Learn the fundamentals: what the objective of the game is, how the game is organized.

Welcome to this poker tutorial!

Whether you are looking for competition, performance, pitting you wits against your opponents, or simply having some fun, you will certainly find a great deal of appeal in many of the unique traits of the game.

This is the first part of a series of several courses, so don’t worry, we will start from the beginning, and we will steadily move on to the more advanced concepts. I will try to make it as entertaining as possible, and I will occasionally deliberately favor “putting the message across” over accuracy, but everything is eventually detailed and straightened out, once the point is made. Enough talk, and let’s start!

The Poker Variants

First of all, let’s note that there is actually no single way of playing poker. Several variants exist, all built around the same “core rules”. Those variants, you probably know their names: Holdem, Stud and Draw are the three main families of poker variants. Think of it like playing the guitar: rock, jazz, bossa nova and classical guitar all require a different approach, but the core set of skills is common.

The purpose of the following parts is precisely to teach you these core skills, while we will study each variant in detail later on.

The Hand

So what is poker? It is a card game played by two or more players, each one betting at turn and trying to win the bets either by being the last player standing (nobody called his last bet), or showing the best hand at showdown with the random cards he was dealt all along, against the players still contending for the pot. Players make their bets with chips, that they have been given at the beginning of the game (usually paid for, in money games at least).

The best hand is determined according to a table ranking the different allowed poker combinations.

The action from the moment the first cards are dealt, to the winning of the bets by one player is what we call a hand.

Important: there are two ways to win a hand: being the last player standing, or showing the best hand at showdown.

Ring Games & Tournaments

For the same reasons tennis matches are not comprised of a single point, poker games consist of several hands. A poker “game” can actually refer to two things: ring games, and tournaments.

Ring games

In ring games, the objective of the game is simply to accumulate as many chips as possible, by winning hands. It is as though you played tennis points for an hour or two with a friend. In poker parlance, this is a poker session. You decide with the other players how long the session is going to last: two hours, five, or until 3:00am, it’s up to you. The players who end the session with more chips than they started with are said to book a winning session. Obviously, the opposite is a losing session.

If you lose all your chips, you can buy extra chips, or stop playing, taking your loss.

Sessions are not the end of the story, as being a small loser a couple of time and a big winner the next session can be better than being a very small winner each time. In order to really know the winner, you would have to look at your results after many sessions, or at the end of the year… Consequently, if you don’t keep records, you can be a loser and not knowing it…

In practice, scores are of course not kept on a sheet of paper, but the losers pay the winners after each session, as poker is essentially a money game.

Tournaments

Tournaments are completely different. Each player starts with the same number of chips, that he got by paying fees, called the “buy-in”. The objective of a tournament is simple: be the last player standing, with all the chips.

So as not to last forever, tournaments have rounds, which is a fixed period (eg. 30 minutes) during which the blinds are set to a given amount, possibly with antes. Don’t worry about that for now, just consider blinds and antes as a tax to pay before each hand, contributed to the pot (so the player winning the hand gets the blinds and antes). As time goes by, the taxes increases, eating up that many chips from each player, as well as creating an incentive to win the hand to get all those extra chips. This means you cannot wait forever for the ideal situation, otherwise you would be taxed to death, so to speak – since when you have no chip left, you have lost.

Like tournaments in other sports (eg. tennis), the winner takes most of the prize money, but the second and the third players also get a decent share. The scale is anywhere near linear yet, and the sixth or seventh player usually get a very small prize. This is all relative of course, and depends on the number of participant – but the big money is always in the three first places.

These particularities change considerably the strategy, compared to ring games, and call for a specific set of skills.

As it is, you can be a great tournament player, and do rather poorly in ring games, or conversely.

Related Items:

• Harrington on Hold'em Volume 1: Strategic Play
• Harrington on Hold'em Volume 2: The Endgame
• Holdem Rules