Description

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Our goal is to show you how to be a better poker player, regardless of how you want to play the game. If you only want to play good cards and never take any risks, you can play that way. If you want to be a wild man who always stays in for the last card in a hand, where you only have a 5 percent chance of winning, you can play that way. For that matter, you can write out a list of strategies and tactics, and then roll dice to determine your next action. We don’t care what you do, as long as you don’t throw away a winning hand
after the last bets are down. That would break our hearts. Who We Think You Are We wrote this book for the beginning poker player, but we realize that a lot of poker players buy many of the books that come out in the hope that they can glean any advantage from the material. To that end, we included a fair amount of advanced material with instructions on how to analyze your performance in general and specifi c game situations in particular. We do assume that you’re familiar with the Internet and can install software on
a computer, but that seems like a pretty safe assumption, considering you saw the book’s title when you picked it up.
Conventions Used in This Book
✦ We display new terms in italics and defi ne the term in the text.
✦ We abbreviate non-numeric cards with the fi rst letter of the card’s name, so A means Ace, K means King, and so on. We abbreviate spot cards with the number of spots on the card, so Nines are 9, Eights are 8, and so on. The exception is the Ten, which we represent with the letter T.
✦ We use symbols to designate suits, so expect to see lots of ♣, ♥, ♠, and ♦
throughout the text.
✦ An “s” after the cards in a hand means the cards we discuss are suited (or are all of the same suit), but the suit doesn’t matter (e.g., AKs can mean A♠ K♠,
A♥K♥, and so on).
✦ An “o” after the cards in a hand means the cards we discuss are not suited, and that the suits don’t matter (e.g., AKo can mean A♠K♥, A♥K♠, and so on).
How This Book Is Organized
We’ve broken our coverage into a number of topics, each of which has its own chapter. Part I tells you everything you need to know to get started playing online poker. Chapter 1, “So What Is This Online Poker Thing?” provides a quick introduction to online
poker, how it affects your life, and whether it’s legal or not in the United States. Chapter 2, “Getting Started,” presents the mechanics of online poker, lists the hardware requirements for popular poker software, and shows you how to deposit money into an online account. Credit card companies don’t allow United States residents to transfer money
to most gambling sites, so you may need to go through an alternative funding source. Chapter 3, “The Mechanics of Online Poker,” reviews the basics of poker, the actions you can take, and how the games are designed to stimulate action. Chapter 4, “Games You Can Play,” expands on the material covered in Chapter 3 by describing the games you can play online, from the old standard seven-card Stud to the hottest game in the poker world, Texas Hold ’em. Those basic games have variations, such as dealing you more hole cards or letting you play for both high and low hands;
we’ll cover them all. Chapter 5, “Cash Games versus Tournaments,” describes the differences between tournament and cash game play. You may have read that the best tournament players are wild and aggressive cash game players who can throw away their money. That stereotype is
true to some extent, but you have to remember that the best tournament players are used
to playing hands that could cost them $100,000 or more if they lose, and even smaller tournaments can have a $10,000 difference between the prizes for fi rst and second place.
Risking that much money is a lot more stressful than taking a shot at a $400 pot in anonline game, where all bets and raises are $10 in the fi rst two betting rounds and $20 in the fi na