Poker: What You Have To Know

No matter what kind of poker game you are playing in, there are certain things you have to know. I list them and comment on them below. They are listed in order from the simplest to the most complex. The more of them you are capable of, the greater your chances of winning. Therefore, obviously I start with "kid stuff" that any poker player worth his salt knows as a matter of second nature and I progress to factors that may not even occur to anyone but players of the highest rank:

1.   The rank of the hands.

Don't scoff at this—75 percent of all poker players have diffi­culty remembering.

2.  What constitutes a good hand, a fair hand, a bad hand.
All these are relative values and vary in accordance with the

game you are playing. It is absolutely necessary knowledge that you must take into any game with you. In jackpots draw poker a pair of sevens is a weak hand not worth playing; in blind-opening draw poker, in certain circumstances, it might be a good hand worth a stay and even a bet. A pair of tens and a king in the first three cards constitute a good hand in seven-card stud but are not worth a play in seven-card high-low stud, in which a good starting hand is something like 7-3-2. Later on I tell what is a good hand, a fair hand, and a bad hand in every one of the principal forms of poker. Before you go into a game, make sure that you have a very clear idea of this, whether you get it from experience, from intuition, from this book, or from any other source.

3.  Your chance of improving.

As I will explain later, poker is not a game of the higher mathematics. All you need is rough approximations of the accu­rate figures. Nevertheless, you have to know approximately what is your chance of improving the hand you were dealt. To make an extreme example, if you did not know this you would be as likely to play an inside straight (in which the odds are nearly eleven to one against you, odds that you are seldom if ever offered by the pot) as a double-ended straight (when the odds are less than five to one against you, odds that you are frequently offered by the pot).

4.  What you stand to lose and what you stand to win.

At this point we begin to approach expert stuff. The ultimate phase of mathematical figuring in poker is the number of hands you will win and how much you will win on them, and the number of hands you will lose and how much you will lose on them. You know the chestnut about the man who had three farms and lost them all in poker; he lost the first two drawing to inside straights and not hitting, and the third drawing to an inside straight and hitting. It is not enough to know that when you draw three cards to a low pair the odds are eight to one against making three of a kind. The necessary next problem is, what are the chances that I will win if, in that one case out of nine, I do make three of a kind? If your three of a kind, once you make them, have only an 85 percent chance of winning the pot, then to be mathematically sound you must deduct your losses on the other 15 percent, the times you improve and still don't win.

5.  The best hand probably held by each opponent.

This comes even closer to the expert level, and if (as in stud poker) it involves discounting all cards that you know about, it becomes superexpert. I will give you a simple and oversimplified example. In a stud game, you have a pair of kings. Your oppo­nent has an ace showing. What is the chance that he has a pair of aces? If you have watched all the cards that have folded, and if three aces have shown, you know that the chance is zero; if two aces have folded, you know that the chance is a remote one; if one ace has folded, you know that there is a distinct danger; if no ace has shown, there is a probability that your opponent has aces. All of this is modified by your appraisal of the opponent himself. If he is a player who probably would not have stayed unless he had an ace in the hole, then regardless of the mathe­matics of the case he is likely to have aces. The true expert in a stud game must watch every card dealt, remember every card folded, and judge every opposing hand in accordance with the cards that the opposing player cannot have or probably does not have in the hole.

6.  What the opponent thinks he has.

This again approaches the highest degree of expert skill. After all, your opponent may bet into your three aces when he has queens up, because he honestly thinks that queens up will be the best hand. So remember, when the opponent bets, that he may be wrong! Your bets and especially your calls will be based on your estimate of how good a hand the opponent thinks he has.

7. How to fool or outguess the opponent.

This is as far as you can go in poker skill. It is the highest expert or superexpert level of skill, and it probably cannot be taught, cannot be measured, cannot even be denned. Anyone who has the knack or ability to outguess his opponents probably has such an aptitude for poker that he doesn't need a book to help him win. Furthermore, he probably knows quite well that he doesn't need a book, or my advice, and no doubt if he and I played poker together he could beat me.

Yet the finest poker player or any player can profit from read­ing books on poker. When he reads such a book, he is reading about what other good poker players have done and the methods they have found effective. / have never seen a bad poker book. Many of them are badly organized, yes; usually they are incom­plete; analyze them as a whole and they consist mostly of tips that apply to specific situations and not to the game as a whole. Nevertheless they are all worthy publications, praiseworthy, help­ful, admirable. If you tried to write everything that is known about poker in all its forms, you would fill a twenty-five volume encyclopedia as big as the Britannica. Many of the finest poker exploits are inspirational and intuitional. They won't necessarily occur even to the most expert player at the strategic moment when they will be most helpful. But if that player has heard about them, through reading books that give the experiences of other players, he doesn't need inspiration or intuition or even practical experience in a game. They become part of his experi­ence. To illustrate this, I will cite a couple of the chestnuts of the game, the classic stories that don't lose their validity because they are so classic or because the situations involved are so rare.

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