An Introduction to Poker & its History

Series Summary

Poker is a vying card game that involves the use of guarded hands of cards and wagers on a central pot of money or chips. The winner is the player with the best combination of cards in his or her hand, combined with the best bet. The game requires the skill of subtlety, as well as knowledge of the card deck and the probability of certain hands. The art of deduction and bluffing can combine to make a very successful poker player. Though there are many variations of poker, most players use the same basic pattern to play. A dealer will hand out cards to players, at which point betting and assessing hands based on the dealer's house hand takes place. Though the game's origins are hard to pin down, it has been played in one variation or another for many years. Today, the game is even popular online, as players compete on the Internet against challengers and a computerized dealer. Understanding poker probability and betting strategy is extremely important, even for beginners, and for the cheater at the table, card counting might also play a role.

In this free video clip series, our expert will introduce you to the game of poker, go over some of the game's history, and explain some basic strategies for winning. The art of betting in poker is included, offering tips and solutions for winning poker games, as well as techniques for recognizing an opponent's standing mid-round and probability of winning hands based on deals and draws. Card counting techniques are also explained and demonstrated.

Video Transcript

" I am Joe Marshall with Expert Village.com and today we are going to learn how to win at poker. Poker has been around forever. It was first discovered in Europe and Asia and then it landed it here in America in the Mississippi Port of New Orleans as early as the 1800s. It was originally played with 20 cards. It consisted of Aces, all the tens and the core cards and the flushes and straights were not recognized as legitimate hands obviously because straights and flushes were easy to come by with only core cards, tens and aces in the deck. As early as 1840, the game was played with a full 52 card deck. Today we will be learning draw poker also known as five-card poker or Jacks or better. The nice thing about poker is even if luck is not on your side you can still win the game with skill and use of psychology. We are going to be talking about the ranks of the hands, how to win, how to bluff, how to count cards and all kinds of other things. There is over 2,500,000 different combinations that could be made out of five-card hands and only 10 of those combinations allows you to have a winning poker hand and we will discuss that now."