Do you mix up your play?

This is a very important strategy to any form of poker. If you play a certain way, soon your opponents will know your style. You become predictable. Being predictable allows your opponents to out play you as they will know what you will do in all circumstances.

Mixing up your play keeps your opponents guessing and forces them to call with marginal hands (getting you extra profits). It also keeps them from raising you at times because they won’t be able to put you on a hand.

Normally, many folks raise with AK or AA. To throw your opponents off, just limp in with premium hands, especially if in a tight game. Also in tight games, try raising with hands like 76 or 45. If the flop comes out J82, come out swinging and you’ll probably win the pot right there. If not, you may catch runner runner and then when you show your hand, you’ll be guaranteed to get lots of callers the next time you come out rasing with AK or AA.

This is a new term that was recently passed around at our local poker game. It is a name given to a hand that we thought should rank higher than a Royal Flush. Definately higher than Four Of A Kind.

The hand occurs in Texas Hold Em when there is three of a kind on the board and you hold the fourth one in your hand. In addition to you haveing the four of a kind, the kicker in your hand must also match one of the cards on the board.

For example, you have 10-2 and the board has 2-2-2-J-10. You would have a Quad House. Unfortunately you need to play six cards so you’ll never find this hand ranking in your local public card room, but for a home game, you may want to add it to your rankings as a different variation of poker.

Well I just returned from a cruise where the on-board casino has now done away with dealers and added electronic poker tables. These are tables where you sit and play Texas Hold ‘Em against other live players but use electronic chips and cards.

I’ve played on these at other casinos and I like them. No more dealer mistakes that cost you the pot, no more tipping dealers so you save money.

However, the brand of machine we were on was PokerPro and it was a piece of junk. Missing a lot of features it’s competitors have. But we’ll skip all that. What I did want to mention was a couple things I observed while playing.

For one, the game they had the table configured for was $3-$6 Limit Hold Em. The casino took a minimum rake of $3 and a maximum rake of $6 if the pot reached $60. If you ever played $3-$6 you’ll know the pot reaches that much most of the time, so we were paying about $5 to $6 per hand. Those cruise ships love to rip you off in the casino.

Another thing I noticed was that without a dealer, players were regularly reading the board for each other, telling each other who the raiser was. I guess for a small game like this if everyone wants to be friends that’s one thing. However,  at a professional level,  I don’t ever see these things working as there would be too much cheating going on and no dealer to stop it.

Of course even now with a dealer, I don’t see but maybe 5% of dealers even controlling the game. In fact many dealers, even help the players play their hand by reading the board for them or telling them who raised after the action is over. Both are violations of every casino I know of.

Where is the future of these tables going? Personally, I would like to see more of them with better features. They could take a lesson from online casinos and offer many of the same features. Since there are no dealers to run the table there also needs to be a floorman available to enforcen disputes regarding casino rules.