texas hold em tournament

The coverage of the World Poker Tour on the Travel channel and ESPN¡¯s broadcast of the World Series of Poker has sparked the interest of the ¡°kitchen table¡± poker players as well as some people who have never played poker before. The game that has everyone buzzing is Texas Hold¡¯em.

However before you race down to the casino and sign up for a high stakes tournament you need to learn the basics of the game and get some playing experience in low limit games. The matches you see on television are No Limit Texas Hold¡¯em games. That means that at any time a player can bet all of his chips. This is a great format for tournaments but as a beginning player you will want to first learn to play Limit Texas Hold¡¯em.

Texas Hold¡¯em is a deceptively simple game to learn but a harder game to master. Each player is dealt two personal cards an

d then five community cards are turned up on the board. You make the best five card hand using any combination of the seven cards. For this example we will use a low limit structure of $2/4. There are four betting rounds and the first two have a limit of $2 and the last two rounds have a limit of $4. You must bet or raise only the amount of the limit for that round.