CardSharp

This article is specifically for online players switching to playing live and new live players. When you start playing live, you unfortunately have to cope with one of the major downsides of live play: angleshooting, rules abuse, and dealer and player errors. These issues don’t arise in online play, by and large, but they matter quite a bit in live play.

Angleshooting, or rules abuse, is simply a player manipulating the rules or structure of the game to gain an advantage not derived from good play. It can take a lot of forms. Oftentimes the angleshooting villain is on a freeroll - his angle rarely works, but if it does, he profits and if it doesn’t he doesn’t lose anything.

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Reading the board quickly and accurately is an important skill for both players and dealers. It is the process of looking at the community cards and determining the following information:

1. What hands are possible on the current board
2. What draws are possible (assuming there are cards to come)
3. Where a given set of hole cards sits into the range of possible hands, or how two hands compare

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Unfortunately, like any activity where money changes hands, poker attracts its fair share of cheats. While today’s casino games are almost certainly cleaner than at any time in the past, players and the house need to understand cheating methods and the rules and dealing procedures were developed specifically to counteract them. Below I outline some common cheating methods, and describe how they can be counteracted. It’s important to understand that these rules exist for a reason, not just as tradition.

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All cash games played in reputable casinos, and any reputable cash game played elsewhere for that matter, follows a set of rules for putting money on the table and taking it off. These rules, collectively, are known as “table stakes”, are something every player needs to understand and every house needs to correctly implement.

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One thing I hope to accomplish at CardSharp is to provide a high quality set of poker rules for use both in casino settings and home games.  This is a fairly daunting task because of the complexity of the rules of poker and the number of unique games that can be spread.  Luckily, most aspects of poker rules are shared between many of the games.  So to simplify the task of publishing rules, I’ve split out those common aspects.  Every individual poker game is defined by its basic game structure, the betting structure, the hand ranking system used, and in some cases additional special rules.  I’ll publish rules sets for each of these aspects, as well as how to combine them to form specific popular games, as time permits.