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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 than any other professional poker player, ever. I love playing poker probably more than anything else in this world, except maybe teaching poker.

If you’d like to learn more, I’d love to share. Go to nickynumbers.com and there is going to be some amazing free content for you that will definitely you improve your game.

Thanks for watching and I hope to see you at the table soon.

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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 the outcome of the hand. Just one session of cash game poker is going to be largely luck. One tournament hand or one tournament, tremendous amounts of luck. However, the more hands you play, the less luck there is.

As the number of hands approaches infinity, luck approaches zero. If you play tens of thousands of cash game hands, or thousands of tournaments, and you’re a good poker player, you will win in the long run. Poker is a pure skill and the reason it’s beatable in the long run is because the house, the poker room or the casino, only takes a very small amount out of each pot and they’re not a player.

You’re not playing against the house like you would be in craps or roulette, where if you play frequently enough, they’re guaranteed to win. In poker you’re playing against other players and the house is basically just charging you an hourly amount to sit at the table. This amount comes out in the form of rake, which they take a small percentage from each pot or they take an upfront vig for a poker tournament. So for example you might play a poker tournament that’s $120, where $20 of it is just going to the house and $100 is going to the prize pool. Unless the rake is too high, which it will rarely be in a casino or a poker room, then the games are going to be beatable.

However, you do have to be careful when you’re playing in home games or private games, because it’s not uncommon for those games to have enormous rakes. Something like 10% of the pot with no cap might well be an unbeatable game for most if not all poker players. The more poker that’s played, the more the cream will rise to the top. Play enough poker, and if you’re a very good player, you will win in the long run.

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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 because that’s very straightforward. A standard tip is 3%. 3% of whatever money you make in the tournament you tip to the dealers. The thing is that in most tournaments your playing, they are already withholding 3% for the dealers, so when the casino or the poker room already withholds a tip for the dealer, any tip you do is just a token amount, it’s a gesture or it’s pure generosity. By all means send the dealer your entire winnings in the tournament if you want, that’s entirely up to you.

Just like in a restaurant tipping is of subjective endeavor. So while 3% is a standard tip for dealer’s in a tournament, just like 15% or 18% is a standard tip for the wait staff in a restaurant. Many people choose to leave more and many people choose to leave less. Now, in the case of a tournament I really suggest you always leave 3% but as I said the house usually holds it for you so anything you tip on that would just be for excellent service or because you’re feeling particularly generous. Now, cash games on the other hand, tipping is much more frequent. It standard to tip every single time you win a pot regardless of how big or small the pot is. However, what most people get wrong is that they tip relative to the size of the pot when they should.

The dealer performing the same job every single time they deal whether you win the hand, lose the hand, win a huge pot, or loose a huge pot the dealer had absolutely nothing to do it, they were just controlling the cards. They didn’t control the outcome of the hand, so you should tip a consistent amount.

When you’re playing cash games like one to a limit or two five no limit or even five ten the limit and higher. A dollar tip per head is fair for the dealer. Most dealers get out around 25 hands per hour so if everybody’s tipping the dealer a dollar they’re going to make a very good wage. Most people make the mistake of tipping more when they win a big pot and not tipping at all when they win a small pot. If you just tip the dealers very consistently, they’ll be happy. If you want to tip generously, then two dollars for every hand you win would be really generous. Anything above that would just be purely benevolent. However, it’s important that you keep in mind that when playing cash games the hourly win rate that you make is directly affected by the amount of tips that you give, so if your regularly tipping five and ten dollars a hand for a big pot it could completely keep you from being a winning poker player.

That’s okay if you’re not focused on winning, maybe you’re playing poker for the entertainment or the social aspects or for whatever reason you’re playing the game. If you want to tip by all means go ahead and tip. However, just note that that directly comes out of your hourly win rate.

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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 equity and your opponents have a certain amount of equity.

Equity is just a fancy way of saying, ‘your chances of winning.’ So, if I’m in a hand and I have an 80% chance of winning and you have a 20% chance of winning, then you have 20% equity in the pot. If I take an aggressive action by betting, or raising, or re-raising, that makes you fold your hand, you give up that 20% that you were rightfully entitled to had all five cards come out and we had gone to showdown.

In other words, if we were all in at this point in the hand you would realize the true equity of your hand and I would realize the true equity of mine. I’m 80%, you’re 20%, so I would win four out of five, and you would win one out of five. But when I take an aggressive action that makes you fold you give up that 20% and I gain it. That’s fold equity.

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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 you’re playing across multiple streets, you want to be the aggressor.

Whenever you play poker you’re going to make mistakes, but you control the kinds of mistakes that you’re going to make. You don’t want to make passive mistakes, you want to make aggressive mistakes. When you’re aggressive sometimes good things accidentally happen to you. When you’re passive, very rarely do good things accidentally happen to you.

Passive players enter pots by limping into them, by calling raises, and by infrequently raising and re-raising themselves. Aggressive players, on the other hand, enter pots and they come in raising, they’re raising or they’re re-raising and they’re rarely entering the pot passively except under very specific criteria. And the reason for that is because a passive strategy is a losing strategy unless it’s executed just right, which is really hard to do. In general, if you’re trying to choose between calling or folding, fold.

If you’re trying to choose between calling or raising, raise. In other words, if you’re going to continue in a hand as a general default you want to be the aggressor.

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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 maybe they play one hand: just pocket aces. So, basically, to be a tight player just means that you voluntarily contribute money into the pot with a low frequency. The lower the frequency, the tighter you are. The higher your frequency, the loser you are.

To be a tight player you’re rarely putting money in the pots. There are a couple of ways you could be a tight player. You could be a tight passive player, or you could be a tight aggressive player. A tight passive player is rarely playing pots, but when they do play a pot they’re entering it passively. So they’re limping in the pots; they’re calling raises; they’re rarely raising themselves, and even more rarely than that, re-raising themselves pre-flop. On the flop, these are players who you’re regularly going to see check/call or check/fold. When someone else makes a bet, they just call. It’s extremely difficult to be successful playing tight passively.

The reason is because you’re simply not playing enough hands and when you do play hands you’re not getting value on them because you’re not escalating the size of the pot. In addition, because you’re playing passively, you’re rarely creating full deck with it, which is the value gained by taking an aggressive action that sometimes results in you winning an uncontested pot. So, you’re not getting value on your hands explicitly just by betting and raising with them as someone would, but then you’re also not getting value from the hands that you play by bluffing. If you’re going to play tight poker, you want to be a tight aggressive player.

It means that you’re not playing that many hands but when you do play you’re coming in with guns blazing: You’re raising pre-flop; you’re re-raising pre-flop; you’re betting on the flop; you’re opponent bets on the flop; you’re raising on the flop. Basically, when you continue in the hand, you’re almost always continuing in an aggressive manner. Playing a tight passive style at the poker table is a very problematic one because you’re never maximizing value on hands and you’re also never making people fold. When I say never, I don’t mean never, but effectively never. Tight aggressive, on the other hand, comes out swinging. They play their hand strong. They make people fold, and they get value by being paid off on their premium holdings. Tight aggressive poker is a winning style.

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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, the looser they are. The fewer hands they play, the tighter they are. To be a loose player all you have to do is play a lot more hands than you already do. The loosest you could possibly be would be to play every single hand pre-flop.

However, that would make it impossible to win. If you never fold, you can’t win. What that means is that you have to be selectively loose in order to be a good loose player. There are two types of loose. There’s just loose where you’re just playing any hands and then there’s selectively loose where you’re playing specific hands for specific reasons. You want to be selectively loose if you’re going to be a loose player where you’re not just playing any two cards that you’re dealt but you’re playing specific hands in specific situations.

There’s also another form of loose. That has to do with your level of aggression or passivity. You could be loose aggressive or you could be loose passive. You want to be loose aggressive. Loose aggressive players can do very well when playing Nolan at Hold’Em. If you’re going to play loose, you want to play loose aggressively because loose aggressive players have the opportunity to do very well. They’re constantly putting their opponents to meaningful decisions by taking aggressive actions, by betting, by raising.

When they’re playing hands, they’re often the aggressor. Loose passive, on the other hand, involves still playing a lot of hands and perhaps playing them selectively. However, the manner with which you’re playing then is not at all aggressive. You’re not betting and raising and re-raising with them. You’re instead limping in pre-flop, or calling raises with them, checking them post flop. Loose passive players are some of the worst poker players that exist. It’s impossible to win playing a loose passive style. Passive players rarely win. And loose players, unless they’re loose in just the right way and they’re loose aggressively, don’t do well either. The single biggest mistake to make in Hold’Em is playing too many hands. Most loose players make that mistake constantly.

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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 are 50 and 100, then if you were trying to steal the blinds, you would be making a preflop raise that will result in sometimes winning an uncontested pot. That means that you raise preflop, and sometimes everyone folds. A classic steal attempt of the blinds is done when it folds to either the cutoff, which is one seat off the button, or it folds the button, or it folds to the small blind. If it folds to anybody either in late position, or in the small blind, and they raise verses the pot, that’s traditionally going to be thought of as a steal attempt.

This sometimes also extends to even one seat further, from not just the button, not just the cutoff, but to the seat before the cutoff, which is often referred to as the hijack. Stealing the blinds is incredibly important in a tournament, and much less important in a cash game. When you play a tournament, and you have a starting stack, if you do nothing with that starting stack, it’s going to erode over time, because you’re paying blinds antes. Also, the blinds are increasing, which means that the size of your stack decreases relative to the blinds. If you just stand still and do nothing, eventually you’re going to result in just having one big blind in your stack. So you have to steal blinds in order to keep pace with the escalating tournament structure. In a cash, stealing blinds is far less important, because they’re consistent.

They don’t increase, and they usually only represent a very small percentage of the chips you have in front of you. In addition to the blinds, sometimes there’s also antes. So let’s say the blinds are, instead of 50 or 100, 100 to 200. It’s common at the 100 to 200 blind level for there to be 25 antes that every player puts into the pot. If there’s 10 players at the table, then they’ll be 10 antes in the pot. One from each player. In this case of blinds of 100 and 200, and 10 times 25, in antes in the pot, that’s 100 plus 200 or 300, plus 250, for a total of 550 in the pot, before the action has even started. That’s 550 in the pot instead of the 300 that would be in the pot with no antes. So you can see the pot is almost twice as big when antes come into play. When antes are present, the frequency with which you attempt to steal the blinds should increase, because there’s more dead money out there that can potentially be won.

Dead money is money that players put into the pot without necessarily getting anything for it. The only thing they get for putting out the blinds and antes is their whole cards. However, they’re not guaranteed a flop, or anything else. So it’s dead money, because they’re putting it in blind. The best opportunity for stealing blinds and antes has everything to do with the number of remaining opponents yet to act behind you. People often talk about stealing from under the gun. UTG stealing it’s called, because they feel that they can represent a good hand by raising from early position. However, there’s actually a direct linear correlation between the chances of you winning the pot uncontested preflop, and the number of remaining opponents. That means that under the gun is the seat at the table least likely to win uncontested pot.

The seat most likely, not the hijack, actually not even the button, but rather the small blind, because the small blind only has one player to get through when they raise in order to make them fold successfully when the blinds. The next best seat is the button, followed by the cutoff, followed by the hijack. In other words, the fewer remaining opponents yet to act when it’s been folded to you preflop, the better your chances of successfully stealing the blinds.

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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 calling a bet or raise or re-raise that they make in an effort to under-represent your hand or induce aggressive actions from them in the future.

The best situations to trap or slow play against your opponents is when you don’t have opponents, it’s when you have an opponent. When you’re against a single player is the best time to trap because that drastically reduces the likelihood of someone improving to a hand that beats you. The more players that are in the hand, the more likely they are to have a draw that may improve to beat the hand that you currently have.

So ideally the thing that you want in place in trapping is to be against a single opponent. The next thing that we’d like to be in place is a dry board. The texture of the flop is incredibly important. The more coordinated the board, which means the more draws that are present the more likely your opponents are to successfully continue against you.

The dryer the board the more scattered it is, and the more rainbow it is. A rainbow board contains no flush draws. A scattered board contains no straight draws. When a board is both scattered and rainbow, like deuce/seven/deuce, all three different suits, or deuce/seven/King, all three different suits. Those are very dry boards. When a board is dry and you’re against a single opponent, it presents an ideal opportunity for trapping. The times where you don’t want to try to trap your opponents and slow play your hand are the times when you’re in big multi-way pots on heavily coordinated boards. When the board is two to the flush and especially when it’s also two to the straight, and you’re against two or more players, especially if you’re against three or more players, that’s a terrible time to trap. First of all, if you have a strong made hand taking an aggressive action will usually be contested by your opponents.

In other words, you don’t need to trap. Someone’s likely to give you action already and when they don’t give you action, you’re just going to win an uncontested pot. That’s the myth about big hands. Just because you have a big had doesn’t mean there’s a way you can magically play it to win all of your opponent’s chips. So multi-way pots and heavily coordinated boards are very problematic for trapping. Single opponents and dry boards where no flushes or straights are present are excellent for trapping.

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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 value in that it’s going to improve a significant amount of the time on the next streak. So if we’re on the flop, it’s going to improve to a strong made hand on the turn regularly.

If we were on the turn, it would improve to a strong made hand on the river regularly. Typically, semi-bluffing can be thought of taking aggressive action when you have 8 outs or more. A semi-bluff is significantly different from a stone cold bluff, which is a bluff with no hand no draw. Take a look at this situation where you have 8-3 offsuit on a board of 9-7-King, 2 to the flush. If you bet at this pot or raise a bet on this flop and you fail and your opponent chooses to continue in the hand, 8-3 offsuit could often be drawing slim or even dead to your opponent’s hand. However, a hand, like 2-4 of clubs, has a flush draw.

There’s 13 clubs in the deck; 2 of them are on the board and 2 of them are in your hand. That means that there’s 9 remaining clubs. When you have 9 clubs to make a flush, you have 9 outs. This is a classic semi-bluffing hand here. Although you have a weak flush draw, flushes are usually strong when you make them using both hole cards. Typically, you want to take those hands to showdown and play a big pot.

So if you take an aggressive action at this flop and your opponent continues in the hand, you’re not just out of it like you would be 8-3 offsuit, where the overwhelming majority of the time you’re not going to be able to continue past the turn. In this case, you’re going to hit a flush on the turn about 18% of the time and when you don’t, you have another shot to hit it on the river. When you’re taking aggressive actions at the poker table and you’re bluffing, ideally, you want to be semi-bluffing, where if your bluff fails, you have a back up.

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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. Your hand is not going to win if you continue and you don’t have a draw as backup. That’s a stone cold bluff. Stone cold bluffing should primarily be reserved for poker tournaments, where you have to make moves regularly in order to win. In cash games outside of continuation betting and firing second bullets, stone cold bluffs can primarily be avoided.

However, all forms of bluffs, including semi bluffs, which are aggressive actions that are taken with a draw like a straight draw or a flush draw as a backup in case your aggressive action fails you may hit your draw and improve to a strong-made hand, are going to be most effective under the same types of criteria. The single biggest factor is how many opponents you’re up against. You can regularly make a single opponent fold. You can sometimes make two opponents fold. But it’s very, very difficult to make three or more opponents fold without the play of a hand. So, when you’re bluffing, you really want to focus on situations where you’re against a single player.

There are a few very important Do Not’s with regards to bluffing. You do not want to bluff in big, multi way pots. The more opponents you’re up against, the less likely an aggressive action is to succeed. You also want to avoid bluffing in situations where your opponent has taken multiple aggressive actions post-flop. They bet on the flop, and the turn, and the river. Or, they’ve raised on the flop and bet on the turn. The more aggressive actions your opponents have taken on the flop, turn and river, the greater the likelihood that they’re not going to fold. And as is true at any point in no limit Hold’Em, it’s critical to know how many chips you have in your stack and how many chips you’re opponents have in theirs so that you can take into account when you’re choosing to bet or raise.

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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 chips are in the pot, how many chips are in your stack, and how many chips are in the stacks of the other players in a hand. You also want to take into account your position. Are you acting after all of your opponents and you’re in position? Are you acting before some of your opponents and you’re out of position? It’s also incredibly important to know how many players saw the flop.

The larger the number of players that see the flop, the stronger the likely holding is to be at showdown. As the number of players that see the flop increases, the likelihood of one-pair winning at showdown decreases. Number of players seeing the flop is an incredibly important consideration. When you couple that with the texture of the board and the number of players still in the hand, you start to gain a very clear picture of the types of hands you should be continuing with and the types of hands that you shouldn’t. It’s also essential that you take into account the actions that have taken place in front of you, not just on this street but on all the streets that have occurred before. A betting line is a series of actions across multiple streets.

The betting lines that your opponents take, as well as the betting lines that you take, are going to significantly impact the information that you’re aware of throughout the hand. And of course, you always want to take into account how your hand connects with the board. The stronger your hand, the more likely you should be continuing. The bigger your draw, the more likely you should be continuing. If you don’t have a strong hand that you’re going to regularly take to showdown and you don’t have a draw of eight-outs or more with which you can regularly continue, then unless you can take an aggressive action that will frequently result in the opponents, in the hand folding, then unless you can take an aggressive action that will frequently result in your opponents folding, and you winning an uncontested pot, there’s really no reason to continue in the hand. These are just some of the post-flop factors that could be evaluated that when coupled together with deductive reasoning will drastically inform your decision-making process.

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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 or small are they relative to your stack? How many chips are in your stack? How many chips are the in stacks of your opponents? What’s the average stack, or better yet, the median stack at your table?

Your position at the table relative to the button pre-flop is also incredibly important. It lets you know how many players are yet to act after you.

In addition, you want to take into account the players that have acted before you, the positions they were in and the actions that they’ve taken. And that’s not even getting into your opponents’ betting patterns, their tendencies, the size of their wagers, and whether or not the actions that they take at the table are indicative of how strong or weak their holdings may be.

After evaluating all of those factors, you’ll be able to better put your opponents on a range of hands, that is, all the cards that they may have played the same way.

And of course, after evaluating all that, you still have your cards to take into account. However, it’s important to understand that in No Limit Hold ‘Em, cards have relative hand strength not absolute hand strength. There’s 169 different hold cards that you can be dealt. Each one of them has an absolute ranking, however the absolute ranking should rarely inform your decision.

It’s the relative strength that’s important. How does your hand compare to your opponents’ range? Can you continue profitably? Are you ahead of their range? Are you behind their range? If you’re behind in the hand, are you getting odds to continue? If you’re not getting odds to continue and you don’t believe that your hand is ahead of your opponents’ range, then the only question you really have to ask yourself is if you take an aggressive action, will you be able to make your opponents fold with a high enough frequency such that the aggressive action can be profitable?

These are just some of the factors that could be evaluated pre-flop, and when used with deductive reasoning, they’ll significantly inform your decision making.

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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 of the pot to the size of someone’s wager. The wager that they make could be a bet, it could be a raise, it could be a re-raise. What we’re comparing is the call amount to you to the total amount in the pot. So let’s say we’er in the middle of a hand and this is the pot. Black chips are 100 and the green chips are 25. So we see there is 400 in black, another 100 in green, and another 100 in green. So there is 600 in this pot right now. If my opponent was to make a wager of 300 chips into this 600-chip pot, any amount that they put out is now part of the pot. So instead of the pot just having 600 in it, it is 600 plus my opponent’s bet of 300 for a total of 900.

The amount for me to call is 300. In order to figure out our pot odds, what we’re doing is we’re taking the call amount to use and seeing how many times that amount can go into the pot. In other words, how many times can 300 go into 900. Well 3 goes into 9 three times, which means that our pot odds are 3:1. The call amount is always the one in the ratio. 3:1 means that we’re literally getting 3:1 pot odds, or 3:1 odds on our call. If instead of betting 300 our opponent bet 600, they would have made a pot-size bet. Now their wager plus what was previously in the pot becomes the total pot. So instead of there being 600, there’s 1200 in the pot.

The call amount to us is 600. So how many 600s are there in 1200? Two. Remember, the call amount is always the one when you’re talking about pot odds. So it’s 1200:600, or 2:1. There’s a very quick short cut I’m going to show you that immediately know your pot odds.

If you know how much is in the pot, and you know what percentage of the pot your opponent bet, then you can easily know your pot odds. If my opponent makes a pot-sized bet, I’m getting 2:1. If they make a half pot-sized bet, I’m getting 3:1. If they make a quarter pot-sized bet, I’m getting 5:1. If they make a double pot-sized bet, I’m getting 1.5:1; however, you don’t even need to worry about any of that because most of the time your opponents are going to bet somewhere between half the pot and the full pot. Half the pot is 2:1, full pot is 3:1. Anything in between is going to be somewhere between 2:1 and 3:1.

In the case of a three-quarters pot-sized bet, that would be the exact midpoint, and that would be 2.5:1. So there are some quick ways to calculate your pot odds.

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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 flop: deuce, three, king with two hearts. Depending on the hand you have, that will drastically affect how many outs you have. Let’s say we have five, six of diamonds. So we do not have a flush draw. However, if we hit a four, then we will make a straight: deuce, three, four, five, six. How many fours are there in the deck? Well, there are 4 fours in the deck, which means that we have four outs. There are 4 cards that can come that will improve our hand to one that we’re going to comfortably take to showdown. In this case a straight is a very strong hand. If we had four, five instead of five, six, then we would have what is known as an open-ended straight draw, which means we could hit one of 4 cards on the top of the straight and one of 4 cards on the bottom of the straight. In this case we have a draw of deuce, three, four, five, which means we can hit any one of the 4 sixes or any one of the 4 aces in the deck to make a straight. That contrasts drastically to the six, five which was just a gutshot straight draw and only had 4 outs. An open-ended straight draw has twice as many outs as a gutshot straight draw.

With ace, seven of hearts, we have a flush draw. There are 13 cards of any suit in the deck. Two of them are on the board, and 2 of them are in your hand. That means there’s only 9 hearts left in the deck, which is to say that there are 9 cards that can come that will give you a flush. In other words, you have 9 outs. With king, ten of hearts, it’s a very interesting hand because not only do you have hearts for a flush draw, but you also have a pair with king. A pair and a flush draw is a powerful combination draw. We have 9 hearts in the deck that can make us a flush. However, we also have 2 kings in the deck that can make us three of a kind as well as 3 tens in the deck which could make us 2 pair. So 9 hearts, plus 3 tens, plus 2 kings gives us 14 outs. Anytime you have 12 outs or more to make a strong hand, that’s an enormous amount of outs, and you should think of yourself as having a really strong holding. You should rarely fold on the flop if you flop 12 outs or more. Eight or 9 outs is a very solid draw, and that’s typically what people mean when they’re referring to a draw. However, the more outs you have, the more likely you are to win the hand. The more likely you are to win the hand, the less likely you should be to fold.

The last example here is four, five. Four, five of hearts has an open-ended straight draw as well as a flush draw. So there’s 9 outs to make a flush as well as 8 outs to make a straight. However, 2 of those outs that make a straight, the ace of hearts and the six of hearts, also make a flush, which means that those outs can’t be double counted. So instead of having 9 outs and 8 outs, we actually have 9 outs and 6 outs for a total of 15 outs. When you flop a straight draw and a flush draw with 15 outs, that’s a monster hand. In fact, when I go to bed at night and I dream about no-limit holdem, these are the kinds of flops that I see.

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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 hand, and then what we’re going to do, we’re going to start with one hand and roll them to the other hand, and then be able to easily pick them up. So, the way you do this trick, is you start with your chips in your right hand, or your left hand, depending on which hand’s dominant. So, your right hand, you start with your chips in your right hand, and you want to hold them between your thumb, and your index finger. And then, what you’re going to do, is you’re going to slowly release your thumb from the end, so that one chip falls off. And then, another. And then, another. And then, another. And then, another. And then, the last one.

And the key is the angle of your hand. All you’re really doing, is releasing the chips. So, I’m just holding them tight and snuggly here, and then, slip, lifting my thumb the slightest amount, so that it rolls to the other hand. The part you’re going to have to experiment with, is the position of your hand, because if you do it too straight, they don’t go far enough. If you do it too low, they could go really far. So, you want to have, like, a nice forty-five degree angle in your hand, ideally, and that’s going to make the perfect roll. So, try to get, like, a forty-five degree angle, and then just release from the thumb up. And just practice hitting your other hand. Once, you can do that, you will be able to roll them all, from hand to the other. So, another cool trick I’m going to show you is, what I call, a chip slinky. Remember a slinky where it goes from one step, down to the next, down to the next? Well, that’s kind of how this trick works. You go from one finger, to the next, and over, and back up. I always wished my slinky could go back up the stairs, but it never could.

So, the way you do this trick, is you start in between your thumb and your index finger, so that when the chip goes over, it hits the top of your finger, in between your knuckles. In between this knuckle, and that knuckle. So, you can see how it works, by just balancing a chip there, and seeing how you can kind of get it with the other finger. So, you just start with your thumb and your index finger, and then you, kind of, let go, and the chip falls. If your finger is away from the other finger, then when you touch it, you’ll be able to create just enough friction to flick the chip over. And then again. And then again. Now, the last one is tough because most people don’t have a whole lot of pinky strength, but you’re just squeezing the two, so you don’t need much. Then your thumb comes from underneath and does all the work. So, it goes like that. Another chip trick I want to show you, is called the up and over. You start with three poker chips, and you put them in your hand, and then you flick it. One to the next, to the next, to the next, to the next. The key to this trick is to use four fingers well. You want to use your ring finger, your middle finger, your index finger, and your thumb. However, your thumb cannot be responsible for holding the chips, at all. So, all I’m doing with the thumb is lifting. I’m just lifting. It’s staying planted on my index finger.

That’s the anchor. So, my middle finger is not moving at all, and my thumb is using pressure against the index finger, to lift it up gently. Once you’re able to lift it up a little bit, it can just, kind of, fall back. I’m not really doing a whole lot of work to guide it back, once it’s up and over. I’m just putting the slightest amount of pressure from my thumb, to my index finger, and then pulling it back. So, that’s how you do some cool poker tricks. And, what it will do, is it will show players at the table that you’re playing with, that you have some experience. Actually, before the first time I ever played live poker, I had only been an online player and I learned some chip tricks, and how to move my stack and bet, before I ever played live poker. It made me so much more comfortable, and it gave my opponents the feel that I’d played a lot of live poker, in the past.

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 talk about, is putting your chips into the pot neatly, in separate piles of equal amounts. So, let’s say I’m going to bet twenty red chips. I slide my stack forward. I cut them in half. I cut them in quarters. And, now everybody can see how much I wagered. Another way people do the same thing, is they bring out a full stack, and cut it off into fives. And, they stack it out neatly, or sometimes after the last cut, they’ll flurry the last one out, so everybody can see how much was in each stack.

Standard is stacks of five, but sometimes you’ll see people do stacks of four, or ten, or some other odd amount. Some people when they’re going to bet chips, they just put them into the pot, and they just flutter them messily, so, they know they’re going to bet five white chips, and they just thrown them in. Now, when I say throw them into the pot, I don’t actually mean, throw them into the pot. If there’s chips out there, and there’s a pot, you never, ever, ever want your chips to hit that pot. That’s called splashing the pot, and is extremely bad etiquette. It keeps people from being able to see how much you wagered, and it confuses the pot.

So, if you do flurry your chips, always make sure you’re know where near the pot, which is the center of the table. And no where near the chips in front of anyone else. So, you want to flurry into the open. Some people do a flurry that’s very neat, where they take their chips, say they’re going to bet six white chips, and they just let them tip over, as opposed to making extremely messy, and not caring. The reason this matters, is because how you put your chips into the pot, can give away information about your hand. You’re giving away behavioral information based on how you bet your chips. So, you want to bet your chips consistently, whether you consistently do it messy, or, you consistently do it neatly, you want to do it consistently. Because if you sometimes do this, and sometimes do that, you’re going to fall into patterns, and patterns are the enemy of poker players.

So, many times, if you know you’re going to bet exactly ten chips, or exactly twenty chips, and you have your chips logically arranged, like you should in stacks of twenty, then you can just break off any chips you have on top, and just slide out a stack of twenty. If you know you’re going to bet a stack of ten, then you can just cut your chips in half, and slide out a stack of ten. Say you want to bet multiple stacks. Then what you want to do, is size out the exact amount you want to bet. Okay, I want to bet twenty white, twenty red, and two green, and then you can slide them out in one motion.

What you cannot do, is go back to your stack. So, I cannot make a bet that’s like this. Come back to my stack, and then add more chips. If you’re putting chips into a pot, and you don’t announce it, you need to do it in a single motion, which means that if you’re going to something like go all in, you have to learn how to move stacks. So, you want to practice setting up stacks of twenty, and sliding them along the felt. What you don’t want to do, is do that, when you’re trying to go all in. Now, you know how to bet poker chips, so that you can do it consistently, in the same way , and not fall into patterns.

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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. It’s something that’s very common at the poker table, something akin to shaking your leg. People do it nervously. People do it habitually. People just do it because it’s fun to shuffle chips.

The way you want to start is with just six chips at time. Three, and three. Don’t worry about all the other chips, til later. So, you get three and three. Now, what you need to do, is align your fingers. So, you want to make sure that each side of the chip is covered. So, I’m going to put a pinky on the back, a ring finger on the front, and then I’m going to put a thumb and an index finger. And I’m going to use my middle finger, to slowly lift the chips, while I guide them together. And there, if you look close, you can see that the chips just slide together. At first, your hand’s going to feel a little uncomfortable, because these may be muscles you haven’t ever used before in this way.

Then, once you get that down, and you’re able to riffle back and forth, a couple times, you just start adding chips. You want to add chips in increments of two. So, now instead of three chips, I have four, and the technique is always the same.

And as you practice, you add more and more chips. If you’re not going to do at least three chips, though, don’t even bother. You often see people at the table doing something like this. That’s not shuffling chips. Shuffling chips is this. So, gradually add more, and before you know it, you’ll be at a full stack of twenty chips, ten and ten, and you’ll be able to riffle them like a pro. And, once you’re able to shuffle chips, doing it with different colors, it looks even fancier. You can see, shuffling two chips together, results in them alternating perfectly. So, when you riffle fast, it creates more of an optical illusion, and it’s much more interesting to look at. And that’s how you shuffle chips.

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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 with the biggest chips first, because those are the most valuable and the one that you would suffer from losing the most. So we’re going to say black chips are the highest, followed by green, followed by red, followed by white. So I’m starting with the biggest chips to protect them. Now every once in a while as you’re stacking them you’re going to see a dirty stack here. A dirty stack is when a chip is mixed in. After you’re done stacking your chips you always want to look them up and down and make sure you don’t have any mixed in, because it can result in you betting or calling or raising the wrong amount. So once you have your chips all sorted and stacked, what you want to do is break them off into stacks of five. So I take five chips, and then start sizing them up next to each other. I want to see how many stacks of five I can get. Whenever you get to four stacks of five, that’s a stack of 20, and that’s one full stack.

Then what you want to do is size the other chips against it. So I can see that I have one full stack of black, one full stack of green, but I don’t know how many white I have, I don’t know how many red I have, and I don’t know how many extra I have. So I’m going to take these green and cut them into stacks of ten. So now I have a stack of ten green, and I can either put that on top or on the side. Then I have one extra green which I’m going to keep in excess. Some people, they don’t keep stacks of five or ten.

They just put them all as excess here. I like to keep stacks of ten because it makes me always know how many chips I have in front of me. Now I can see I have a stack of ten white, and I do not have enough red, so I’ll throw those on top and do something like this. Now what you don’t want to do when you’re stacking chips is start counting them one by one. And you often see people do this. And then even when they have all their chips stacked and counted and neatly arranged, you see them do things like flip through them, like they’re wondering how many black chips they have and they’re like… That takes forever, and it makes you look like you have no idea what you’re doing at the poker table, so it makes you a target. Learning to stack your chips in fives, and then sizing up against it is the best technique. Another thing you don’t want to do at the table is combine two stacks and mix them. So you do not want to have a stack of some green and some black. This is often called barber poleing or peacocking, and in many situations like tournaments it’s absolutely not allowed.

It’s also very frowned-upon, even in cash games or any other setting where it might not be heavily regulated, because you’re deliberately trying to keep your opponent from knowing how many chips you have. The other thing you want to do is make sure any large denomination chips you have can be clearly seen by everybody at the table. If you get enough chips and you get five stacks of 20, then you’ll have a full rack. An entire rack is a hundred chips, and if you have a rack of that denomination, when you’re playing poker they have plastic racks in poker rooms where you can just fill all your chips in there. So based on how many chips you have you can know how many racks you’ll need, and you’ll also know what someone’s talking about when they say, “oh, I won a rack”.

Follow these techniques and you’ll learn to not give yourself away as an amateur at the table, because if you stack your chips poorly everybody is going to know that you’re new at the game.

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 a lot of experience playing, just based on how they stack their chips. So, let’s say, there’s a bunch of chips.

A bunch of chips are out there, and you drag in a pot. So you win a big pot, and now you’re going to stack them. How you stack these chips is going to have a lot to do with, how easy it is for you to count them, how easy it is for other players to count them, and also, how easy it is for you to manage them yourself, so that you can bet, and call and raise, with a lot of comfort. So, the first thing you want to do, is whenever you’re counting chips, you just want to group them all by color.

Just get the chips off the table, if you’ve won a pot, or if you’ve just bought them, or whatever. Get them off and out of the way, towards you, and just get them all in one color. Then, after we do that, what we’re going to do, is we’re going to put them into logical groupings. So, a lot of people would just stack their chips like this, and that would be end of it. Now let’s say, white chips are the lowest denomination, red chips are the medium denomination, and green chips are the largest denomination. It’s a good idea to have a system where you go low to high, or high to low. Either can work. So, if we’re going low to high, then it’s from my perspective. So, I’m going to put the white on this side, and because the red is in the middle, the green on this side. And now, some people just leave their stacks like this. You can see they’re all uneven. You don’t necessarily know how many you have in any one stack.

So what you want to do, is you want to start by setting out five chips. So, if you’re used to dealing with chips, you can get very comfortable with setting out five, and then you’re just going to cut them against each other. And what you doing, is creating four stacks of five chips. You have a nice stack of twenty. There, we can break it down again, and see that we have twenty chips in here. Now, we’re going to size all other stacks, up to this twenty chip stack. And so, now we have a nice, neat arrangement of chips. Let’s say we didn’t have as many chips, though. Let’s say we were short some. So, we’re short some chips. Now when we stack them, we’re still going to a logical group of twenty, four stacks of five, if we can, which we can for the white, but we can’t for the green.

So, in that case you want to try to make stacks of ten, and this case happened to work out where we had exactly ten. Now, we’re going to size up the red, against the white. And then, any excess chips you have here, which in this case are not ten, you want to put on top of your stacks of twenty. So, when you get a lot of chips in front of you, you’re going to have many stacks of twenty, and then, until you get a stack of twenty, you can put them on top of each other. Now, what you see a lot of people do, is, do lots of little stacks, the sure sign of an amateur player. Just so many little stacks, all over the place, little stack, little stack, little stack.

When you can have stacks of twenty, you want to have stacks of twenty. It makes it easier to count, and easier to manipulate. So, I know, for example, if I’m going to make a bet and I have stacks of twenty, I know that I have twenty times this denomination, here. So, if these were hundred chip denominations, I know that twenty of them is two thousand. And so then, I can bet two thousand. I would also know that ten of these chips is one thousand. Now, I can bet one thousand. Just by breaking the stack in half, even if I don’t get it right the first time, I can then re-size it up. Now, I’m much less likely to make mistakes. And that’s how you stack chips, like a Pro.

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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 normal decisions. You’re not making decisions to the best of your ability.

Frequently, tilting is associated with taking a bad beat. You have a good hand but it gets cracked by a lesser hand often in some horrific manner and then you get upset. You start to steam. Your blood starts to boil. You start to get angry about it. It starts to bother you. It eats away at you. You can’t believe the injustice. That’s when you go on tilt. It’s a mental game problem that affects most poker players, in fact, probably all poker players at least to some extent or another.

Even if you work really hard to control tilt, you’re still going to be subject to it sometimes. Now, it’s important to understand that tilt doesn’t only occur when you take a bad beat or when you get cold-decked, where your kings run into aces or set over set or something like that. Tilting can occur for something completely off the felt. Maybe you have a bad day. Maybe you’re tired. Maybe you’re hungry. Any number of things can affect your decision-making ability at the table.

Some people classify tilt as anything that results in you making worse decisions than you would have made in a vacuum. In other words, with all the time in the world to make your poker decisions, what’s the pure decision that you would have made? If you make one different from that, then it could be the result of tilt. Most commonly, tilt has to do with what’s going on at the table and whether or not a player is upset.

The more upset they are, in general, the greater the chances that they may be on tilt and would do something they wouldn’t normally do. Everybody tilts in different ways. Some people tilt by playing more hands. Some people tilt by playing fewer hands. Some people tilt by being more aggressive. Others tilt by being more passive. How you tilt is unique to you as an individual, but it’s very important to be aware of it. The mental side of poker is at least as difficult to master as the strategy side of the game and it’s very, very underrated.

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 bets, I don’t want to continue with the hand so I muck my cards, the action goes, and then the turn card appears and I go “ohhh! Unbelievable!”, where I’m clearly indicating to the table that that card would have been a valuable one for me because my hand would have improved. You see people do this so regularly at the table pre-flop when they muck two cards that were not a playable hand and then they look at the flop and they see that they would have connected. They would have made two pair, or they would have made a flush, or a straight, or trips, or full house, or whatever strong hand they would have made if they played, but they didn’t.

They’re reacting behaviorally at the table. That gives other players information about the hand. Often it can be very key information. Giving away information about the hand while it’s still going on, especially when you’re not in the hand is some of the worst poker etiquette that you can have at the table. Even worse than that is actually talking about the cards that you folded. So instead of just signing and reacting that you would have improved your hand, actually talking about it is so much worse. People regularly whisper at the table whisper like “I folded two clubs”. Oh, loud. Because they’re not in the hand so they don’t have any vested interest in protecting the secret of their cards. If they were in the hand, obviously they would shut up about it but they’re not in the hand.

So they’re choosing to be disrespectful to the other players that are in the hand, and potentially giving an information edge to one or all of those players in the pot. If somebody’s seated next to that’s in the hand, they might hear the whisper while someone might not. That’s unfair because it’s a disadvantage to some of the players at the table. When you fold a hand and you’re no longer involved in the action, do not talk about the hand while it’s going on. It doesn’t matter what you folded. It doesn’t matter that you were or were not in the pot. None of that matters. While a hand is going on, don’t discuss it. That’s the best policy you can possibly have from a poker etiquette standpoint.

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 of you; so you’re at the table playing, you’ve got your nice stacks and you want to make a bet or you want to make a call or you want to make a raise, well how you put your chips into the pot is incredible important. What you don’t want to do is this, where the chips that you put out have now gone right into the middle of the pot. This is called splashing the pot and it’s terribly bad poker etiquette.

The reason it’s such awful etiquette is because it completely confuses the game. I don’t know how many chips you put out, if you were making a bet or a raise, we don’t know how much it was, if you were making a call it’s difficult to confirm that you called the correct amount. You’re going to often force the dealer to have to recreate the entire hand just to see how many chips should be in the pot and how many chips are in the pot in order to figure out what chips went into the pot and which chips are suppose to be part of a bet, raise, or call. Rather than splash the pot, what you want to do is put your chips out in front of you where they can’t hit any other player’s chips or the pot itself. So, for example, if I was going to bet that same amount I could just put them in front of me like that or I could neatly stack them in front of me like this. Either way is fine, the key is that you don’t want your chips to encounter any other obstacles at the table involving other chips.

The next thing I’m going to talk to you about has to do with showing the winning hand. Let’s say I’m dealt two cards, we’ve had some betting go on, and now I’m all in. You call me and I wait, I don’t show my hand right away, except that I have two Aces. I know for a fact that I have the best possible hand pre-flop, I know I have the winner, yet I paused and made you sweat. I made you sweat and potentially think that your hand might be good. I deliberately allowed you to believe that you were more likely to have a winning hand or the best hand at the moment than you actually were. That’s called a slow roll and it doesn’t only happen when I’m the person that bets or raise.

When you call a bet or raise, especially on the river, if you know that it’s very likely that you have the winning hand just table it. If you or your opponent is all in and you know that you are likely to have the winning hand just table it. The only time you should wait for your opponent to show their cards first or to make them wait and sweat is when you’re genuinely unsure whether or not you have the winning hand. Splashing the pot, slow rolling your opponents or reacting to or discussing a hand while it’s still going on are three great examples of poor poker etiquette.

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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 players after them on their left are the blinds. The blinds have to put up forced bets.

For example, one green chip, two green chips.

Being on the button means that the button is literally in front of you. The button is the most valuable position at the table because it’s last to act post-flop. On the flop, turn and river all the players in the hand have to act before the button.

However pre-flop, it’s almost last to act. There’s two people, the blinds, who get to act after it.

So when you’re on the button, it means that you’re in a good position at the table.

The last thing about being on the button is knowing that it moves around the table so each player gets the button for one hand. If you’re at a table with 10 people, then every 10 hands you would get the button, the most valuable seat at the table.

And that’s what you need to know about being on the button.