How to Play Poker

Transcript Hey, my name is Nick Brancato. People call me Nicky Numbers. I’m a professional poker player and I’ve played well over two million hands online. I’m also a World Series of Poker Circuit Champion and the lead instructor for the World Poker Tour Boot Camp. I’ve almost certainly trained more people to play poker …

Transcript Hey I’m Nicky Numbers, I’m a professional poker player, and maybe the most common question I get asked is: How much of poker is luck versus skill? Well, that answer to that really depends on the sample size. If you just play one hand of poker, it’s going to primarily be luck that drives …

Transcript Hey, I’m Nikki Numbers. I’m a professional poker player and one of the most common questions that I get asked us how much to tip the dealer. Now, there’s two situations in which tipping dealers regularly occurs. One is in cash games and the other is in tournaments. We’re going to address tournaments first …

Transcript Hey, I’m Nicky Numbers, I’m a professional poker player and I’m going to explain fold equity. Fold equity is the value gained by taking an aggressive action that sometimes results in your opponent laying their hand down and you winning the pot uncontested. Whenever you’re playing a hand you have a certain amount of …

Transcript Hey, I’m Nicky Numbers, I’m a professional poker player and I’m going to talk to you today about playing aggressively versus playing passively. The most important thing to know about passive play in No Limit Hold ‘Em is that it’s rarely correct. The overwhelming majority of the time when you’re playing a hand and …

Transcript Hey. I’m a professional poker player, Nicky Numbers. I’m going to talk to you today about how to be a tight player. The first thing to know about being a tight player is that it’s very easy. You just simply don’t play any hands. The tightest player in the world plays no hands or …

Transcript I’m a professional poker player, Nicky Numbers and I’m going to tell you how to be a loose poker player. It’s actually very easy to be a loose poker player. A loose poker player just means that someone who plays a lot of hands. The greater the frequency with which they play hands voluntarily, …

Transcript Hey. I’m Nicky Numbers, professional poker player, and now, I’m going to talk to you about stealing the blinds. First of all, in order to steal the blinds, there have to be blinds out there, which means there has to be a button. So if the button is across from me, and the blinds …

Transcript Hey, I’m professional poker player Nicky Numbers, and I’m going to explain slow playing. Slow playing is another way of saying “trapping”. When you’re trapping your opponent, you’re deliberately allowing them to stay in the hand to induce action from them. Trapping can range from checking and giving your opponent free cards to just …

Transcript Hey I’m Mickey Numbers. I’m a professional poker player and I’m going to explain semi-bluffing to you. A semi-bluff is an aggressive action that is taken without having a strong made hand but rather having a draw, like an open ended straight draw or a flush draw; a hand that has a lot of …

Transcript Hi. I’m professional poker player, Nicky Numbers, and I’m going to explain how to bluff. Before you can learn how to bluff you have to first know what a bluff is. A stone cold bluff is a bluff that’s made with no hand and no draw, meaning your hand has no equity into itself. …

Transcript Hi. I’m Nicky Numbers. I’m a professional poker player and I’m going to talk to you about some of the considerations that should go into your post-flop strategy. There are a number of factors that you could take into account when figuring out your post-flop strategy. Some of the most important are how many …

Transcript Hey, I’m Professional Poker Player Nicky Numbers, and today I’m going to explain a little bit about some of the considerations that should go into your pre-flop strategy. It’s all about identifying what factors should go into your decision making process. The first thing that you want to identify is the blinds. How big …

Transcript Hey, I’m professional poker player Nicky Numbers, and I’m going to talk to you about pot odds today. First of all, it’s really important to know what pot odds even are before we can talk about them. Pot odds are a term that is used in poker to reflect the ratio of the size …

Transcript Hey, I’m professional poker player Nicky Numbers, and today I’m going to talk to you about outs. An out is a term in poker that’s used to describe a card that you can hit that will improve your hand. Let’s dig right into it and look at some examples. Let’s say you’re on a …

Transcript Hey, I’m Nicky Numbers, Professional Poker Player, and today I’m going to show you some really cool chip tricks. We’re going to start with the chip roll. What you want to do, is get some small amount of chips, like five or six, is usually good. And you want to start them in one …

Transcript Hey, I’m Nicky Numbers, Professional Poker Player, and today, I’m going to show you how to bet your poker chips. So, a lot of people use various techniques for how they actually put their chips into a pot, whether it’s an actual bet, a raise, or a call. The first technique I’m going to …

Transcript Hey, I’m Nicky Numbers, a Professional Poker Player, and now, I’m going to show you how to shuffle chips. You may have seen poker on t.v., and you may have seen pros at the table doing something like this, shuffling their chips while they’re making a decision, or, while they’re not in a hand. …

Transcript Hey, I’m Nicky Numbers, professional poker player and today I’m going to show you how to count your chips and more importantly how not to count your chips. So let’s say you’ve just won a nice pile of chips here. The first thing you want to do is sort your chips by color. Start …

Transcript Hey, I’m Nicky Numbers, Professional Poker Player, and today I’m going to talk to you about, how to stack chips. Stacking chips is a component of the game that most people completely overlook. And, you can often tell the difference between someone who has a lot of experience playing, and someone who doesn’t have …

Transcript Hey. I’m Nicky Numbers. I’m a professional poker player and I’m going to talk to you today about tilting. To tilt means to play sub-optimally, to play off your regular gain. It means something has thrown you off the decision-making path you would normally make. If you’re tilting that means you’re making weaker than …

Transcript Hey, I’m professional poker player Nicky Numbers, and I’m going to talk to you today about poker etiquette. The last piece of poker etiquette is a very important one and it has to do with when you’re not in the pot at all. So all this action goes on, we see a flop, somebody …

Transcript Hey, I’m professional poker player Nicky Numbers and I’m going to talk to you today about poker etiquette, most importantly, what not to do at the table. The first thing I’m going to talk about is how you bet, how you call, and how you raise. Let’s say you have some chips in front …

Transcript Hey, I’m Nicky Numbers, Professional Poker Player and today I’m going to explain to you what the term “on the button” means. When you’re playing Hold ‘Em, there’s a button that one player at the table has in front of him. This player is the simulated dealer. When they have the button, the two …

Transcript Hey, I’m Nicky Numbers. I’m a Professional Poker Player and I’m going to talk to you about position in poker. What exactly do people mean when they say position? Position primarily takes its form in one of two ways. The first is pre-flop and the second is post-flop. Pre-flop position has everything to do …

Transcript Hey I’m professional poker player Nicky Numbers and now I’m gonna talk to you about check raising. The first thing to know about check raising is what it is. A check raise is when you check, your opponent makes a bet, and you raise them. So in order to be able to check raise, …

Transcript Hey, I’m Nicky Numbers, Professional Poker Player, and I’m going to help you learn how to size your raises. The first thing you need to know about raising is when you can raise and when you can’t because it’s so common for people to confuse the terms “bet” and “raise”. Pre-flop, there are blinds. …

Transcript Hey, I’m Nicky Numbers, Professional Poker Player, and now I’m going to talk about raising. First, you have to identify when you can raise and when you can’t. It’s very common for poker players to misuse the terms “bet” and “raise” because it is slightly confusing. Because you see pre-flop, the blinds are forced …

Transcript Hey, I’m Nicky Numbers, Professional Poker Player, and I’m going to help you learn when you can bet in Hold ‘Em. The first thing to know about betting is that you can only bet post-flop. There is no bet pre-flop. The blinds are forced bets which means the first aggressive action to enter the …

Transcript Hey, I’m Nicky Numbers, Professional Poker Player and today I’m going to show you how to bet. When you’re betting, by definition you’re on the flop, turn or river. In other words you’re post-flop and the pre-flop action has already taken place. The reason this must be true is because pre-flop the blinds are …

Transcript Hey, I’m Nicky Numbers, professional poker player and now we’re going to talk about betting. Betting can only occur post-flop, on the flop, turn, or river. It cannot occur pre-flop because the bets have already been done. The blinds are forced bets. You only have the option to make a bet when you’re first …

Transcript Hey, I’m Mickey Numbers, Professional Poker Player. Today I’m going to talk to you about checking. First of all, checking can only occur post-flop. It cannot happen pre-flop because the blinds are in place, which are forced bets. You can only check when no one has bet first. On the flop turner river, if …

Transcript Hey, I’m Nicky Numbers, Professional Poker Player and today I’m going to talk to you about the blinds. The blinds are two forced bets that occur right before every hand of poker. So one player at the table is going to be the dealer and they’re going to have this button in front of …

Transcript Hey, I’m Nicky Numbers, Professional Poker Player, and today I’m going to talk to you about antes. Antes are a forced contribution that every player has to put into the pot to play each hand. You might be familiar with blinds, which are two forced bets which occur after the button. So say this …

Transcript Hey, I’m Nicky Numbers, I’m a professional poker player, and today I’m going to help you evaluate your starting hand. So you sit down at the table, you get dealt two cards, you peer at them, now what? Now you have a decision to make. So let’s look at a few examples. We’re going …

Transcript Hey, I’m Nicky Numbers, a Professional Poker Player, whose going to talk to you today, about the best starting hands in poker. Now, when most people are talking about poker, they mean No Limit Hold Em. The best starting hands in that game are, big cards, and big pairs. So, hands like Ace, King. …

Transcript Hey, I’m Professional Poker Player, Nicky Numbers, I’m going to talk to you today, about the worst hands in poker. Now, a lot of what you’ve seen on poker on t.v. and in movies, has looked something like this. You see a player, sitting there, with five cards in front of them. That is …

Transcript Hey, I’m Nicky Numbers, Professional Poker Player, and today, we’re going to talk about poker hand rankings. What, beats what. Most of the time when you see hand rankings, you see them displayed for all forms of high card poker, rather than what you’re really interested in seeing, which is Texas Hold Em. But …

Transcript Hey, I’m Nicky Numbers, Professional Poker Player, and today, I’m going to talk to you about the rules of poker. Hold em is a game where each player starts with two down cards. However, before they even deal, there are two players that are forced to put out bets, known as the blinds. There …

Transcript Hey, I’m Nicky Numbers, Professional Poker Player, and now I’m going to help you learn how to make and keep a good poker face. Now, a poker face is kind of a general term for stoic behavior at the table giving your opponents the minimal amount of behavioral information possible. The idea is that …