 
Hi, I'm Martin from Claremonts.com. What we're going to do now, is we're going to learn how to play the
game
of Texas Holdem Poker. Texas Holdem, it's
been a big booming game hasn't it in the
Internet era?
And you can be a big part of it and the
best thing to do is to learn how to play
it properly
before you start playing the game. That's what
I'm here to do. I'm gonna teach you the
fundamentals
of Texas Holdem Poker.
What is it? I'ts a game of Poker against
other players.
Eventually there's gonna be seven cards in play. Two are kind of secretive, they're your
own cards.
Five card layed out across the middle here and
the best player, with the strongest
hand will win and i'll talk you through it.
You can see on the table here you've got
something called a Dealer Button, you'll see
this when your playing online.
Everybody takes their turn to be dealer. The Dealer Button will move around after every
hand
so everyone takes their turn. To the left
of the dealer,
that's the person who starts the betting off
in every single hand,
they're called the Small Blind. That will be, in this
case, here's the dealer. So to the dealer's
left, here's your Small Blind. To
their left,
is what we call the the Big Blind. So what are the
Blinds? The Blinds, they're
the thing that start the action going. They're
compulsory bets so that we've got
some action, we've got some betting to start every
hand off. In this case, we'll say the small
blind is one of these
$5 chips here or £5 chips,
so the Small Blind to the dealers left will be
five,
and the Big Blind has to be twice as
much. So in this case, we call this, this is what we
call a 5-10 game, the 5 being the Small Blind, the 10 being the Big Blind.
You'll see games of all different levels on the
website. This'll be a 5-10 game this case.
Five Blind, 10 Big Blind. So that's started our betting going hasn't it?
What happens next? We've got our table set, we've got our players,
we have the cards dealt out initially. You have just two cards each, so
out come the cards. We'll have three
players playing in this example.
Two cards to each player and the players,
as the cards go over the line there, will have a little look at their cards and think, have they made a good
start to the
hand. We've got the betting started, so we've gone Small Blind here, we've
got the Big Blind here, so we would say the
action,
the next person to act in the hand is
again, as it moves round clockwise the player
to the left here.
So we've got the Small Blind and the Big Blind, so what does
the player here have to do next?
Well the action is now 10, that's him out of the bet
So they've now got three 3 different choices. Very common
term in the world of Poker are these three
phrases;
They are to Fold, they are to Call and they are to Raise.
So lets go through the three different options that the player in the third position here in
this example.
if he Folds, that's pretty straight forward, he
looks at his cards, he sees the betting is
10 and he thinks "Oh, that's too expensive,
I don't have a very strong hand,
discretion is the better part of valor, 
i'm gonna Fold my hand."
So the cards will be Folded, nothing ventured,
you can actually have many hands in
Poker
where you don't lose any money in the game. Quite nice.
There is a second option is to Call. To think "Well, I'm not doing too badly
but I don't wanna commit too
much to the hand." To Call
at this stage, would be just to match the bet which was 10 there,
The bet will again be 10 more. If he does
that, the action keeps moving around in a
clockwise direction until it comes to the next player. The third
option is to Raise. Now raising is when you
add money to the pot, you build it up. You could possibly call it by playing aggressively.
An aggressive player does a lot of Raising
and to Raise you have to double the
amount
that's been bet previously. Here, the
amount is 10,
so if the player in the third box is going to
Raise, the minimum he would be able to do
that would be 20.
He couldn't bet 15, that wouldn't be allowed.
You have to double it up. So he can bet 20 or
more.
So we'll say he has bet 20, the action then
moves round the table,
the player in the box here, he has to now have 20 committed to the pot.
He's got 5, we'll put him in for 20 and we'll
move the action round to the next player to his
his left,
he's again got the same options. He's
committed for 10, the bets 20,
he can Fold, he can Call it at 20 or he
can Raise it again.
We'll put him in for a Call. At this stage,
everyone's got the same amount committed to the pot, that's when the round of betting ends.
And all the money goes, as we say,
into the pot, that's gonna be played out at the end. So that's the end of the first round of betting.
After this, what we do is we'll now draw three cards out and this is called the Flop,
where the dealer will, in a real game,
burn a card. Drop a card down, and then three more cards
are drawn to the table. Now, you with your two cards here, are gonna be matching up
seeing how strong a Poker hand you can produce here. This is called the Flop.
And again the betting
will open up again, to the left of the
dealer. Whoever is the player left in hand
to the left of the dealer,
shall be the first to act. A little bit differently to the first round here,
because there's no compulsory betting already out there,
you can at this stage do something that we haven't talked about which is called
Checking. Checking is when there's no
action, but you
don't want to commit any money at this stage to the pot, but you don't want to get out of the pot either,
 
So you can just Check and move the action around to the next player,
So you'll maybe go Check, Check, maybe perhaps the third player here, he wants to bet into the
action.
We're in a 5-10 game, so the minimum bet here would be 10.
So we'll have this player here maybe, very very confidently betting
200 chips, getting a bit of action going in the game.
The betting then moves round again in a clockwise action to the next player
who's here. He's now got those three
options we talked about before,
where he can Fold, he can Call, or he can Raise.
Just like in the first round of betting. In this example then we'll have the player
Calling the bet, the third player here,
he's then got the same three options. He can match that 200, he can raise to 400
or more.
Or he can think, "My cards aren't quite good enough. I've seen the 
Flop,
I haven't got a strong enough hand." So in this example let's have the third player
Folding his cards and he's out of the hand. So we've just got the two players remaining,
all the bets are equal. So again, that's the end of that round of betting,
called the Flop and the pot is building
up nicely.
The next thing that happens,
is called the Turn. The Turn is a fourth card. Down it goes,
over it goes. So now look; we've got four cards here,
hopefully you're building up a nice strong
confident position
in the hand. Again, to the dealer's left
the first to act, do you Check or do you bet?
What should we do this time? Maybe the player here, fairly confidently bets 200,
maybe the player to his left is very
confident and Raises to 500.
Again the player here, we'll talk through these three options again. What does he do?
Does he Fold, does he Call or does he Raise?
Lets in this example say you Call the bet, you match the 500,
so that 200 disappears,that 500 goes in.
We've got the bets matched
at this stage then, that's the end of that betting turn.
And we're now ready for the last card to be delivered
and this is called the River, everything can change on the River.
A lucky player is sometimes known as a
River Rat, we've all been one.
There's the last card that's burnt,
there's the card that goes into the middle. Let's see, we've got a Pair of 4's on board,
lots and lots of different possibilities. We then 
return
to the player to the dealers left to choose,
what are you gonna do? Are you gonna Check, are you gonna
bet?
In this example, let's keep it nice and simple.
We'll go Check,
and Check. Both players, a little bit scared perhaps to commit too much into this pot.
The hand is now complete.
The last thing to do is to see who the winner is, so we turn the cards over.
An 8 and a 10 there, a Queen and a 6 there.
The winning hand in this example is this
hand here,
you've got two 6's and two 4's with what we call a Queen Kicker. We'll talk about the Hand hierarchy
in just a moment.
so in this example, the player here wins
the pot, all the cards are brought in.
The Dealer Button will move across one, and we're all ready to start our next hand.
