CardSharp

I don’t play in Vegas all that often, so when I do make it out to the desert there’s always something new going on.  This time it was a new way of taking your first hand when sitting down at the table. Read the rest of this entry »

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 Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »