888poker Team

Chinese poker is simply a type of poker game, although it’s quite different from some of the form of poker we might be familiar with. For a start, players don’t make use of chips like in common poker variants such as Hold’em and Omaha. Instead, players play for points or units. The objective is to arrange our cards into three rows where points are awarded for rows that beat our opponent’s corresponding row. Like Stud games, there are many different versions of Chinese Poker so it’s definitely a good idea to recap on the exact rules before playing for real money.

A bluff in poker means to represent that we hold a strong hand when we don’t. We make bets and raises in the hope that our opponent gives us credit for having a legitimate hand and folds the best hand as a result. Bluffing is an important part of poker and in many cases what makes the game so appealing to first time players. Without the aspect of bluffing, poker would simply be a game where players try to make the strongest hand.

Expected value refers to the amount of money we can expect to win/lose on average after making a certain decision at the poker tables. It has the exact same meaning as expectation. A poker decision that is expected to make money in the long run can be described as a decision with a ‘positive expected value’ or “plus-EV” (+EV) for short. Although our results will rarely conform to our expected value in the short term, good poker players realise that the expected value of a decision is far more important than short term results.

Equity is our percentage chance to win a hand of poker assuming we are all-in. For example, in Hold’em, AA has 81.94% equity against KK. In practice, equity does not tell us the whole picture regarding how often we’ll win, because either we or our opponent could end up folding some of the time. Having a rough idea of our equity is still helpful however and will help us to increase the quality of our decisions at the table.

The term combination refers to one instance of particular holding in poker. For example, there are six different ways to be dealt pocket Aces preflop in Hold’em so we can say that there are six possible combinations of pocket Aces. There are also 12 different combinations of each off suit hand and 4 combinations of each suited hand. In most discussions, the term combinations is abbreviated to combos.

Ring Game is a term used to describe a cash game in poker (as opposed to tournament format). Since not all poker games are played with real cash, the term ring game might make more sense when describing such a format. In most cases however, ring game is used interchangeably with cash game; although cash game is used more commonly to describe this format (even for play money games).