Thorough and frequent hand analysis is essential to keeping you ahead of the game. It helps you find leaks in your opponent’s strategy, and develop +EV plays to exploit them.
Hand analysis is another, and one that may seem as distant from game choice as ‘effective bet sizing’. But let’s say I do bluff often (since I’m facing loose opponents), and I up my farío range to 60 per cent of all hands. So I’ll win when I pretend to be strong on average 60 times per 100 hands. Now, that means I will also be able to use effective bet sizing – bluffing aggressively more often than usual and scaring off my opponents. Effective bet sizing is another way – the most effective way – of raising a bet.
Jacks or better
If you learn how to make good starting hand choices for Jacks or better video poker, you’ll greatly improve your chances of making the cut, especially when dealing with low hands that can improve to higher-ranking hands such as straights, flushes and more. And Jacks or Better wasn’t given its name until 1970, when poker fan JH Green wrote about the eponymous riverboat gambling games that included cheating in a description. The jackpots are very large, the payouts are high, and the game is easy to play – Jacks or Better feature you’ll find in all of the US online casinos! The rules of the Jacks or Better video poker variant are very easy to understand – you end your round with a score depending on the strength of your hand. This makes the Jacks or Better video poker variant one of the easiest games for video poker.
King of hearts
Whether you play poker with your friends for fun at the kitchen table or play professionally at the casino, knowing the ranking of poker hands and knowing which hands beat other hands is critical to playing your cards properly. (Compare hands of equal rank: a $K$ beats a $Q$; $A$ kicker beats $J$ kicker; a full house beats a flush; etc.) Staszko opened-shoved his weak T 7 to try to steal both blinds and the ante from Heinz. Heinz called. Heinz held one of the best starting hands in tournament poker.
Aces or better
The reason poker is such fun to play is that it’s one of those skill-meet-luck games, and over the years there have been any number of unforgettable hands that became legendary through association with famous players or historic events (Doyle Brunson won two World Series of Poker Main Events that way, with 10-2). Chris Moneymaker beat Sammy Farha with a full house bluff. Hokey pokey, now you see it, now you don’t. It comes down to whether the feel of the game is more important than happenstance – and for me it always has been. For example, experienced poker players have to be careful to consider the ways in which their second card interacts with their ace to build good hands (think flushes, low wheel straight or high broadway straight, a hand with aces and two cards in between like 4 and 5, etc) – what’s called board texture.
Ten of diamonds
So, given these relative probabilities, we see that the ten of diamonds is the best five-card poker hand calculated in terms of cumulative probability, meaning that it ranks highest among all five-card hands but the royal flush (A-K-Q-J-10 of one suit). It is for this reason that the ten of diamonds – ‘the snub’ as it has come to be known since its unbeatability means it is almost impossible to acquire in real play. Doyle Brunson’s 10-2 demolition of the field at the 1976 WSOP Main Event began the next great chapter in poker history, and Chris Moneymaker took Sammy Farha – who had memorably performed that very gesture to win his seat in the tournament – to school. Chris Moneymaker beat Sammy Farha at their own game in the 2003 WSOP Main Event before winning the title for himself. ‘Command’ is the key word for the Ten of Diamonds and relates to the masculine energy, an air of Jupiter that can point you to power over possessions or become a source of influence in your
Jacks or better
This brings us to Jacks or Better, perhaps the most popular of all video poker variations, and what I would recommend to a new player hoping to keep life as simple as possible. It’s low in variance (in poker terms), easy to learn, and has a high payout percentage. It is a card game, played with a 52-card deck, where the payouts depend on the strength of your hand. For example, Two Jacks pay onex, and Royal Straight Flush can go up to 250x your bet! With countless monumental hands being written into poker’s history since its inception – from sick-beat beats to timely bluffs – it’s impossible to envisage a poker universe without the clairvoyant-like moves of these five players. 1. Phil Ivey seals the WSOP Championship with ace-queen (2009) In 2009, the WSOP Main Event final table went down in poker’s history after being subject to Steve Dannenmann’s two-out suckout on the very last hand of the tournament when every poker devotee was tuned in. Before it unfolded, Shane Schleger, who had more than enough chips to go head-to-head against the crown jewel of the card world, Phil Ivey, came into the final hand holding a formidable combination of king-jack suited against Ivey’s ace-queen.
