Poker Lingo for the Newbie
It is only natural for a novice poker player to enter an online poker room, begin a game and find the players communicating in an almost alien language. After a while you begin to suspect that these are neither typos nor a plot against the newcomer, but terms and abbreviations which are obvious to any decent poker amateur. The game is full of poker-specific words and concepts. This article might be of some help to those of you who occasionally have trouble understanding some of the chat messages in online poker rooms or forums.
The first step for you to take is to learn the lingo in the most popular of the online games – Texas hold’em. Whether you are playing a limit, pot-limit, or no-limit game, there will from two to ten folks playing with you. The person handing out the cards to the players is the dealer. The dealer’s location at the table is demarcated by a special “button,” thus he may be termed “the button.” The button or dealer in online games is not to be thought of as the same as the dealer in a casino. The casino dealer is being paid for his work by the casino and in no way is a participant in the game.
Situated in back of the dealer are two players who are there to make blind bets. Bet size depends solely on the limit at the table. The first bettor puts one half of the limit as a blind bet, the bet being termed as a small blind. The second bettor makes a full-limit bet which is called the big blind. So, in the case of a table limit of $2/$4, the small blind bet is for $2 and the second big blind bet is for $4. Usually, terms are abbreviated to indicate the positions of the players. The small blind is SB and the big blind is BB. It is most confusing that those abbreviations, SB and BB, can also mean small bet and big bet which is not the same at all, so beware.
The first move is always made by the small blind player. Because of this, his position is counted as the first position. The button, or dealer, plays last and is counted as whatever that number is depending on the number of players at the table. The second move is by the big blind and the third player is still in an early position and “under the gun” or UTG. Following are the next two positions also considered “early” are known as UTG +1 and UTG + 2. Are you still with me?
The next three players represent the middle position: MP1, MP2, and MP3. The next “late” position includes the player immediately before the button – referred to as the cutoff or CO – and finally the button player him or her self.
These are position terms for a ten player Texas Holdem game. In a game of less than ten players, some of the positions will be missing.
The first step of the game is called the preflop, during which each player is dealt two pocket cards. Three “streets” follow the preflop: the flop, the turn (the fourth street), and the river (the fifth street). During these rounds community cards are laid out on the table (also “the board”), called after the relevant streets: first three flop cards, then one turn and one river card. Flop cards of different suits are called a rainbow.
This is a bare beginning in the argot of online poker, but it should whet your appetite to learn more terms and gain more understanding of the games in the online poker rooms. So, good luck and enjoy the game and the education you are giving yourself.
The author is a full time online poker player and makes the majority of his income from his online play and rakeback at True Poker. To sign up for a Rakeback account of your own visit Rakeback Solution.
