No-limit hold 'em for casual observers

If you've played any poker, strolled through a bookstore or even just turned on a television any time in the past six years, you may have a pretty good idea about the basics of no-limit hold 'em. I know first-hand that about half the members of Team Mark could teach a course.

But it's also possible that this crazy Internet-fed fad has slipped by you somehow, so I thought I'd give the more casual of my backers a quick beginner's guide. This way when I make the featured TV table on ESPN's taped coverage later this summer, you'll know what the annoying announcers are talking about.

Fundamentally, hold 'em is a simple variation of seven-card stud, in which each player gets two down, or hole, cards, and then shares five common, face-up cards. If there's a showdown, the best five-card combination of the hidden and exposed cards takes the pot. Betting comes in four stages: one round after the hole cards are dealt; another after the first three up cards, known as the flop, are exposed; another after the fourth up card, or the turn; and a final round after the last up card, the river.

Unlike your friendly home game, where every player may toss a one-chip ante into the center before the deal, hold 'em uses a two-blind structure to ensure action and keep things moving. The first two players to the dealer's left put up a blind bet before getting their cards -- the small blind is half the size of the big blind, which will be the minimum bet thereafter -- and the subsequent players can call the big blind, raise or fold their hands. When action gets back to the player in the big blind, he has the option of raising or, if the pot hasn't already been raised, checking and seeing the flop for the price of his blind bet.

In a strucutred, or limit, hold 'em game like those Michelle and I usually play, the action is relatively predictable and so is the amount that can be won or lost in any one hand. In our regular $4-8 game, for example, I know that if I bet $4 on the flop nobody else can raise it more than an additional $4, and there's a limit of three raises on each betting round so the most this flop will cost me is $16. In no-limit, the version of the game played in the Main Event, there are no restrictions on the number of raises or the size of the bets. Hence the name.

Aside from the wonderful heart-wrenching bluffing opportunities in no-limit, the absence of structured betting rounds gives players one extremely powerful tool: the ability to control pot odds.

A lot of poker decisions come down to basic math. If I have the ace and 10 of hearts in the hole and need one card to make my flush on the turn I know that I'm facing odds of about 4 to 1 against hitting my hand. Therefore if the pot contains more than four times the amount of my opponent's bet it makes sense for me to call; less than four times the bet I'm facing and I should fold. The pot odds, or the amount of money the pot is offering against the bet, have to be at least equal to the odds against making my hand. In a limit game these calculations are pretty straightforward. Say there's already $40 in the pot and the most my opponent can bet is $8, there's no way he can get me off my hearts if I think I'm drawing to the best hand. Assuming he bets, I'll be looking at calling $8 to win $48 -- that's pot odds of 6:1, and I'm only a 4:1 underdog to hit my hand.

Now let's imagine we're playing no-limit with the same hand. This time there's, say, $400 in the pot, but instead of being forced to bet a set, inviting amount, my opponent throws out $800. Suddenly the pot odds don't look so good. I'm now being offered a $1,200 pot for the price of an $800 bet, or odds of only 1.5 to 1. That's a recipe for losing money, and I have to fold.

So the trick in no-limit is sizing your bets to manipulate the pot odds for your opponent. If you want him in, offer him the right price. If you want him out, price him out. Nothing to it.

The extra wrinkle in a poker tournament is that each player begins with the same amount in chips, the blinds and minimum bets increase regularly and once you run out of chips you can't rebuy. That's why the biggest, most intimidating bet -- TV's famous “I'm all in!” -- is so powerful. If you put all your chips out there and lose, your tournament is over.

Even without an all-in, the rising blinds ensure that players are eliminated pretty regularly. Eventually one player ends up with all the chips. He or she is the champion.

In the World Series Main Event, if you're curious, players start with $20,000 in chips, and blinds begin at $50 and $100, increasing every two hours. That's a generous, “slow” structure, leaving a lot of time before the blinds start putting pressure on players' chip stacks and suggesting that, with so much time, the best poker players will win.

We'll see about that soon enough.