Want to learn Texas Holdem poker? You're in good hands

If you've made it a priority to learn Texas Holdem, welcome to Sunday School. Our comprehensive course takes players from the first basics all the way through to expert tactical advice.

Watch and learn Texas Holdem's structure

For the purposes of this demonstration hand, we're playing as BooBoo at $1-2 no limit. If you recall from earlier installments, this means any player can bet any amount, as long as he matches the minimum of $1.

Spock posts the small blind of $1 and Loser posts the big blind of $2. Action is now on Chippy and proceeds clockwise around the table. As BooBoo is on the button, we act last (apart from the blinds preflop).

This is a big positional advantage, because we get to see what the other players will do before WE act. Inversely, Spock is in the worst position, being 'under the gun' (first to act on each round). He will have to make decisions BEFORE everybody else has had their turn. This gives us much more information than he has on every round.

When you learn Texas Holdem strategy more thoroughly, you'll realise that position determines whether a borderline hand is worth playing at all. Sometimes a hand you can play on the button is unplayable under the gun!

As you continue to learn Texas Holdem, this will make more sense than it does now. I understand you might feel a bit overwhelmed here, so let's move on.

Chippy and Dawg both fold. Mutton raises to $8. Pauly and Loz fold, AAbod calls and now it's our turn. AK is quite a strong hand, but there's been a big show of strength, so we decide to just call. The blinds, last to act on the preflop round, both fold.

This concludes the preflop betting. Look at the table now: there's three players left contesting the pot. Each of us has put $8 in the middle, plus the $1 from the small blind and $2 from the big blind for a total of $27 (the house will usually rake a percentage of this now, but we'll pretend there's no rake here for simplicity's sake).

Here comes the flop!

As you learn Texas Holdem, you'll realise that after your most important decision: Do I play this hand at all? which happens preflop, the flop is the most important part of every hand. The 'texture' (nature) of the flop, along with the actions of our remaining opponents, will determine whether or not we want to continue, or bail out.

A flop containing three of a suit, or a pair, is much more dangerous than an unconnected flop. This is a hard lesson to learn.

Texas Holdem situations don't come much more classical than this one. We have to like this flop: A3Q. A few considerations are worth bearing in mind though. First, there was a raiser and a call before we acted. Typical raising hands to be scared of here are AQ, QQ or a big suited hand in Diamonds (there are two diamonds on the flop), so maybe KdQd.

We should be cautiously optimistic. We have top pair, top kicker. It's a strong holding. If another Diamond, or another Queen, come on the turn or river, we should be more concerned. As you will learn, Texas Holdem can deliver nasty surprises...

Here's the action. Our preflop raiser, Mutton, now bets $10. This is almost an automatic bet, known as a continuation bet. Nothing looks weaker than a preflop raise followed by a check, so many players will follow up with a hopeful bet to continue representing the strength of their hand. They learn Texas Holdem is a game of image, and the best way to represent a strong image is to be aggressive.

AAbod folds. This is great news. We ideally want to be heads-up with this kind of hand. If he'd called, we would almost certainly have had to raise to drive out one of the players.

Now we have a choice. We can put in a good raise, and hope to scare off Mutton, or just call and see what happens. Let's be bold! We raise to $25. Mutton just calls.

Now there is $78 in the pot: the original $28, our $25 and Mutton's $25.

Now for the turn

It's a great card for us: Ks. Now we have the top two pairs. The only hands Mutton can beat us with are JT for a straight, or three of a kind (holding a pair of threes, Aces, Kings or Queens).

He has only $30 left. He checks, we bet $30 and he calls.

The pot is a monster: the original $78, plus $30 from him and $30 from us for a total of $138.

Cry me a river!

Now there is nothing more to do. All our money is in the middle. All we can do is pray to the poker gods for a nice last card.

Oops! It's another high card, the Th. Nasty! Now any hand containing a Jack will beat us with a top straight. It could have been worse: a Diamond would have made a potential flush too.

There is nothing more to do than declare the hands. Normally there would be one last round of betting (and we wouldn't like it very much under these circumstances!), but there's no more money to bet with.

Mutton shows his hand, the unlucky AhQh. He flopped two pairs, Aces and Queens, but we got lucky and hit a bigger two pairs on the turn. The dealer pushes that lovely big pot in front of us! Yes! We win.

Post-mortem of this hand

An important thing to learn: Texas Holdem post-hand thinking can improve your play. Let's analyse the way this hand panned out. We don't know what AAbod had, so we'll surmise that he called with a medium pair (perhaps 77) and folded when he didn't like the flop.

Mutton made a decent preflop raise with his high card suited hand. He got a perfect flop. Perhaps his one mistake was trying to trap us with his two pairs. When we raised to $25, instead of reraising (warning us that we were losing), he elected to flat call and hope to win a bigger pot.

The danger of this tactic is shown by the turn, which gave us the lead and made his hand almost dead. He needed another Queen on the river to outdraw us, but failed. He must have smelled a rat when we moved all-in, and the river would have made him as sick as it made us.

Overall, he was very unlucky to lose the hand. Because so much money was committed by the flop, there was no chance he could afford to fold his two pairs. This is one of the disadvantages of no limit Texas Holdem.

And when the analysis is done, we DID have a better hand than he did before the flop. Justice was done!

If you are keen to learn Texas Holdem and want to read more, we'll be adding a fixed limit version of the same hand tomorrow. It is quite interesting how differently the situation plays out.

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