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1. Texas Hold Em Strategy

Ultimate Texas Holdem Strategy The biggest takeaway from the rules section is that the amount a player is allowed to Raise will decrease with each passing round of play. Either way, a Raise (aka Play Bet) must be made at some point, or the player must fold.

Casinos are always looking for new games to offer bored gamblers. Over the last decade or 2, these games are more commonly related to poker than anything else. But games like these—including Scientific Gaming’s Ultimate Texas Holdem—are more akin to blackjack than to poker. In fact, dealing Ultimate Texas Holdem is considered dealing a novelty casino game. The College of Southern Nevada covers how to deal Ultimate Texas Holdem in their blackjack class.

What’s the big difference between Ultimate Texas Holdem (and games like it) and “real” poker games? The main difference is who you’re competing with. In a so-called real poker game, you’re competing with the other players at the table. If you win money, you’re winning it from them. If you lose money, you’re losing it to your competitors at the table.

This isn’t a value judgment. It’s perfectly all right to play house-banked casino games. Gamblers do it every day. I’m pointing out the distinction because it’s important to know what you’re getting into when you play a casino game.

With that as a premise—understanding in detail what you’re getting into when you’re playing a casino game—I offer you this post: “The Definitive Guide to Ultimate Texas Holdem.” The idea is to share everything you would ever need or want to know about Ultimate Texas Holdem. Luckily, it’s not that complicated a game. There’s no need to write an entire book about it, like you would do with blackjack or poker.

Ultimate Texas Holdem is a card game where you play heads-up against a casino dealer. Other players at the table are also playing heads-up against the dealer. It features a progressive jackpot, among other payouts.

You start by making 2 equal-sized bets:

• The Ante Bet
• The Blind Bet

At most casinos, the minimum bet is either $5 or $10. The maximum bet is usually between $50 an $500.

You also have 2 optional bets you can make:

• The Trips Bonus Bet
• The Progressive Bet

You start by getting 2 hole cards from the dealer—these are 2 cards that are dealt to you face-down, just like in regular Texas holdem.

When you get those cards, you can choose from the following actions:

• Check
• Bet 3X the Ante (A “Play” Bet.)
• Bet 4X the Ante (Also a “Play” Bet.)

After you’ve made your decision, the dealer reveals 3 face-up cards—the “flop.” (This is also how regular Texas holdem works.)

If you checked when you got your hole cards, you have the option now to place a bet of 2X the Ante (another example of a “Play Bet.”) After that decision is made, the dealer turns over 2 more face-up cards—the turn and the river, in Texas holdem terms. Note that the action here is different than in traditional Texas holdem. Normally you’d have a turn, followed by a betting round, then the river, followed by another betting round.

Once you’ve made your decision, the dealer reveals her hole cards and announces the final hand. If your hand beats the dealer’s hand (using the standard poker hand rankings), you win even money on your Ante bets and the Play bets. On the other hand, if the dealer’s hand beats yours, you lose your Ante, Blind, and Play Bets. If you tie, then these bets are all treated as a “push.” (A push is when your original bet is returned to you, but without any winnings. You have neither a net win nor a net loss.)

The Blind Bet is handled differently. It pays off if you win AND if you have a straight or better. If you have less than a straight but still beat the dealer, the Blind Bet is treated as a push. The Blind Bet is paid off based on a pay table. The better your hand, the more it pays off. (It’s like video poker in this respect.)

Casinos generally use a shuffling machine called an “i-Deal single deck specialty shuffler.” That’s because this game was created by Shufflemaster, which is now a division of Scientific Games. Shufflemaster’s reason for existence is to sell shuffling machines to casinos, so creating new cards is something they do in service to this goal.

The Blind Bet and the Trips Bonus Bet have 2 different pay tables.

Here’s a common pay table for the Blind Bet:

Keep in mind that the Blind Bet pays off regardless of whether the dealer qualifies. Also, notice that 3 of a kind doesn’t pay off for the Blind Bet, which is an interesting quirk of the game. The pay tables can vary—the casino gets to choose from multiple options. For example, some casinos pay off 40 to 1 instead of 50 to 1 for a straight flush. This changes the house edge for the game, of course.

Here’s a common pay table for the Trips Bonus Bet:

Here are a couple of facts to keep in mind about the Trips Bonus Bet:

• Your hand doesn’t have to win. It pays off regardless of whether you or the dealer wins.
• It wins even if you don’t have to use your hole cards. You can just play the board (the flop, turn, and river.)
• It wins even if you fold.

How the Progressive Bet and Jackpot Works

The progressive bet in Ultimate Texas Holdem is also an optional side bet. At most casinos, this bet is a flat $1 bet. But at some casinos, the Progressive Bet is $5. You can win 1 of 2 progressive jackpots in this game—the smaller jackpot, or the larger jackpot. To win the smaller progressive jackpot, you must use at least 1 of your hole cards. The smaller progressive pays off for hands that are a full house or better.

Texas Hold Em Strategy

To win the bigger progressive jackpot—which is 100% of the jackpot—you must use both your hole cards and the flop to form a royal flush. If you hit the royal flush on the turn or the river, you don’t win the bigger progressive. You can also win a percentage of the full big progressive jackpot

Casinos also feature something called an “Envy Bonus.” This is a bonus paid to any player at the table when one of the other players wins the progressive jackpot.

Casino games where you make decisions usually have a house edge that varies based on how well you make those decisions. In other words, your strategy matters. There’s always a mathematically correct play in every situation. In Ultimate Texas Holdem, your strategy is limited to whether you make Play Bets during the various stages of the game. For me, this isn’t an intuitive decision. You can find various websites offering strategies for this, but I have another recommendation:

The house edge is the amount of each bet that the casino projects you’ll lose on average based on the probabilities behind the game. Obviously, the lower the house edge, the better for the player. You should do everything you can to minimize the house edge on any casino game you play.

If you use perfect basic strategy on Ultimate Texas Holdem, the house expects to win a little over 2%. Let’s assume that the house edge is 10% if you don’t know basic strategy. What does that do to the cost of playing the game in the long run?

There’s an interesting post at Two Plus Two from a gambler describing his basic strategy for Ultimate Texas Holdem. I don’t know how close it mirrors a mathematically perfect strategy, but here’s what “nonprofitgambler” says is the correct way to play:

Preflop, he suggests raising with any of the following hands:

• Any ace
• Any k5+, and any king suited
• Q5s+, Q8+
• J8s+, JT+
• 33+ for pocket pairs

That small “s” after the number means that the cards are of the same suit (they’re “suited.”) On the flop, he says most people play the same, and that it’s correct—if you pair anything, you raise. But those obviously aren’t the only hands you should raise with here. You should also bet flush draws, straight draws, and combination draws. This means you have 4 cards to a big hand. On the river, you should bet any kind of made hand, but some boards are scarier than others.

Finally, I’d like to point out that the house edge on Ultimate Texas Holdem isn’t outrageous, but blackjack is still almost always a better deal. With perfect basic strategy, many blackjack games have a house edge of just 0.5%. This means you get the same kind of entertainment for closer to $2/hour instead of $8/hour.

You can play a nice, free version of Ultimate Texas Holdem at this site. It has a place where you can toggle the sound on and off. You can also toggle the “give advice” button off an on. If you’ve never played Ultimate Texas Holdem before, this page is a great way to practice. It’s refreshingly free of advertising, too, which is rare and unusual in this industry.

Also, if you like Ultimate Texas Holdem, I suggest you give multiplayer Texas holdem in the poker room a try—if you haven’t already. It’s a lot more fun, and you have more of an opportunity to get an edge, since you’re competing against other players.

That’s it for my “Definitive Guide to Ultimate Texas Holdem.” I can’t imagine any information you could want about the game that I’ve left out. But if I did miss something, or if you have questions about Ultimate Texas Holdem that remain unanswered, please put a note in the comments.

Poker is one of the greatest games on earth. The combination of skill and luck, the psychological element, and the fact you can make money from it all help with its popularity. But in order for you to make money from poker, you need to learn how to win at poker, which is actually easier than some would suggest.

Learning how to win at Texas hold’em can be broken down into four categories. (It can probably be broken down into many more, but for the sake of simplicity we’ve opted for four.) Those categories are:

• Learn the basics
• Learn advanced concepts
• Apply your new skills
• Continue the learning process

Learn the Basics

It should go without saying that in order to discover how to win in poker, you need to learn the basics of the game. When I first started playing poker, I didn’t know anything about the game, even including what hands beat what. You’d be surprised at how many people sit in a real money game and expect to win at Texas Holdem poker without even a clear understanding of the rules and other basics.

Those basics not only include knowing the poker hand rankings so you know what beats what, but also the various positions at the poker table and how they affect your strategy, pot odds and implied pot odds, and the importance of following solid bankroll management rules. Once armed with this information, you’re ready to add a few more strings to your bow and move one step closer to discovering how to be a winning player.

Players new to any form of poker could do a lot worse than start their poker career at WSOP Social Poker. The free-to-play site designed by the World Series of Poker is the perfect place to get to grips with cash games and poker tournaments because there is no rake and no financial risk at all.

Learn Advanced Concepts

The next stage in your quest to win at poker every time is to learn some of the more advanced concepts. Fill your mind by studying such aspects of the game as three- and four-betting, as well as how to play against the various different player types — e.g., tight-aggressive, loose-aggressive, and loose-passive — because each opponent type needs to be approached with a different strategy.

One advanced concept became public knowledge in the mid-1990s when David Sklansky penned The Theory of Poker. It is in this book that you will find Sklansky’s thoughts on what he calls “The Fundamental Theorem of Poker,” which reads:

“Every time you play a hand differently from the way you would have played it if you could see all your opponents’ cards, they gain; and every time you play your hand the same way you would have played it if you could see all their cards, they lose. Conversely, every time opponents play their hands differently from the way they would have if they could see all your cards, you gain; and every time they play their hands the same way they would have played if they could see all your cards, you lose.”

This text may seem long winded, but the idea being expressed is quite simple. What the theorem is essentially saying is that the correct decision to make in any given poker situation is one that has the largest expected value, or “EV” as it is commonly abbreviated. If you were able to see your opponents’ cards, you would be able to calculate the mathematically correct decision and would win at poker every time!

Obviously, it is not possible to calculate the correct decision to mathematical certainty as poker is a game played with incomplete information. But you can use all of the available information presented to you to make a decision that would yield long-term positive results — decisions that are +EV.

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Apply Your Skills

While it is practically impossible to learn how to win at poker every time in a monetary sense, due to the luck factor, by making decisions that are +EV you actually are winning every time you play poker, at least in the long term.

As a simplified example, imagine you are heads-up with an opponent in a hand where the board reads . You hold and your opponent has accidently revealed , so you know that you need to complete your flush to win the hand. There is $100 in the pot and for some reason you opponent decides to only bet $20. In this situation you should snap-call, because even if the river is not a spade you actually gain in the long run.

Why is this the case? Because the pot odds you’re receiving are 5-to-1 (calling $20 to win $100) yet your chance of hitting your flush with one card to come is about 4.1-to-1. As the pot odds are greater than the odds of hitting the hand, you actually make money in the long run even if your flush misses! That is to say, if you faced the same choice many, many times and always chose correctly, you do stand to come out ahead thanks to your consistently “+EV” decisions. And that folks, is how to win at poker every time!

Of course, the game is more complex than that overly simply example suggests. But in essence the idea still holds. The key to how to win at poker is to make more +EV decisions that –EV ones, and then play enough for the math to make the results run true. Sadly, this can take longer than you could imagine, but it does happen eventually!

Continue the Learning Process

It may seem to an outsider that the best poker players have discovered the secret of how to win at poker every time, yet this simply isn’t true. What is true is those at the top of the pile are extremely skilled poker players, but they are also some of the hardest working people in the industry, constantly working on their game and trying to improve.

One way to improve your own game vastly and increase your chances of learning to win at Texas Hold’em is to play around with different scenarios to see what the mathematically correct decision would be. Load up the PokerNews Odds Calculator and look at how much equity your hand has on different boards and against different possible hands for your opponents. There are other tools out there that allow you to see how your exact hand fares against a possible range of hands, too.

Knowing this information and being able to draw upon it while in the heat of a hand could be the difference between winning or losing at poker or losing. Always look to extract as much value as mathematically possible, if you want always to win at poker.

_{This article was originally published on Jan. 15, 2016. Last update: Jun. 8, 2019.}

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  cash game strategytournament strategyTexas hold’emno-limit hold’embeginner strategy