14 Essential Tips for Your First Time Playing Poker at the Casino 1) Post to Get Dealt In. Most casinos require you to post an amount equal to the big blind before you can get dealt in. 2) Always Call Out Your Action. This will make the game infinitely easier for you and everyone else at the table.
Live Poker Tip #5: How to Play Poker in a Casino Poker Room Etiquette Just in case it wasn’t clear enough, tip fairly. Do you really want to be the guy who wouldn’t pay the service provider. Learn to stack chips. Stack them in a way that’s practical and so other players can figure out your chip.
Once you know the rules of poker, and of the particular version you are playing, you are ready to get started. The dealer is often responsible for setting the tone of the game, but for it to be really enjoyable, there are a few other things you should know. Observing poker etiquette.
Casino Poker Etiquette When Showing Your Hand and Who Shows Their Cards First? Always show this poker hand By Steve Beauregard “Show one, show all,” is the age-old poker saying, applied to those.
Robert Woolley
Ed. note: For those who might have missed it before, we're reprising Robert Woolley's series of articles for poker players who are new to live poker. The series is great for newcomers, and likely useful as well to those with experience playing in casinos and poker rooms.
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'The guy who invented gambling was bright, but the guy who invented the chip was a genius.'
That pithy sentence is usually attributed to Julius 'Big Jules' Weintraub, a big gambler who essentially invented the 'Vegas junket' for East Coast residents, though I have not been able to identify a reliable primary source for this quotation. Whoever said it was right — you can play poker with cash, but chips make the game far easier to manage.
Because chips are such a ubiquitous feature of poker, it's easy to accept their presence without much thought. But I think there's a lot that's worth knowing about poker chips before you sit down at a table full of them.
Chips and Money (A Complicated Relationship)
The first thing to understand is that chips are real money, just in a different form. This truth is simultaneously obvious and elusive. Weintraub's observation gets at how easy it is to forget it and to start treating chips as mere abstractions.
In The Biggest Game in Town — one of the most articulate and influential books ever written about poker — Al Alvarez mused, 'The chip is like a conjurer's sleight of hand that turns an egg into a billiard ball, a necessity of life into a plaything, reality into illusion. Players who freeze up at the sight of a fifty-dollar bill, thinking it could buy them a week's food at the supermarket, will toss two green [$25] chips into the pot without even hesitating if the odds are right.'
Successful poker players rely on their weaker opponents losing touch with the equivalence of poker-world chips and real-world money. As for their own relationship with that truth, however, strong players both remember and disregard it.
That is, you must keep in mind that playing badly and as a result losing $100 in chips is the same as setting a $100 bill on fire. But at the same time, you can't let the fear of losing your hard-earned money prevent you from investing your chips in the way that will be the most profitable.
But enough abstraction. Let's deal with the tangible aspects of poker chips, as they are used in casinos. All of the following points apply equally to both tournaments and cash games, with two exceptions, which I will note when we get to them.
Color Code
The dominant color of most poker chips is related to their denominations in a nearly universal way: $5 chips are red, $25 green, and $100 black. (If you're playing with chips above this, you're not likely to be new enough to poker to be reading this article!)
The exception is the $1 chip, which casinos order in a wide variety of color schemes, with either white or blue being the most common. Meanwhile tournament chips also do not usually follow this or any other consistent color pattern.
Stacking Chips
It is both courteous and strategically advantageous to keep your chips in neat stacks of 5, 10, or 20 chips each. This makes it easy for both you and other players to count or at least closely estimate how much you have on the table — a vital consideration in no-limit and pot-limit games.
You need to know at all times which opponents can 'stack' you (i.e., take all of your chips if you lose a big confrontation), or, conversely, how much you could potentially win from them. Players whose chips are in an unorganized heap, or in uneven stacks, or in which denominations are mixed together haphazardly, make this unnecessarily difficult.
Hiding Chips
For similar reasons, it is both against the rules and deeply unethical to hide one's largest-denomination chips from the view of other players.
If you play poker long enough, sooner or later you will encounter a dishonest player who carefully hides several black chips under or behind stacks of red chips. His goal is to get you to underestimate how much money he has in play. If, for example, you have $500 but see only $200 in front of the guy in seat four, you might be more inclined to call his all-in bet than you would be if you could see the six $100 chips he has stashed behind his stacks of red.
If you see somebody trying to hide his big chips this way, you not only may, but should point it out to the dealer. If you'd prefer not to risk being seen as a 'snitch,' you can step away from the table and tell a floor person about the problem.
Poker rooms have little tolerance for such 'angle shooting', because it upsets less-experienced players when they get deceived this way, and the casino does not want to lose them as customers.
Removing Chips
Once you put chips into play at the table, you cannot remove any of them until you remove all of them to cash out. That is, you can't pocket some of your winnings to ensure that you won't lose them, no matter how tempting it seems to do so. (I'll explain this in more detail in a future article when I address the whole subject of 'table stakes.')
Similarly, you cannot just give some of your chips to another player at the table, such as your spouse or best friend. If he or she needs more chips, they must be purchased from the casino. (You can give cash out of your pocket to another player, however.) Symbol for dark matter.
When Cash Plays
Most casinos allow at least some forms of cash to be used in poker games. The most common rule is that $100 bills, but no other currency, can be in play. However, a few casinos allow other denominations of cash to be used in poker games, while a few don't allow any cash on the table at all.
The only way to know the house rule on this point is to ask. When cash is in play, these bills are subject to the same rules about being kept easily visible to other players and not being removed from the table until you are leaving.
I think it will be obvious to you that cash never substitutes for or supplements chips in poker tournaments. In fact, poker tournament chips are usually explicitly marked 'NO CASH VALUE' so that nobody mistakes them for ones exchangeable for cash.
Personally, I prefer using just chips, so if I win a pot that has bills in it, I will ask the dealer or chip runner to trade me chips for them.
My reason for this idiosyncrasy — and I admit that that's all it is — is simply that when I look at chip stacks, either my own or other players', my brain tends not to register the bills the same way it does the chips. As a result, I've occasionally made large errors in estimating what amounts are in play. Apparently, other people don't have this problem. Do as seems best to you.
A possibly profitable tip: Many players, when in possession of a mixture of both chips and bills, will be much more reluctant to put the cash into the pot than the chips. This is precisely because of the psychological effect mentioned at the beginning of the article, in which chips lose their equivalence to 'real' money. For that reason, a player who is betting with his cash instead of or in addition to his chips is less likely to be bluffing than one who is betting with chips only, all else being equal.
Of course, like everything about poker 'tells,' this is not a universal phenomenon. But it's sufficiently common to make it worth paying attention to see if it's true about the specific players at your table, then using that knowledge to your advantage.
There a lot more to say — and to learn — about chips. In the next article, I'll explain the rules about making bets and raises with chips.
Robert Woolley lives in Asheville, NC. He spent several years in Las Vegas and chronicled his life in poker on the 'Poker Grump' blog.
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cash game strategytournament strategylive casino pokerbeginner strategyrulesetiquette
Robert Woolley
Ed. note: For those who might have missed it before, we're reprising Robert Woolley's series of articles for poker players who are new to live poker. The series is great for newcomers, and likely useful as well to those with experience playing in casinos and poker rooms.
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Since in this 'Casino Poker for Beginners' series of articles I have lately been talking about types of equipment in use at casino poker tables (chips, buttons, and cards), it seems logical to wrap up that whole line of thought with some tips about the table and chairs.
It's not that you don't already know how to sit in a chair, or what a table is for, but there are some points of etiquette and unwritten rules that might be worth knowing about.
Divide, But No Need to Conquer
Space around a poker table is always tight, and, unfortunately, juvenile disputes over an inch or two of elbow room can spoil an otherwise pleasant game. Here's how to figure out what territory is rightfully yours.
Some poker rooms run their games with nine players, others with ten. You have to know this before you can deduce where all the players belong. This is usually easy — just count the number of chairs.
For a nine-handed game, the player in Seat 5 should be centered directly in front of the dealer. Seats 1 and 9 are on the dealer's left and right, respectively. That leaves three seats to divvy up the remaining room between those points of reference.
In ten-handed games, the space between Seat 5 and Seat 6 should be directly in front of the dealer. Again you can kind of eyeball how to divide equitably the remaining space among the three seats that fall between those and Seats 1 and 10.
Sometimes things are made even easier by the presence of built-in cupholders. If the number of cupholders equals the number of players, the whole process becomes wonderfully simple. Each player just centers his or her body on the assigned cupholder.
Unfortunately — and perplexingly — many casinos do not have a one-to-one correspondence between built-in cupholders and seats, which confuses everybody. You may encounter ten seats with nine cupholders, or nine seats with ten cupholders. In those cases, ignore the cupholders and in your mind's eye divide the space up as you would if there were none.
By the way, if you like having maximum personal space, the two seats on either side of the dealer are the places to be. They're always my preference for that very reason, unless strategic advantage dictates that the potential for winning more money from another spot needs to trump comfort.
Space Invaders
As players enter and leave the game, chairs get jostled and displaced. Sooner or later, the distribution of space will end up lopsided, with one half of the table crowded like sardines, and the other half enjoying elbow room like first-class airline passengers. The dealer should notice and fix this, but if he doesn't, it's perfectly fine to ask him to do so.
When the dealer is between hands, just get his attention and say, 'When you get a chance, could you please square up the table?' That's the key phrase: 'square up the table.' It's universal, and it translates to 'Scoot the players around as needed to redivide the space more evenly.'
Poker Room Rules
Always let the dealer direct this process. If you try to take it on yourself ('You move to your left a little, you move closer to the dealer'), you sound dictatorial, and will likely encounter pushback from people who don't like being told what to do.
Casino Poker Room Rules
Feet and Inches
Casino Poker Etiquette
There is a closely related space issue at the poker table, and that is the space under the table. Your feet have to go somewhere, after all.
Sadly, you will encounter players who are as rude and childish about taking more than their fair share of leg room under the table as they are about elbow room above it. This is harder to combat than the seating arrangement, as the problem will not be apparent to anybody except the two players involved.
You really can't ask the poker room personnel to intervene here without sounding petty. You just have to deal with it, using some combination of charm, assertiveness, and opportunism — just as you would for an airline passenger trying to invade your tiny allocation of space.
The carpet under the table, incidentally, is frequently a disgusting mess. Many players use it as their personal trash can, too lazy to get up and walk a few steps to the real one. Casino staff can't get in to clean it until after a game breaks up, so the stuff just accumulates. It's gross.
Bad Poker Etiquette
Microgaming casino bonuses. Please don't be one who contributes to the problem. Similarly, when you leave a game, be considerate and take your cup, glass, or bottle with you. Don't force an employee or the next player to dispose of it for you.
Losing the Spilling Bee
Speaking of beverages, poker rooms without cupholders built into the table will have portable cupholders that are stabilized by jamming a lip under the rail of the table. Feel free to grab one from an empty seat or table to use for yourself, or move it out of your way if you don't need it.
Never, never, never have an open beverage container on the poker table without a cupholder. Yes, I know you think you could never be so clumsy as to knock it over. But bad things happen. Other people's hands move in sudden, unexpected ways, like when trying to catch a runaway chip, flag down a cocktail waitress, express outrage at a bad beat, or pass a phone to show a funny picture. The table tilts when somebody leans on it to stand up or sit down. As a result, drinks spill.
And when they do, it's a royal mess. Just look at the picture Andrew Teng tweeted from the WSOP a few summers back, along with the advice 'Don't drink wine at the table without a cupholder.'
Cards and chips get wet and have to be cleaned. Towels have to be fetched for the felt. Sometimes they have to shut down that table and move the whole game to another one. Everybody gets tremendously inconvenienced and justifiably annoyed. Don't ever even take a chance on being the one responsible.
Casino Poker Etiquette
Guest Hosts
From time to time, you'll see a player who has an onlooker, a friend or spouse there only to watch. Every poker room I've been in allows this. Still, it's best to first ask permission from the dealer. He can tell you where to find an extra chair, how to place it so that it's not taking up other players' space, and so on.
As the player, you are responsible for your guest's conduct. He or she must not comment on the action, talk to you in the middle of a hand, peek at other players' cards, do anything that might help or hurt another player's chance of winning, or be insulting or obnoxious. Your guest should be made to understand these prohibitions in advance, and you must be willing to take immediate and decisive action should any violation occur.
Conclusion
I guess when you boil it down, all of this stuff about the poker table and the space around it can be summed up like this: be as courteous and respectful of the other players as you want them to be to you.
That's not so much to ask, is it?
Robert Woolley lives in Asheville, NC. He spent several years in Las Vegas and chronicled his life in poker on the 'Poker Grump' blog.
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cash game strategytournament strategylive casino pokerbeginner strategyrulesetiquettecardslive poker