Tips and strategies from the world’s top poker players Archives - Page 3 of 4

Do you want to watch poker tips and poker strategy advice from Phil Ivey, Dan Colman, Dan “Jungleman” Cates and many more top Texas Holdem players? Of course you do!

Hi, it’s Paul Phua here with some very exciting news. My new series of “Tips from the pros” and “In Conversation” videos is almost ready for you to watch! Three months ago I released a series of poker videos on my YouTube channel, and I noticed that the two “Paul Phua In Conversation With Tom Dwan” videos were the most watched, with more than 20,000 views.

So when some of the world’s finest poker players joined me in Manila this February at the Triton High Roller Series, I asked my video team to capture some of their best poker tips and strategy advice. Which poker pros will appear in the video series over the next four months? Watch the trailer video on this page, or read on:

Phil Ivey. That’s right, Phil Ivey! Phil is an incredible player, absolutely fearless, brilliant at reading his opponents. He has ten World Series of Poker bracelets and nearly $24 million in live tournament cashes, even though he primarily plays high-stakes cash games.
Dan Colman. Dan Colman ranks above even Phil Ivey in the list of the ten biggest live tournament earners, having defeated Daniel Negreanu heads-up for a massive payout of $15.3 million in the Big One for One Drop at the 2014 World Series of Poker, only a few days after his 24^th birthday. This February he won the 2017 Triton Super High Roller Series Manila HK$ 250,000 6-Max Event, and then, just two weeks later, he won the Aria $25,000 High-Roller as well.
Dan Cates. Also known as Daniel “Jungleman” Cates, after his online poker name, Dan passed the $10 million online cash earnings milestone nearly three years ago. His famously aggressive playing style has made him one of the most formidable heads-up and shorthanded players in the world.
Timofey Kuznetsov. Playing under the name “Trueteller”, Timofey Kuznetsov is another online poker specialist. He hit the headlines in 2015 for a marathon 30-hour high-stakes heads-up session against Phil Ivey on PokerStars during which they played nearly 5,000 hands, and last week he was revealed to be the biggest online winner of the year so far.
Winfred Yu. As President of the Poker King Club, Winfred Yu runs the world’s highest-stakes cash games, in Manila and Macau. He is, of course, a terrific player himself, and has been active on the poker circuit for more than a decade.
Wai Kin Yong. Poker is in Wai Kin Yong’s blood – he is the son of the businessman and high-stakes player Richard Yong. In November 2016 he took down one of the biggest prizes in tournament poker (over $2m) at the Triton Super High Roller Series Main Event in Manila.
Rui Cao. Rui Cao emerged nearly a decade ago as one of France’s strongest players. He built his reputation online as “PepperoniF” before challenging the Macau high-stakes cash games as far back as 2011.
Go subscribe now to the Paul Phua Poker YouTube channel, so as not to miss a thing. It’s free!

Poker is a fun game, but in order to keep playing, let alone make a living from it, you must learn to manage your money responsibly.

Paul Phua explains why you must be a rock with your ’roll

Last week one of my readers emailed the Paul Phua Poker site with a question: “Paul Phua, please tell me: how can someone make a living from poker, how much cash and/or income would they need, and what stakes should they be playing?”
This is a great question. In fact, I will soon be releasing a video of tips from top players including Phil Ivey, and he says in it that managing your money is one of the most important things for beginners to learn. I hope the following insights will be helpful to players wishing to take poker seriously:

Bankroll management

When poker players talk of their “bankroll”, it means a sum of money they have set aside exclusively for poker. It is very important that this money, whether it grows or shrinks through playing, is kept separate from all your other funds and financial dealings. One reason is so that you don’t start dipping into money you should be using to pay important bills. Another is that it enables you to tell whether you are making or losing money at poker.
Equally importantly, your bankroll should be money you can afford to lose without giving you problems in your daily life. We all hope to win, but no one can guarantee to make money at poker – even the world’s best players can simply have a run of bad luck.
How big should your bankroll be? It could be $500 or it could be $5 million. The principle is the same: it’s money you feel you can afford to risk at poker. The only thing that will change, according to the size, is what stakes you are able to play at.

Choosing the stakes

The bigger the bankroll you have, the higher the stakes you can afford to play. This doesn’t mean you have to play at the highest possible stakes – billionaire Bill Gates supposedly enjoys a bit of poker, but only plays at $1-$2 blinds – but it does mean you shouldn’t play at stakes that are too big for your roll. For one reason, you may be playing scared, and that never results in the best decisions. For another, if you play for too large a proportion of your bankroll, just a few unlucky games could wipe you out.
Poker is a marathon, not a sprint. Only once you are making money consistently at one level should you consider moving up to the next.
So where do you start? Typically, the cheapest live cash games you will find in casinos are $1-$2. Since it is recommended that, in No-Limit Hold ’Em cash games, you sit down with 100x the big blind (some might say 200x is preferable in order to maximise your potential winnings from big hands), you would need $200 to play each time; with another $200 in reserve in case you need to rebuy. And since you may lose in that game no matter how well you play, your total bankroll will need to be several times bigger than $400.
Tournaments are a superficially cheaper option. Though entry to one-off tournaments can be anything from a few hundred dollars to many thousands, regular casino tournaments can be found for $50 or so. Bear in mind, however, that only the top 15% or so of players get paid anything at all, and only the top 5% or so get back a significant return; so again, you will need to have enough in your bankroll for many tournaments.
If your bankroll is not big enough for the above stakes, you will find every possible size of cash game and tournament in online poker sites.

Can you make a living from poker?

There’s an old saying about poker: “It’s a hard way to make an easy living.” And that’s never been truer than today, when so many players have understood that they need to read up on strategy. All the same, it is at least possible to make a living from poker. There is no such thing as a professional roulette player, but there are professional poker players!
Most people will start out losing money, until they develop the experience to become winning players. My advice at that level, when you are still likely to lose, would be to spend no more on a session of poker than you would spend on a typical night out. Poker is, after all, a fun game. A lot more fun, in my view, than most forms of entertainment!
Whether you can then convert that experience into making a living from poker, that will depend on you. You will need skill, strategy, an understanding of the odds and of psychology, a calm temperament, the ability to learn from your mistakes. A good start is to follow the above rules on money management – and to keep reading my strategy blogs on Paul Phua Poker, and watching the videos on the Paul Phua Poker YouTube channel.
— Paul Phua

Unpredictable poker players in live poker games

Poker used to be thought of as a game mainly of flair and emotional intelligence. A good bluff, or the ability to peer into your opponent’s mind were considered the primary characteristics for a Texas Hold’em pro.

This was the era of the “live” player. One who thrived off the occasion. The face-to-face. Reading their opponents’ tells. The pressure. The emotion.
Now though, if you fast forward a few decades, the poker world has changed beyond recognition. Players analyze betting patterns, they discuss bet sizing and scrutinize fold equity and expected value. Investment bankers and engineering graduates from the world’s best universities now flock to poker. Instead of trading volatility in the world of finance, they are exploiting “thin value for maximum pay-off” in high stakes games, often online.
Poker has transformed into a game of rigorous calculation. It has automated, you could say. It has taken a leap towards the world of math and away from old-fashioned emotional intelligence. A lot of the world’s best and most successful players play percentages and probability.
However, that doesn’t mean that all those players who thrive on the cut and thrust of face-to-face, live play have had to cash in their chips and leave the table. They have had to learn to play differently. And some have found a technique that works – using the unconventional and unpredictable, to confound the percentage and probability based systems used by so many players nowadays.
Unconventional live players tend to play the player, not the numbers, and work outside the rules of betting charts. It’s like they are playing in a separate world from the more mathematical players. They are able to weave in and out of convention. It is often a difficult style to play against because it’s so unpredictable.
Most young pros would say that this “out of the box” approach isn’t the best way to play in the long run (partially because it falls so far outside their own models). That’s a good argument. But one thing is for sure. The unconventional players are great to watch!

Here’s a great example of where unconventional play can overcome an opponent. Take Henry Tran in the WSOP 2016 Main Event — one of our all-time favourite hands at Paul Phua Poker.

Tran is dealt three of clubs and two of hearts and his opponent, Ben Alcober, is dealt King of diamonds and eight of diamonds.
Before the flop, Tran opens middle position to two times the big blind. Alcober reacts to this by three betting out of small blind to 25k. The pot has now grown to 43.5k, but the action does not stop here. Tran then makes an astonishing four bet which Alcober calls. The pot is now at 94.5k and the flop has not even been dealt.
The flop is nine of clubs, four of diamonds and seven of spades (a “rainbow” flop). Alcober leads out of position bluffing for 32k. Tran responds by re-bluffing and making it 65k. Alcober calls.
The turn peels off and it is the nine of spades. This gives the players a paired board and also puts two spades up there. Once the players see the turn they check to each other.
The river is the two of diamonds which completes no flushes and makes it unlikely that either player has a full house. But it does give Tran a pair of twos, together with top of the pair of nines on the board. Not enough you would think to win a big pot.
Alcober seizes the moment and bets 165k (which is over two thirds the size of the pot) even though the fans watching on TV know that all he has are the nines on the table.
Tran thinks for a moment and instead of folding, he then calls with his pair of twos and nines. Totally unexpected. Surely he couldn’t.
Alcober shows his King eight of diamonds, with a slightly meek expression on his face. Tran shows two, which makes his two pairs. Footage of the moment shows Tran hopping around the table, and other players open mouthed at what has happened. The commentators can hardly believe what they have seen either. Bluff, counterbluff, big raises followed by checks followed by raises. Unpredictable play. Great to watch.
Tran’s call wins him a huge pot at a critical juncture of the tournament. But the new generation of poker player would feel pretty uncomfortable making the sort of call Tran makes here, because the price is simply not right to be calling on the river. You are simply wrong too often for it to be a profitable call in the long run.
Looking a little closer it’s important to recognize that these guys have deep stacks in a multimillion dollar first-prize tournament. The amount of three-betting bloats the pot in a lot of ways which means that these guys are destined to play a huge pot from the start.
There are also a lot of mind games going on. These guys know each other’s style and they are trying to exploit that. Fortune favours the brave and in this case the bravest won the pot. Tran saw something in his opponent that did not add up and he acted on his read.
Tran’s big pot approach seems risky. But it demonstrates the enormous value of taking people out of their comfort zones and using it to the player’s advantage. Did Tran’s play affect Alcober’s decision-making and bet-sizing?

Another great example of where unconventional meets conventional in poker is Qui Nguyen at the World Series of Poker Main Event 2016.

Qui stunned the poker world with his play. Phil Hellmuth compared it to his own “white magic” style of play. Qui (like Hellmuth) is able to see beyond the realms of probability and pricing, and through to the core of the opponent, what they are thinking and how they are behaving. Poker wizardry.
This style has won Hellmuth 14 World Series of Bracelets. Hellmuth and Qui prove how effective emotional intelligence combined with deep understanding of the game can be highly lucrative.
The likes of Qui Nguyen, Henry Tran and also Scotty Nguyen are examples of traditional players who have adapted to modern-day poker, to take down titles or win cash whilst using less conventional methods and placing emphasis on playing the player, not just the cards.
On the one hand, yes, poker is at heart a game of math and science. Math, for obvious reasons, and science too because science simply asks the question: “Why?” Something we should all be doing at all times in poker. Keep evaluating, as Paul is always saying. And yes the top online players have a mathematical orientation, it is true. You have to understand probability and hand computations to a certain level.
But it is a mistake to forget the other half of the brain. Poker is holistic and the likes of Tran, Hellmuth and Nguyen show that. It is the blend of the old style pros (who love the ebbs and flows of the live game and who play out of the box poker), and more math orientated online pros that make Texas Holdem poker in 2017 such an exciting game to watch and play.

Poker tournaments are exciting, but also long and exhausting.

On TV you will see the bright lights and bundles of cash on the table with a bracelet or a trophy for the winner. But behind the victories lies a lot of dedication. Getting there requires discipline, patience, and usually a lot of practice.

The major difference between a tournament and a cash game, from the players’ perspective, is the amount of control you have over the conditions. In a cash game, you can leave any time: Feel hungry or tired? Grab a snack or a nap. Did all the bad players just leave the game and get replaced by pros? Go find another game. Notice that you are not focusing very well? Take a break. Did you play a hand perfectly but get a bad beat? Buy back in. Whatever else happens, you are on your own schedule, and you get to control which games you sit in and how long you stay.
In a tournament, you have essentially none of that control. The tournament organizers choose where you sit and who sits with you (usually by random draw). And the tournament organizers decide the schedule and when the breaks are. Moreover, you have to play until you are eliminated or you win the entire tournament—which can sometimes take a week or more, playing ten hours a day. And of course, once you are eliminated, you are out—no matter how unlucky it was (unless the tournament offers rebuys).
To make it in the tournament world, then, you not only have to be a skilful poker player, but you have to maintain your focus over the course of the entire tournament. You also have to keep at it: in any given tournament, you may play very well and be eliminated due to misfortune—but over time, in tournament poker as in cash game poker, the skilful players succeed.
To do this well, you have to treat poker like any other sport. Tournament poker is about mind, body and soul. All three need to work in rhythm and sync in order to make those key high pressure decisions over and over again. You may hear of players paying attention to mindfulness, meditation, exercise, and nutrition. These are all very important when you are playing days of poker with little rest.

7 tips on poker tournament strategy

For anyone who thinks they might want to play in a tournament (rather than just games with friends or at the casino):

Don’t get over excited in the first levels. The blinds are relatively very small. If you pick up decent hands or you think you can win a big pot with low suited connecters, then go for it. But be careful not to get too excited. The upside isn’t so big that it is worth taking a lot of risk early.
Tournaments are long. You are going to get some bad beats. See the bigger picture. It will put the bad beats into context. Your tournament strategy can survive a couple of bad moments if you don’t lose your head.
Try and spot weak players to play against. By the same token, stay clear of the really good players until you can figure out their play.
Always try to mix things up. Be very aware of your table image. For example, you’ve been playing for an hour and you have good hands. So naturally, you have been raising pre-flop a lot without having to show your cards. However, to mix things up try raising on some weaker hands too, and keep your opponents guessing. I myself did just that half way through my poker career. And once your opponents spot that you have loosened up, play tight again to get them to make mistakes.
Table assignment is something you need to be aware of. Which table you are on, and which players you are playing with, is out of your hands. Sometimes you can be with some very good players, sometimes less so.
Remember your position at the table. That will change over the course of the tournament when you change tables as you progress through the levels.
And be aware that because you will be playing against so many different players over the course of a few days, often players you have never been up against before, you need to be reading their tells, their bluffs and their traps.

5 tips for surviving the length of a poker tournament

On the human level:

Give yourself time before the tournament starts to sit quietly, collect your thoughts, and gather your energy.
Try and create some sort of playing ritual, so whenever you win or lose you are steady and focused. This could be inhaling to three, exhaling to six and repeating three times.
Come prepared. Bring healthy food and if needs be energy drinks, (but be wary of too much caffeine, it can make you impulsive and too aggressive at the table).
Try and find food groups that stimulate your brain. And remember to stay hydrated. It sounds obvious but the brain needs to be fed and water is vital in that process.
Make sure you know where the restroom is because if you are playing long levels with few breaks there will be times when you might need to rush out.

These are just a few of the things I have come across playing tournament poker. If you can include them in your game both in terms of health and playing style then you will be on your way to becoming a winning player.
Poker is not just flopping hands and winning chips, it is everything that goes on behind the scenes. A healthy lifestyle gives you an edge at the table and in life.

I wrote a few weeks ago about the differences between playing face to face and online. And how one of the big factors now in online poker is how computers are used. Software helps the players who have it work out what moves their opponents are likely to do next. It’s a big advantage. But I can’t believe the next development in the poker news world. Now a computer has beaten players without the help of a human being!!

First of all, in early January, a computer program developed by researchers in Canada and the Czech Republic beat several players. But that was just the starter to the main course.

Later in the month, there was a much bigger experiment. One that everyone in the poker world was waiting for. A computer program called Libratus played 120,000 hands over 20 days against four of the best poker players around. This would be a real test. And again, the same thing happened. The human poker players were beaten.

According to the Guardian newspaper, Dong Kim, Jason Les, Jimmy Chou and Daniel McAulay spent “11 hours each day stationed at computer screens in the Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh battling a piece of software at no-limit Texas Holdem, a two-player unlimited form of poker. Libratus outmaneuvered them all, winning more than US$1.7m in chips. (Thankfully for the poker pros, they weren’t playing with real money)”

It is much more difficult for a computer to win at poker than it is at other games like chess. With chess, the computer and its human opponents have all the available information relating to the game. Everyone can see the whole board. There are no secrets. This is why computers were able to get good at chess several decades ago. I remember the games between the IBM computer Deep Blue and Gary Kasparov in the nineties. Kasparov won the first game. But Deep Blue won the second. It was the first time a computer had beaten a reigning world chess champion under tournament conditions.

However, with poker, it is much harder for the computer. There are lots of secrets. Players don’t get to see each other’s hands. So the computer doesn’t either. The computer has to cope with the fact that player A and player B will play the same cards differently. For this reason, it has taken much longer for them to learn how to play well at poker.

There are tens of thousands of different ways that a poker hand can develop – but a computer can deal with that complexity of information. However, if the computer wants to win, it has to do more. It has to learn the human characteristics of intuition. It even has to learn how to bluff. It has to learn how to second guess.

The amazing thing that this tournament in Pittsburgh shows is that computer programs CAN learn how to do that. They can learn how to play like humans – adding to their already huge advantages of data processing and speed of “thought”. As the Technology Review put it when talking about the Prague experiment, “perhaps most interestingly, the academics behind the work say their program overcame its human opponents by using an approximation approach that they compare to “gut feeling.”

Noam Brown, the Carnegie Mellon university student who built Libratus along with his professor of computer science Tuomas Sandholm, said “we didn’t tell Libratus how to play poker. We gave it the rules of poker and said ‘learn on your own’. The bot started playing randomly but over the course of playing trillions of hands was able to refine its approach and arrive at a winning strategy.”

One of the beaten poker players Jason Les said “Libratus turned out to be way better than we imagined. It’s slightly demoralizing. If you play a human and lose, you can stop, take a break. Here we have to show up to take a beating every day for 11 hours a day. It’s a real different emotional experience when you’re not used to losing that often”

I’m very interested in Mathematics. In probability. It’s one of the reasons I like poker so much. Computers have always been good at calculating that sort of thing. But I never thought they could learn how to do the other things in poker that you get face to face. Reading tells. Bluffing. Getting into your opponent’s head. Making them scared of your cards. Or more likely to make mistakes. Intuition. All that other stuff. It seems they can.

One advantage a computer also has is that it never gets tired. As long as it is plugged in. I’ll have to remember that if I ever play one!

I was asked the other day at a Texas Holdem poker tournament how I was able to become the poker player that I am now even though I started playing Texas Holdem at a pretty late age – only in my 40’s. It got me thinking. There are lots of things. Here’s a list of them in no specific order…

I was lucky in that I started play Texas Holdem with a bankroll. Most players start out with just a few dollars’ stake. If you are a beginner, you will pretty much always lose more than you win at the start. You have to get quite a lot of miles under your belt, played thousands of poker hands, made a few mistakes, and learned from them, before you can turn the tide. And if you don’t have much money and lose it can take a long time to get the confidence and game experience until you start winning as a habit. So, I accept that I was very lucky to have had a successful career as a businessman beforehand that gave me a bit of money. So that when I lost, as all beginners at Texas Holdem do, it wasn’t too much of a problem and I didn’t get too downhearted.
I am very calm under pressure, even when there is big money on the poker table. You can’t make good decisions if you aren’t calm. In business l learned how to deal with pressure. That’s useful for me at the poker table, particularly with some of the big hands I find myself in nowadays.
I am fit. Not as fit as I was though. The younger Phua Wei Seng Paul was very fit – swimming both before and after games! Physical and mental fitness are very important. Mental fitness has come naturally to me after so many years in business, particularly in the junket business. If a junket customer isn’t happy, you have to learn how to deal with it. You have to have an agile and patient mind.
Since I started when I was older, I had the benefit of life experience. As you grow older, you learn to deal with situations that are quite similar to those that have come before. You learn to recognise them. You get more patient when you are older too. That’s very useful in poker, particularly in cutting your losses when you are having a succession of bad beats.
I’m a humble person. I never tell myself “Phua Wei Seng Paul, you are a great player!” – pretending I’m better than I am. I am honest about my abilities. There are better players than me. There are worse players than me. I’m still learning the game. Even today, in my mid-50s, I still have so much to learn. If you have the time and the dedication you can use your humility and willingness to learn and move forward.
Learn from Texas Holdem poker players who are better, and from yourself. During big tournaments, after I have finished playing for the night I will go back to my room and have a beer before I go to sleep and think. I will write down the games where I don’t think I played at my best level, or I didn’t make the best decisions. So, the next day I will go and see some poker pros who are there playing with me and ask them, “what would you have done in this situation?” You improve a lot that way. It is human nature to think you did the best you could. It’s hard to admit weakness to yourself when you are around the card table or at the casino. But a neutral observer can evaluate you better. Not many players think this way, but I think more should.
If you want to play in big games, for big money, you have to make an effort. You have to learn, think differently, recognise that this is a serious business. That’s what I did. When I realised the sort of money that was needed to buy into these games, perhaps $200,000, I said to myself, “wow, this is no joke!” So I read books. I watched a lot of videos from the big tournaments, cash games. I spent hours and hours on YouTube.
I used to have a very good memory when I started. I trained it. Now I am older, it’s not so good. I have to learn to win using different methods. There are lots of ways to skin a cat luckily!

#phuaweisengpaul, #paulphua, #pokertips

One of the world’s best poker players, Tom Dwan, met up with Paul recently to play a few hands and talk about the game.

It’s part of our “In Conversation” series where Paul chats to some of the best Texas Holdem players in the world. In this video, Tom and Paul discuss the art of “trapping” in poker.

One of the things you hear discussed most in the poker world is bluffing. When to do it, how often, with how many chips, which player does it the most? All sorts of questions commonly asked on this site by players starting out in poker. But what about its opposite counterpart, trapping? You never really hear it discussed much at all.
With bluffing, you are trying to convince your opponent that you have good cards when in fact you don’t. The means — making big or emphatic bets to give the impression you are confident in your hand. The end game – to scare them away from the hand so you can take the pot for yourself. Trapping an opponent in Texas Holdem poker is the opposite. Here, the aim is to persuade your opponent that they aren’t in fact very good, that you are only barely staying on in the hand more out of hope than expectation. The reality, though, is you have a hand that is very strong. So the aim is to get as many opponents to stay in the poker hand so you can win money from a player who has a habit of betting aggressively. There are lots of ways to do it. Perhaps you might come across as uncertain, or you play slowly and cautiously, perhaps you only play with small bets at the beginning of the hand. Paul Phua doesn’t always recommend this though because keeping lots of players in the hand can sometimes blow up in your face after the flop when your opponents’ bad hands can turn into good ones.

Here Tom Dwan and Paul Phua talk about whether Trapping is a good idea for amateurs or not.

The American poker mega star Tom Dwan met up with Paul Phua in a casino in the Philippines recently to play at a tournament in aid of a cancer charity in the country.

They managed to find some time though to have a chat for the Paul Phua poker website. Watch their conversation on “trapping” here, where Tom Dwan poses the question about whether beginners trap enough, or too much. But in the second video in our “In Conversation” series, Paul and Tom talk about the role of players’ nationalities in Texas Holdem poker. Can you make generalisations about an opponent’s style of poker play based on the country they come from, or on other factors like age and profession? Does a player from Germany for example play in one way, and a player from China navigate their way around the poker table in another? Do old players bluff more or less than young ones? Does a banker have a specific tell? Although generalisations are never the whole truth, even so, Paul and Tom thought, yes, they are often accurate! Watch the video – it’s a lot of fun.

In a game of Texas Holdem, how often will you be dealt a Royal Flush (10, Jack, Queen, King and Ace all in the same suit)

We’ve all done it. We’re in the casino, sitting at the poker table, and we have a reasonable hand but it’s just one card short of a great hand. And you keep putting in chips so you can stay in the hand, hoping that card WILL come along and you will have the winning hand, and that you will walk away from the casino with the pot. The trouble is, the odds of getting that perfect poker hand is often a lot lower than you might think.
Paul Phua says that to start with, you will have to play 30,940 poker hands before you get dealt a Royal Flush. But, there are few people who will ever play 30,490 poker hands in their life, so this mythical poker hand which beats all others will stay just that – a myth – for the vast majority of poker players. Even getting a start at that hand – being dealt Ace King suited – only happens one time in 331 hands of poker.
OK, so you’ve rolled back your ambitions for poker night. All that would make you happy is just to be dealt a pair of Aces. Not going to be that unusual huh? Hmm. You’ll have to wait for on average 221 hands to be dealt that little bundle of joy. In fact, in a casino you’re actually much more likely to get a start on a straight in your hole cards. You’ll only have to wait between five and six hands on average to be dealt connectors – two cards in any suit of consecutive rank.
Here’s a statistic to make your mind hurt. In a casino game of Texas Holdem with six players, there are more than a quadrillion different hand combinations dealt at the start of the poker game. That’s 15 zeros. It shows you how skilled those poker stars are that have a sixth sense of what cards their opponents are holding. And it’s always worth remembering that in Texas Holdem, the more players are at the poker table, the less likely you are to win, and the better the set of cards you have need to be in order for you to walk away from the casino with the pot. Unless you bluff successfully of course!

When you are in the casino at the beginning of a poker game, and you have lots of chips, the blinds are something you hardly notice. Towards the end of a poker night, especially if things aren’t going so well and your chip pile is lower than you’d like it to be, or the blind bets are increasing in size, then the blind can really eat into your stack.

Some poker games have antes – forced bets. But Texas Holdem doesn’t, meaning you can fold your cards without betting. Texas Holdem poker does have something called blinds though. They are another type of forced bet, but this time before you have been dealt your cards. Like antes, they exist so that there is a cost to playing, so the poker games don’t go on and on with players just waiting to be dealt a great hand. Paul Phua thinks that the blind keeps the momentum up, and ensures the game of poker finishes within a reasonable time frame – especially since the blinds often increase in value during a game of Texas Holdem to speed things up even further.

There are mainly two blinds in Texas Holdem – the big and small blind, but there can sometimes be three players who have to make them.

The name comes from the fact that players are being asked to bet without seeing their hands. They are betting blind, with no knowledge of the hand’s worth. So in the casino, whether you hold a 2 and a 3 unsuited, or a pair of aces – before you see your hand it’s all the same.
Paul Phua says the blind also marks potential poker strategy. Depending on your position around the poker table in a casino, or a social poker night where the dealer changes as the “button” moves from player to player, you will have to give certain blinds. Being in the small blind spot on a poker table is a disadvantage because you will be the first to act in every round after the flop. But Paul Phua’s poker tip is to remember never feel committed to a pot simply because you have paid your blind, especially in Texas Holdem, and not be afraid to enter a pot if you have a strong enough hand.