Thursday-Night Poker How to Understand Enjoy-And Win

You are playing in your regular Thursday-night poker game, dealer's choice, and the game is 7-card stud, high only. You have a pair of Aces showing, the second received as the fifth card. You have been making normal-size bets, and after the seventh card has been dealt, there are still three others in the hand. You find that despite a number of possibilities, your hand has not improved. You consider making a bet to suggest you have at least two pair but decide instead to check. There is $50 in the pot. Duke, sitting to your left, also checks, but Bill bets the maximum allowed, and Ty folds. Now it's up to you. You . . . Do you fold, call, or raise? That depends on several crucial pieces of information, some of which you would already have as a player, though they were not mentioned above. First, how big is the bet, and what are the betting rules? On the one hand, if Bill bet $2 because this is a $2-limit poker game, that is a small amount to spend to possibly win $52. Because a pair of Aces or worse will prove to be the winning hand in more than one twenty-sixth of all deals in 7-card stud, it would be foolish to fold in the face of what might be a bluff. On the other hand, if the game is pot limit, and the bet is $50, you would be risking $50 to possibly win $100, and the probability of a pair of Aces being the high hand is far less than one in three. This illustrates one of the guiding principles of playing poker: pot odds are crucial to determining what to do. In turn, this means that you have to pay attention to the relationship among the probability of holding the winning hand, the amount you expect to spend to be in on the call, and the amount you expect to win if you have the winning hand. The last two of these factors depend crucially on the betting rules and the stakes of the game. Anyone who tells you that you should always call or always drop with a given hand can't be right-though it may be sound advice for a beginner if it is usually right. The second kind of information concerns who the other players are and their styles of play. Even a $2 bet by a very conservative player may lead you to fold if he virtually never bluffs and you know he would never bet into the two pair you may well have. But if your opponent is a regular bluffer, a big bet of $50 may be an attempt to steal the pot with a hand that was aiming for a straight or a flush and never made it. After all, in this situation his only chance of winning the $50 is to have everyone else drop out, and he may judge it worth $50 to try to win $50. This depends, of course, on how he evaluates you and anyone else still in the game. The important principle here is that poker is played against people, and each person plays differently. This being so, your actions and reactions must take into account the nature of your opponents. The third consideration has to do with what the other players were looking for and how likely it is that they succeeded. After all, they did pay to get sixth and seventh cards even though you had a pair of Aces showing. Your judgment here will depend on what cards the other players are showing, the cards that have been folded, and how the betting has proceeded. There is information in each of these elements. The important but sometimes overlooked principle here is to pay attention to all the information that is available to you. This requires concentration and the ability to use your memory. Fourth, how you play depends to a significant extent on why you play. While this may seem a relatively minor consideration in how you play a particular hand, it does affect your whole strategy and outlook. I do not agree with a popular book on poker that gives as the first fundamental principle of poker that "The only purpose in playing poker is to win money."1 People differ in why they play poker-why they iSteiner, Peter O. is the author of 'Thursday-Night Poker How to Understand Enjoy-And Win', published 1996 under ISBN 9780679760207 and ISBN 0679760202.