11:46
23 Jan
Texas hold’em is by far the most popular variant of poker in the world today. It has been that way for decades but never more so than during this millennium following the poker boom.
The origins of the variant are shrouded in mystery, with very little known except the birth of the game being around the early 1900’s in Robstown, Texas. For decades the game spread like wildfire around the Lone Star state, but no further than its borders.
It wasn’t until 1967 when legends Doyle Brunson, Amarillo Slim, and Crandell Addington upped sticks and moved to Las Vegas that people began to wonder what his new, exciting game was all about.
Apr 16, 2020 Below you'll find a list of Texas Hold'em starting hands organized by relative strength.The following charts contains every 2-card possible combination you can be dealt in Texas Hold'em. Each hand is followed by its long-term winning percentage (out of 100, of course) against a specific number of opponents holding random cards. Play Good Cards and You Will Win. My #1 Texas Holdem tip is one of the very first lessons in poker. Texas Holdem Poker Winning Tips & Tricks For some people, their love of playing cards extends to the occasional game of poker including the increasingly popular game of Texas Holdem. As with all card games, there is no guaranteed way of winning but there are tips and tricks you can learn to improve both your enjoyment of the game and your. Next in the poker hands list is a straight, consisting of a run of five cards of consecutive values, such as 4-5-6-7-8. Aces count as high or low, so you can make a 10-J-Q-K-A straight, the highest, or an A-2-3-4-5 straight, which is the lowest and sometimes called a “wheel”.
Beginning of an Era
At the beginning, Texas hold’em was only found at the Golden Nugget Casino, which hindered the game’s growth as the card room there wasn’t the nicest around. In fact, most professionals who were resident in the city wouldn’t consider going there.
It wasn’t until the road gamblers played a game in the entrance of the Dunes Casino that word started to spread. This was right in the middle of The Strip giving the game maximum exposure.
Around the same time a man called Tom Moore was trying to get the best poker players in the world to play at an event named the Gambling Fraternity Convention. For whatever reasons he couldn’t pull it off, so in stepped Benny and Jack Binion who bought the rights from Moore and changed the name to the World Series of Poker.
In 1970 the WSOP circus headed to Binion's Horseshoe Casino where a series of cash games would be the format. Several games were spread with one of the variants being no limit Texas hold’em.
The Binions Take a Risk
This didn’t go unnoticed by observers who persuaded the Binions to change the format to what we still have today—a NL hold’em tournament.
It definitely took a while for the game to grow. In 1972 there were only eight entries, but this grew to around 10,000 at the peak of the poker boom.
During the 70’s Texas hold’em continued to grow in popularity, but not by as much as the top players hoped. Those guys could really see what a great game it is and wanted others to understand. It wasn’t nicknamed the Cadillac of Poker without reason.
Doyle Brunson then took matters into his own hands by writing the original classic Super System. This was the real beginning of poker growing into what it is today.
The growth, although welcome, wasn’t exactly booming. It took a few events for it to really get going.
The year 1998 was significant for a couple of reasons. It was the release date for the classic poker movie Rounders, and also when online poker was introduced to the world. Poker started to make some serious headway at this point but nothing prepared us for what was to come five years later.
In 2003 an accountant from Tennessee called Chris Moneymaker won the NL Texas hold’em WSOP Main Event after winning his seat in an $86 online qualifier.
Texas Holdem Card Winning Order
All of a sudden, Texas hold’em was synonymous with poker. Everybody now knew the game where you got dealt two cards and had to make a five-card hand in combination with the five community cards.
And it looks so simple. Almost everybody who played the game thought they were great at it. The poker boom that took place over the next few years was unlike anything seen before because of this.
The game of NL Texas hold’em is why poker is what it is today. It is still the most popular poker variant in the world despite serious competition from pot limit omaha, and we expect that to remain the case for many years to come.
New fans of poker could do far worse than learning how to play Texas hold’em.
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It’s not uncommon for people to hear of cheating when they hear the term “card counting”, but the technique doesn’t actually have anything to do with cheating at all. What’s more is that you don’t need to be a math wiz to be able to learn how to do it.
Nevertheless, it’s not uncommon for people to want to learn how counting cards works, and in poker specifically, it can be an effective strategy that can give you the edge over your opponents. When you first start learning how to count cards, you only need to get a hang of three simple things, namely Texas Hold’em odds, counting your outs and pot equity. This guide will show you the basics of counting cards so that you can improve your Texas Hold’em game:
How to Count Cards: Counting Outs
Any good poker player needs to be able to count outs. Learning how to count outs will help you improve your game and give you excellent preliminary knowledge before you truly understand how to count cards in poker. So, what is an “out”? The term “out” in the context of poker refers to any card that will make your hand stronger or give you the potential of turning your hand into a winning one. To be able to identify cards that will do this to a hand, you need to have good knowledge of hand rankings. Thankfully, calculating outs is relatively simple:
Remember that counting cards is not an exact science. Unlike the example above, you will never know which cards your opponent is holding. As a result, you need to pay attention to how they play, when they produce their flop cards, how much they are betting while also considering the possible available combinations. Don’t forget that they could always be bluffing!
Counting Cards: Poker Pot Equity
You will be able to grasp pot equity when you get the hang of counting cards. It’s a natural extension of card counting and involves calculating the likelihood of your chances of forming a winning hand and thus taking the pot.
There’s a method for calculating pot equity, and it’s known as the “Rule of Two and Four”. It is only applied during the flop and river stages of a round, and that’s because they are the only two stages where more cards are revealed. Here the two simple rules within the Rule of Two and Four:
For example, if you had a draw with 12 possible outs on the flop, you would multiply this by four, giving you approximately a 48% chance of getting the right cards to complete your hand. Furthermore, if you are left with 12 outs on the turn, you would have a 24% chance of completing your hand. Calculating your pot equity can be extremely useful when it comes to determining your moves in a game, reducing the number of needless bets you have to make, and proving the importance of learning how to count cards in poker.
Texas Holdem Card Rankings
The underlying mathematics of this process is complex, but worth knowing if you want to calculate your equity on the fly. Say you have 10 outs on the turn with 46 cards left in the deck, your probability of hitting is 10/46. By imagining that there are 50 cards in the deck, the probability is 10/50, or 20/100, meaning that your chance of getting the pot equity is 20%.
However, the real probability of 10/46 is expressed as 21.7%, which would mean that the number of outs would have to be multiplied by 2.174 – an incredibly hard sum to do when your opponent just raised €50! Regardless of how you choose to use it, if you want to learn how to count cards, you need to know how to judge your pot equity.
Texas Hold’em Odds: Hole Cards
Texas Holdem Rules Cards
To give you a greater understanding of how difficult it can be to predict an opponent’s hand, as well as giving you a better insight into how to count cards effectively, it’s important to know the odds of receiving some of the best and worst hole cards. In addition, we’ll give you the probability of winning with these hands in a standard four-person game.
Now that you’ve learned the ins and outs of how to count cards, pot equity, and Texas Holdem odds, why not put your skills to the test of one of our online poker games?