The series of articles 'Casino Poker for Beginners' is intended for people who have played poker online and/or in home games, but have little or no experience playing in a “brick-and-mortar. How to play poker Online Poker is an exciting card game with many different variations that pits the player against the dealer to see who will make the best hand. There are many variations of the game including being dealt just three cards to up to seven cards, as well as wild cards and different payouts depending on the game. How To Play 3 Card Poker To start, the player places an ante wager and/or a pair plus wager, betting that they will have a hand of at least a pair or better. Three cards are then dealt face down to each player.

So you want to know how to play poker in a casino cardroom? And you’ve only ever played in home games?

You’re in luck because I can tell you the pros and cons of playing in a casino as contrasted with playing in a home game. I can also explain the differences between the 2 venues and how to choose which one is right for you.

Finally, if you’ve decided you want to make the transition from home poker games to casino poker games, I’ll tell you how to adjust to the differences.

The Differences between Home Poker Games and Casino Poker Games

Most casual home poker games are played at kitchen or dining room tables. You’ll usually be playing for low stakes, and the experience probably has more to do with socializing than playing cards. In most home games, the choice of poker game being played changes with the dealer.

In a casino, though, things are more serious and structured. You’ll be playing at a professional quality poker table, for one thing. The stakes might be low, but higher stakes games will almost always be available. And the game being dealt at each table will be the same as long as you’re sitting there (usually).

The Rake

In a home poker game, you don’t usually pay any kind of rake or chair rental. In a casino poker game, you’ll pay for the privilege of playing there. Most casinos use a “rake” system to make their cardrooms profitable. They take a small percentage (usually 5%) of each pot. Some casinos might still charge flat rental fees for sitting in their chairs, but that’s unusual.

If you’ve been reading my posts about poker, you’re likely to be the best player at the table in a lot of home poker games.

Think about it this way. If you’re playing poker with 8 other people who all are exactly as skilled as you, you’ll eventually break even. If you’re just 1% better than the rest of the players, though, you’ll eventually walk away with a profit.

That’s not true in a raked game. Not only do you have to be better than the other players at the table, but you also have to be so much better than they are that you can overcome the rake.

Professional Dealers and Security Staff

Also, in a casino setting, you’ll have a professional dealer rather than just your buddy dealing the cards. That takes a little of the pressure off, especially if you’re not great at shuffling cards. (I’ve been playing poker for a couple of decades now, and I’m still not great at shuffling a deck of cards. I’m too slow.)

I’ve played in some home poker games in some rough neighborhoods. I remember walking out of one local game in Plano, Texas with $1000 in winnings in my pocket. It was 7am, but it was still almost dark out, and I was terrified someone was going to knock me in the head and take my money.

As luck would have it, that didn’t happen. But it’s unlikely in the extreme in a casino setting. Those places are crawling with security personnel.

Also, the professional dealers and management ensure that no one at the table is cheating. I’ve never played in a home game with a cheat—at least not that I’m sure about. But I sure take comfort in knowing that the staff at the casino are doing what they can to prevent cheating.

Different Kinds of Social Pressure from One Venue to the Other

In-home poker games, if you walk away from the table early to preserve your winnings, you’ll often face social pressure from your opponents. It’s considered poor form to not let your opponents get a shot at winning back their money.

This isn’t a concern in a casino poker game. It’s a good idea at the Texas holdem tables to wait for the blind to come back around, though. After all, you did pay for those hands.

Game Availability

Good casinos offer multiple standardized card games. Most of the following are common:

• Lowball
• Omaha 8
• Stud
• Texas holdem

When you’re playing at home, you’ll probably have a wider variety of games, but you’ll only get to choose the game part of the time. The rules for these variants are often silly, with lots of wild cards. The rule of thumb, strategy-wise, is to play even tighter in these kinds of variations than you would normally.

Home poker games usually have a slower pace than casino cardrooms. The dealers help with this, but the players at the casino are there to play. They’re not there to socialize.

The final big advantage to playing in a casino is the opportunity to meet people from all walks of life who love to play poker. Most home poker games lack the diversity available in casino cardrooms.

Getting Started in Your 1st Casino Poker Game

When you go into the cardroom, you’ll find a counter where the staff handles the seating of new players. There will usually be an electronic board listing what games are available at what limits, but you can also just ask the person working at the counter. Sometimes you’ll be added to a waitlist.

You’ll just tell the person at the counter what game and what limit you’d like to play, and when a seat is available, you’ll be taken to it. If you’re playing in tournaments or large stakes games, you’ll need a valid form of identification to prove your age. (I’ve been allowed to play in low stakes games without my identification before. I look old, and the stakes were so small that the cardroom manager wasn’t worried about it. This might not be true in every cardroom.)

When you sit down at the table, you’ll need to buy chips. Depending on the stakes at the table, you’ll need to buy in for a certain minimum amount. You might buy chips from the dealer, but more often, a floorperson will come around to sell you chips. It usually won’t take them long to arrive, so be patient.

In fact, at most casinos, you can even play before you get your chips. The dealer will just announce that you’re “behind,” which just means you’re waiting for your chips.

You’ll notice that the dealers at a casino do a more thorough job of shuffling the deck than home poker dealers do. These guys work for tips, so it’s customary to throw them a chip or 2 when you’ve won a pot. Also, the dealer in a casino cardroom never plays a hand. In home games, they’re almost always playing in the hand, too.

You’ll also notice that casino poker players tend to fold more often than people in home poker games. In most friendly home games, a lot of players will play almost every hand just for camaraderie. Casino players tend to be more skilled and willing to fold bad cards.

Most players in the casino, especially at the lower limits, are still loose. They play too many hands. Most novice poker players can break even just by having relatively tight starting hand requirements.

I still recommend playing for low stakes the 1st few times you play in a casino, though. There’s no point in needlessly wasting money while you’re learning to play in a casino.

I fold probably 75% or 80% of the hands I get at the Texas holdem table preflop. That’s not the optimal number, because that varies based on game conditions, but those are my standards. You should have your own standards for which starting cards are good enough to continue with and play accordingly.

Getting Used to the Fast Pace

Home poker games are slow. The dealers aren’t professionals, so they take longer to shuffle and deal. Most of the players aren’t taking the game seriously, so they’re holding up the game by not paying attention while they jaw with their buddies.

Adjusting to the faster paces of casino poker can be a challenge for some. Once you get used to it, though, casino poker seems to move at a stately pace. If you’re playing tight preflop like I recommend, you might even be bored while the various hands play out.

Once you get used to the faster pace, which is just something that comes with experience, you should focus on becoming more mindful at the table. Just because you’ve folded doesn’t mean you should ignore what’s going on at the table.

I usually have to think hard about what I’m going to focus on. Sometimes I’ll “clock” how often a specific player sees a flop. That gives me an idea of how tight or loose that opponent is. If you do that with everyone you play, you’ll recognize tendencies that will inform your betting decisions in later hands.

Conclusion

You might be intimidated by playing casino poker for the 1st time, but that’s not necessary. Once you’ve participated in a couple of games, you’ll probably be at least as good (if not better) than most of your opponents. I don’t know many reasonably serious players who don’t at least break even at most lower stakes games.

Of course, casino poker isn’t for everyone. You might be bored with the lack of game variety or wild cards. Or you might not like the faster pace of the game. You might miss knowing all the other players at the table.

But if you’re at all serious about the game, the best place to play poker in its truest form is in a modern casino setting.

The series of articles 'Casino Poker for Beginners' is intended for people who have played poker online and/or in home games, but have little or no experience playing in a “brick-and-mortar” or at an online casino.

Casinos have rules, procedures, and points of etiquette that can trip up players on their first few visits — or at least confuse and mystify them.

I hope to explain these to you in advance so that you don’t get intimidated or embarrassed.

Understanding them might also keep you from losing money by inadvertently breaking a rule during the game.

The articles in this series will focus specifically on how poker in casinos differs from what you have learned from playing casino poker games like three-card poker online or at friends’ home games, particularly in what might be termed its “procedural” aspects.

I work from the assumption that readers have enough experience under their belts at one or both of those other types of poker games to feel comfortable playing them and would like to try adding casino poker to their repertoire.

For this first installment, I’ll give you a step-by-step guide for getting into a cash game. I’ll cover entering a casino poker tournament in a later column.

Figuring Out What Games Are Available

So you’ve taken the trip to Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Tunica, Los Angeles, or any of the other many poker destinations that are now available in the U.S. and around the world. You’ve selected which poker room to patronize. Now what?

Your first step is to know what games are available.

Poker rooms vary in how they communicate game availability to would-be players. Most now have a large-screen TV listing the games and the names of any people waiting to play. Some use a manually updated white board.

The smallest rooms sometimes still use one person behind a desk with a simple piece of paper, and you have to ask what games are available. But let’s say that by one of these methods you learn that the choices are listed as follows:

• 2-4 limit hold’em
• 4-8 limit hold’em
• 1-2 no-limit hold’em
• 2-5 no-limit hold’em
• 4-8 Omaha-8

Often you’ll see a number in parentheses after such listings, which tells you how many tables of each game are in play. Some places display the actual table numbers. (Each table in a poker room has a fixed identification number.) If there are names under the game heading, that tells you who is waiting to play.

What the Numbers Mean

The stakes of the game are communicated by the pair of numbers in front of the name of the game. Confusingly, the numbers mean different things for different games.

In hold’em and Omaha (i.e., the so-called “flop games”), fixed-limit games are named by the size of the bets you can make. For example, “4-8 limit hold’em” means that the bets and raises are each $4 for the first two betting rounds of each hand (before the flop and on the flop), and $8 on the turn and river.

The blinds in these games are typically one-half of those values, or $2 and $4 in this example, though some casinos use different structures. Stud games (and draw games, if you can ever find one) follow the same convention — the numbers in the name of the game represent allowable bet sizes.

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But just when you think you understand that, you discover that no-limit games are listed differently. “1-2 no-limit hold’em” does not mean that the bets are $1 and $2 — that would violate the whole concept of a “no-limit” structure. Instead, these games are named by the size of the two blinds, in this case the small blind being $1 and the big blind $2.

To make it even more confusing, a few casinos — most notably the largest ones in southern California — eschew the conventions I’ve just described in favor of a bewildering hodge-podge of buy-ins and blinds as the titles of their games.

For example, a “$40 NL” game will mean no-limit hold’em with buy-in of exactly $40 — no more and no less — with blinds unstated but understood to be $1 and $2. There are other variations used in these places that are too numerous to detail here. But don’t worry — just tell them that it’s your first time there, and they’ll be happy to explain what the words, numbers, and abbreviations mean. Just about everywhere else, the explanations above will serve you well.

Buying In and Taking a Seat

Okay, so let’s say you’ve decided which of the offered games you’d like to play. Now just approach the person poised to greet you at the entrance to the poker room and tell him or her what you’re interested in. You will either be put on the waiting list for a opening, or, if you’re lucky, directed or escorted directly to a vacant seat in an active game.

If you have to wait, be sure that you don’t wander off to someplace where you can’t hear your name being called. Some poker rooms now offer to call or text your cell phone when it’s your turn, in which case you’re free to go do something else while you wait. However, I think it’s a better idea to stick around and watch (from a respectable distance) a game of the type you plan to play, in order to get a sense for what’s happening.

Next you’ll need to convert some cash into chips. But how much? The amount for which you can or must buy in to a game is related to the sizes of the blinds and/or bets, but not in any obvious or standardized way. Most commonly, the buy-in is capped at 100, 150, or 200 times the amount of the big blind in no-limit games. However, you can find poker rooms with substantially smaller buy-in caps, and some with no caps at all.

There’s no reliable way to figure this out on your own; you just have to ask an employee. Limit games are often officially uncapped, but you’d be looked at oddly if you bought into a fixed-limit game for more than about 50 big blinds, because stack sizes are not usually an important factor in how the game plays.

Let’s suppose you’re going to play $2/$4 limit hold ’em, and you’ve decided to buy in for the maximum this casino allows for this game, which is, say, $200. There are four different ways you might exchange your cash for poker chips.

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1. The person at the front podium who signs you in might also serve as the room’s cashier.
2. He or she might direct you to a separate cashier’s “cage” to purchase chips.
3. You might be instructed to buy your chips from the dealer when you sit down.
4. After you take your seat, they might have a “chip runner” take your money and bring you chips.

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Again, which method a given place uses (and it can change depending on how busy they are) is not usually obvious, even to experienced players — you just have to ask.

Congratulations! You’re past the first set of hurdles, and seated in your first casino poker game, with a fresh stack of chips stacked neatly in front of you. In the next “Casino Poker for Beginners” entry, I’ll start to delve into what the casino expects of you as a player at one of its tables.

Robert Woolley lives in Asheville, NC. He spent several years in Las Vegas and chronicled his life in poker on the “Poker Grump” blog.

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