The game of poker, as played in a casino, has many rules. Some basics are staying in turn and keeping the type of cards within their hand to themselves.
Casino Hold'em® / Caribbean Hold'em™ / GRAND HOLD'EM® (Casino Hold'em® Poker™ / Caribbean Hold'em Poker™ / GRAND HOLD'EM® POKER™) is a casinogambling game. This banking game, introduced by Stephen Au-Yeung in 2000 (First Texas Hold'em Poker play against the casino and not other players) and now played in live casinos worldwide. It was licensed for use in the United Kingdom in 2007. In addition online casinos offer the game, which is based on the traditional multi-player Texas Hold'em Poker.
Casino Hold'em is a house game designed to be dealt by a croupier for casino patrons to play in the main casino. Players play the house and not other players in this variant. Subject to the dealer qualifying, it is a straight contest between the dealer's hand and the player's, player may also get paid an AnteWin Bonus on his Ante bet.Player can also place an AA Bonus side bet which is based on the poker value of his two personal cards and the first three flop cards.
History[edit]
Stephen Au-Yeung devised the game in the late 1990's as a tool to assist in training his partner of the time to play Texas Hold 'Em poker. After this the training tool was developed into a House game and launched in 2000.[1] It first appeared as a live casino game in Egypt, Russia and South Africa. It was shown in 2001 at the World Gaming Congress Expo, Las-Vegas, US and in 2002 at the International Casino Exhibition held at Earls Court Exhibition Centre, London, UK.
Today the game is marketed by the Gaming Supplies Company, TCS-JohnHuxley and over ten online-gaming software and is played in over one hundred live casinos and over one thousand online Casinos worldwide. It was licensed/Approved for use in the USA (Nevada/Las-Vegas) in 2006 and VERSION-2 in 2013, also Approved in the United Kingdom in 2007. In 2017 Golden Nugget's Live-Dealer Online-Casino (Atlantic-City/New-Jersey) launched the game, making it the first Live-Dealer Online-Poker, play in USA.
3 Card Poker Casino Rules
Rules[edit]
- The game is played with a standard 52 card deck.
- Each player makes an Ante bet and may make an optional AA bonus side bet.
- The player and dealer are both dealt two cards (face down).
- Three cards are then dealt to the board and will eventually contain five cards.
- After checking his/her cards, the player has to decide (a) to fold with no further play losing the Ante bet or (b) to make a Call bet of double the Ante bet.
- If one or more players makes a Call bet the dealer will deal two more cards to the board, for a total of five.
- Players and dealer make their best five card poker hand from their own two personal cards and five board cards.
- Each player’s hand are compared with the dealer’s.
- The dealer must have a pair of 4s or better to qualify.
- If the dealer does not qualify, the Ante bet pays according to the AnteWin pay table and the Call bet is a push (stand off).
- If the dealer qualifies, and the player's hand is better than the dealer's, the Ante bet pays according to the Ante-Win pay table and the Call bet pays 1 to 1.
- If the dealer qualifies, and the dealer's hand is equal to the player's, all bets are push (it doesn't win or lose).
- If the dealer qualifies, and the dealer's hand is better than the player's, the player loses all bets.
Strategy[edit]
There is no easy way to quantify optimal strategy for this game since the optimal decision for each hand is based on the combination of all 7 cards (two personal cards and five board cards) dealt. As such while computer programs can easily deal with the calculations required to make the correct play in any particular hand, it is difficult to make a set of general rules which can be memorized such as exists for Blackjack. The optimal strategy player will raise 82% of the time. So only in the worst 18% of hands should the player fold. These are broadly when the player has two singletons in the hole that are low compared to the flop, with little or no chance for a straight or flush.[2]
AnteWin pay table[edit]
In Casino Hold'em the player not only wins a standard 1 to 1 sum if they have the stronger hand, but for rare hands a higher sum. This pay table typically pays a royal flush 100 to 1, straight flush 20 to 1, four of a kind 10 to 1, full house 3 to 1, flush 2 to 1, and straight or less the standard 1 to 1.
House edge[edit]
The house edge of Casino Hold'em excluding the side bet (that is, the percentage of each bet the casino will on average win, assuming perfect play on the part of the player) varies depending on the specific rules in the casino but is the most common pay tables result in a house edge varying from just below 2% to around 2.5%. Using the ante pay table above, the house edge is 2.16%.
Side bets[edit]
A side bet known as the AA Bonus is based on the poker value of the player's two cards and the first three flop cards.
A pair of aces to a straight pays 7 to 1, flush 20 to 1, full house 30 to 1, four of a kind 40 to 1, straight flush 50 to 1 and royal flush 100 to 1. A variations to this pay table, A pair of aces to a straight pays 7 to 1, flush or higher 25 to 1.
References[edit]
- ^ThePOGG (26 February 2014). 'ThePOGG Interviews – Stephen Au-Yeung – Creator of Casino Hold 'Em'.
- ^wizardofodds.com
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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.
'The guy who invented gambling was bright, but the guy who invented the chip was a genius.'
Las Vegas Casino Poker Rules
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
Online Casino Poker
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.)
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.
Finding a trustworthy room to play online poker can be a monumental burden. That's all the more true if you're just looking for a place to play poker for free. We've listed five of the best play-money poker sites to enjoy and help hone your skills.
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