Texas Hold Em Notes

Friday, August 27, 2004

Yes, I've got the poker fever that's been sweeping the nation. I did pretty well at Tueday's home game on Trav's new poker table (love that felt, ooo) and won $85.75 after a $20 buy-in. Not bad! Good enough to be El Numero Uno for that night, the first time for me. I've been breaking even or close to it for weeks and so I may have been due for a good run, but it still caught me off-guard and felt pretty swell.

What helped was playing some online poker and just paying attention to what hands win, not much more than that. To be perfectly frank, I didn't have a gut-level memorization and understanding of the ranking of poker hands, which obviously made it harder to know where you stood, what other people had, what your odds of beating them were, etc. I just had my pre-flop strategy in place and not much else beyond that.

And in that vein, here's a few quick notes below that I took today on what to look out for on the community cards, posted here for remembrance's sake. It's not that these things are rocket science, just a few tips to make calculating the hands easier:

  • a pair is needed to make trips, full house or four of a kind
  • three of a suit for a flush
  • three cards in a row and no more than five cards apart for a straight - that's probably not the best way to describe it but it's the way that's stuck in my head for now. another is “three cards with no more than two missing cards”

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