Poker questions, answered

Every player is dealt two cards of their own and five go face up in the middle, and whoever makes the best five-card hand out of those seven wins. Between the cards there are four rounds of betting, and each time you can check, bet, call or fold.

That is Texas Hold'em, the variant played everywhere and the one anyone starting today learns first. The long version, with a hand dealt and played out to the end, is on the rules page, card by card.

Carry on here: A hand played step by step Street

That the five cards in the middle belong to everyone, so your hand is never just your own two cards: it is the best five that come out of the seven. The second rule is that folding in time is not cowardice, it is what good players do most.

Carry on here: A hand played step by step Made hand

The rules take an afternoon and deciding well takes months, because the hard part is not knowing what beats what, it is knowing what to do when you cannot tell whether you are ahead. Nobody needs maths to start: you need hands played and mistakes that cost nothing.

What takes time is not memory, it is habit. Recognising a made hand on the table is the work of a morning; working out whether the other player has something better is the work of having seen the same situation a hundred times.

Learn the ranking of hands first, then play whole hands with no money on them, deciding for yourself on every street and finding out straight away whether you were right. Reading loose rules does little: what sticks is the hand you played and had explained afterwards.

Carry on here: The Pokeo course

Fifty-two, in four suits of thirteen cards each: spades, hearts, diamonds and clubs. The jokers come in the box but they are taken out before anyone deals, so the deck a poker game is played with holds 52 cards and not one more.

From low to high: two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, jack, queen, king and ace. The three that sit under the ace are the face cards. The ace outranks the king, and it can also play as the low card of a straight up to five.

The Spanish deck used across Spain and much of Latin America has no queen at all: it runs jack, knight and king. That missing figure is the one thing that trips up everyone arriving from a Spanish card game.

Carry on here: The full ranking of hands

They are not worth points: they are worth their place in the order of the cards. The jack sits just above the ten, the queen above the jack, the king above the queen and the ace above all of them. Poker never adds card values up.

Carry on here: The full ranking of hands

The ace, which beats every other card in the deck. When two players make the same hand the cards are compared one by one and that ace decides it; and when nobody makes anything at all, the highest card wins, which is almost always going to be an ace.

Carry on here: Kicker

Nothing: in poker the joker is taken out of the deck before dealing. The game runs on exactly 52 cards because every hand and every tiebreak depends on each card existing once and only once. Some home games use it, but then the hands stop being worth what they are worth.

You can, and plenty of households do, but it does not come out the same: the Spanish deck has forty cards and no queen, so straights and flushes turn up at a different rate. The hands and their order stay identical; what changes is how often you make them.

There is also a trap nobody warns about. In Spanish card games the ace carries the high points but plays as a small card; in poker the ace outranks the king outright, and that is the first habit a new player has to unlearn.

From worst to best: high card, pair, two pair, three of a kind, straight, flush, full house, four of a kind and straight flush. That order never changes and it is the only thing worth learning by heart, because every hand is settled by it.

Carry on here: The full ranking of hands Made hand

High card, which is having nothing: five cards with no pair, no straight and no flush. When two players get to the end like that, the higher top card wins. The worst possible five are seven, five, four, three and two of mixed suits.

Carry on here: The full ranking of hands

Whoever makes the best five-card hand once the cards go on the table, or whoever is left alone because everyone else folded first. Both count the same and the pot is just as much theirs: you never have to show anything if nobody pays to see it.

Carry on here: A hand played step by step Cards on the table

Two to each player, face down, and five face up in the middle for everyone: seven within reach, of which you keep the five that make your best hand. The five in the middle do not arrive at once, but in three goes: three, then one, then one.

Carry on here: A hand played step by step The middle

The usual start is a hundred times the big blind: if the big blind is two chips, everyone begins with two hundred. The number itself does not matter, what matters is that everyone starts level and that the blind is small enough to leave room for decisions.

Carry on here: Stack Blinds

They are counted from the button, which acts last and therefore holds the best seat: to its left sit the small blind and the big blind, who act first from the flop onwards. Everything in between is a middle seat, and later is better.

The button moves one chair every hand, so the good seat rotates and over a session everyone gets the same share of it. Position is not luck: it is a turn.

Carry on here: Position Button

With a 52-card deck, chips or anything else you can count out, and a button that moves round so everyone passes through every position. Whoever has the button deals, the two blinds go in, and the hand plays exactly as it would anywhere else.

The only thing to agree before starting is what a chip is worth and how many each person begins with. With no money involved that conversation takes ten seconds, and the game never breaks down over it.

Carry on here: Setting up a home game Button

Yes, and for learning it is the only thing that makes sense: chips exist to measure decisions, and they measure just as well when they are worth nothing. With nothing on the table you can fold a hundred times, try a bluff and be badly wrong for free.

It is also what separates an exercise from a wager. Here chips cannot be bought and cannot be turned into anything: they are how you tell whether a decision was good, the way a scoreboard works in a training match.

Carry on here: Setting up a home game Chip

Each player is dealt five cards of their own, there is a round of betting, the cards you do not want can be swapped, and then you bet again before showing them. It is the poker of old films, unlike Hold'em, but the ranking that decides it is identical.

Carry on here: The full ranking of hands