
In the future, we’ll dive into more poker-specific topics in this series. Still, the groundwork we’ve discussed here today is important, because poker would not be what it is without the classic deck of cards. In fact, we’d go so far as to say that no games would be what they are without our history in playing cards. Humans have been playing games for countless eons, but the deck of cards may be our crowning achievement in it… even if it is one of the most simple and elegant.
Tune in for more deep dives coming up as we get beneath the cards into the nuances of poker mechanics and keep Thinking Poker!
Ready to up your poker game? Sweep It Poker, Gala Games’ free-to-play casual poker game, is here to help you hone your skills while giving you a chance to win $GALA in our weekly Sweepstakes!
In this series of blog articles, we’ll dive into the basics of poker to get you playing like a pro in no time. In this series, we’ll stick to the games currently included with Sweep It Poker, Texas Hold’em and Omaha Hold’em.
Let’s start with the fundamentals
Understanding the Basics: Poker Hand Rankings
Mastering poker begins with knowing the hand rankings. Here’s a quick rundown from the highest to lowest:
Royal Flush: A, K, Q, J, 10, all of the same suit.
Straight Flush: Five consecutive cards of the same suit.
Four of a Kind: Four cards of the same rank.
Full House: Three cards of one rank and two cards of another.
Flush: Any five cards of the same suit, not in sequence.
Straight: Five consecutive cards of different suits.
Three of a Kind: Three cards of the same rank.
Two Pair: Two different pairs.
One Pair: Two cards of the same rank.
High Card: When no other hand applies, the highest card wins.
Betting is a crucial aspect of poker that can make or break your game. Here’s a breakdown of common betting actions:
Check: If no one has bet, you can choose to check, passing the action to the next player. This action is signified by the player saying “check” or knocking on the table felt.
Bet: Wager chips into the pot. Once a bet is made, players must call, raise, or fold. Betting can be verbally announced or visually as the player slides or tosses chips into the pot area.
Call: Match the current bet by announcing “call” and contributing chips to the pot.
Raise: Increase the current bet by announcing a raise or adding at least 2X the chips that have already been bet. If you don’t have twice as many chips in your stack, you must raise all in or fold.
Fold: Discard your hand and forfeit the current round, indicated by tossing cards face down onto the table.
Your position at the poker table affects your strategy. Position in this case refers to your location on the table relative to the “Dealer” button, which moves clockwise around the table hand by hand.
Early Position: The first few seats to act. Play conservatively here because you have less information about other players’ hands. If you’re first to act in a new round of betting with several players, you’ll probably want to let another player open the betting for that round.
Middle Position: The seats in the middle of the table. You can start to play a bit more aggressively in the middle position, but you should still be cautious. A raise here could risk a reraise from a late-position player with awesome cards.
Late Position: The last few seats to act, including the dealer. You have more information on how opponents are playing, allowing you to be more aggressive. The player with the Dealer button has the last choice, allowing them to “position bet” if every other player has checked in that round.
Play Tight-Aggressive: Focus on playing strong hands aggressively. This makes you less predictable and maximizes your winning potential. Play into your patience and fight the urge to play every hand no matter your cards.
Bluff Wisely: Bluffing can be powerful but should be used sparingly. Always consider your position and your opponents’ tendencies. More chips are won by betting appropriately on mathematically winning hands than bluffing with rags (bad cards).
Observe Opponents: Pay attention to how your opponents play. Look for patterns and tendencies that you can exploit. This doesn’t necessarily mean only physical and vocal mannerisms– More often, it’s patterns in their betting and raising habits. Any time the cards are shown at the end of a hand, there is a lot to learn from your opponents.
Bankroll Management: Set a budget for your poker play and stick to it. Whether you’re playing in a real money game or a casual free game like Sweep It Poker, never chase losses.
Sweep It Poker offers a fantastic platform to practice these basics without the risk of losing real money. The more you play, the more entries you can stack for the weekly Sweepstakes, enhancing your skills in a fun and engaging environment surrounded by members of the Gala community.
Stay tuned for our next blog post where we’ll dive deeper into advanced strategies and tips to help you dominate the poker table. Thanks for being a part of our vibrant community and may your hands always be winning!
