Things To Know About Casino Poker

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Good Things About Casinos
How To Play Casino Poker

Robert Woolley

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.

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.

Good Things About Casinos

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.

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

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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Robert Woolley

At the end of last week, word came that MGM Resorts, one of the largest casino companies in the world, will be banning cash from playing at the tables in its poker rooms effective April 1, 2015. The change will happen at many properties, including in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand, the Aria, the Bellagio, the Luxor, Mandalay Bay, and others.

The news prompted me to reflect on how cash differs from chips in what we somewhat imprecisely refer to as “cash games” in poker. I came up with a list of seven things you should keep in mind when in comes to casino poker games with actual cash in play.

1. Rules vary, so be sure you know what’s allowed

I have played in some casinos where no cash was allowed in play, some where any cash — including down to $1 bills — was allowed, and some with an in-between rule. Perhaps the most common example of the latter is that $100 bills are the only currency permitted. The only way to know is to ask the dealer before you try to add cash to your chips.

2. Dealers may not notice cash

I remember an incident from the Imperial Palace poker room in Vegas. At the time, no cash was allowed in play there, though I didn’t know that rule when this happened.

In one hand, I missed a flush draw but rivered a small pair. I checked. My opponent moved all in — he had a single $1 chip and a single $100 bill, both of which he pushed forward. The bill had been sitting in front of him for several hands at least, but the dealer had failed to notice it until this moment. He informed the player that the bill was not in play, so the all-in bet was only $1.

The floor was called and made the same ruling. The player was livid. I called his $1, though I was about 99% sure I was losing. He had the nuts — a straight. He was ranting about how he was being cheated out of $100. I reassured him that $1 was just about the most I would have called, so the error actually made him an extra dollar that he otherwise would not have gotten, because if his bet had been $101, I would have folded. That calmed him down.

Another time at the Venetian, I noticed that a player had a stack of $20 bills sitting behind his chips. I don't know how long they had been there before I spotted them. I waited until the hand was over, then told the dealer, “We should probably get clarified whether that cash is in play.” The dealer, too, had failed to notice whenever it was that the player had added the money to his stack. He got it changed for chips, and all was well.

If you see another player with cash that you think might not be allowed by the house rules, always ask the dealer to clarify the situation.

3. Beware of bills folded up

Many players fold up their paper money and tuck it under their chips, or keep the bills vertical, hidden behind their chip stacks.

Some are doing this innocently, just to get the money out of the way, not realizing that this can make it hard for others to judge visually how much they have in play. But some do it deliberately, exactly for this reason. They are angle shooters. They hope to get you to underestimate how much they have in play, so that if you call their all-in bet, you’re committed for a lot more money than you thought.

If you notice that another player has bills behind or under his or her chips — in such a way that they are not easily visible — you can and should politely ask the dealer to help the player arrange the cash so that it is readily apparent to all.

4. Players “rathole” cash more than chips

Once in a while you’ll see a player take bills off of the table, otherwise known as “ratholing.” Most often, this is an innocent mistake made by somebody who doesn’t understand casino rules. It is most likely to happen immediately after such a player wins a big pot that contains both chips and cash. Keep an eye on the bills, and if you see them being taken off the table, be sure to point it out to the dealer so that he or she can explain to the player how table stakes work.

Other players, however, do this with full knowledge that it’s against the rules. They want to lock up a profit rather than keep all of their winnings in play, and it seems easier to slip a few bills off of the table than chips. If you notice that a player who once had several bills in play suddenly doesn’t, again, let the dealer know so the situation can be investigated.

5. It’s easy to misjudge the size of your own stack

I have made this mistake more often that I’d like to admit. I’m so used to counting chip stacks, that my brain somehow completely ignores the $100 bills sitting right next to the chips.

Because I know that I’m prone to this visual error, I try whenever possible to trade in cash for chips. You might consider doing the same.

6. People react differently to bets made with cash than with chips

One of the most famous hands from the old High Stakes Poker TV show was when Brad Booth bluffed Phil Ivey off of pocket kings with . Memorably, he did it by placing into the pot three bricks, each consisting of one thousand $100 bills, while Ivey had roughly $250,000 in chips in his stack. Take a look:

Notice at about the 2:35 mark of that video clip, Ivey, pondering whether to call, says, “I wish you’d put the chips in. The cash just looks so sweet.”

The implication is that he is more tempted to call by the cash than he would be by the chips. It’s possible that Booth miscalculated on this point, thinking that the cash was more “intimidating” (as the commentators point out), and should have used chips instead of cash if he wanted to be more likely to induce a fold. But it’s also possible that he knew exactly the effect it would have and used it to his advantage to make it look like he wanted a call, when he clearly didn’t.

Either way, the point is that even a player as experienced as Ivey has a different emotional reaction to cash than to chips. Cash is real, spendable money. Chips are an abstraction. You should keep that in mind as you decide what effect you want to create with your bets.

At the same time, you should not allow yourself to be swayed in your reaction to an opponent’s bet by whether it was made with cash or chips. They are interchangeable, and you should treat them as such.

7. Players protect their cash differently

For the same psychological reason, you’ll often find that players protect the cash portion of their stacks differently than the portion that is in chips. Because of the abstraction element, they find chips easier to bet than cash. Somehow it hurts less to lose chips than to lose the same amount in cash. This is irrational, but common.

You need to watch how opponents bet, because if you’re up against a player who makes this kind of distinction, a bet with cash is much less likely to be a bluff than a bet with chips.

Maybe MGM’s move is a harbinger of things to come, and soon all casinos will adopt a no-cash policy. But until that day arrives, give yourself a strategic advantage by remembering these tips about the ways in which cash differs from poker chips.

How To Play Casino Poker