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Five-bet or 5bet refers to the fifth bet (or fourth raise) in a betting sequence. 5bets most commonly occur on the preflop betting round in games such as Hold’em and Omaha. It’s important to remember that the first preflop bet in Hold’em and Omaha is the mandatory blind post, not the open-raise. The open-raise is actually the second bet in sequence and is therefore a referred to as a 2bet. Preflop 5bets in Hold’em and Omaha are usually all-in, although not always.

Fish is a term used to describe a weak poker player at the table. It’s important to be careful when using this term at the poker table, since many imagine the word to be rude and offensive. Most professional players have now adopted the term fish as a technical term to describe a ‘weak regular’at the table, but many sources still avoid using the term fish in favour of phrases such as “recreational player”or “fun player”.

Favourite means we are likely to win in a certain situation. It can refer to an individual hand of pokeror an entire event such as a tournament or cash game. In a heads up hand of poker, a hand is favourite if it has above 50% pot equity. In an event such as a cash game or tournament, a player is said to be favourite if they are believed to have a skill advantage over their opponents. In a tournament setting, a player might also be described as favourite if they have the largest chip stack when drawing close to the end of the event.

Fastplay means to play a strong value hand by aggressively betting and raising (often for large bet sizings). It’s the opposite term to slowplay, which means to play a strong made hand in deceptive, passive way (hoping to get a big payout on the later streets). Fastplaying big hands is usually the most profitable thing to do. Slowplaying in the wrong spots is a common mistake many players make.

A family pot is a pot where most or all of the players at the table see a flop (or whatever the second betting round is in other variants). In high level Hold’em games, the majority of flop situations are either heads up or 3-way. To see 5+ players on the flop, i.e a family pot,is not something that happens often. It’s either an extremely rare run of cards or it’s (more likely) an indication that the table is populated by weak players who are entering the pot with too many hands on the first betting round.

Expectation 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 expected value. A poker decision that is expected to make money in the long run can be described as a decision with a ‘positive expectation’. Although our results will rarely conform to our expectation in the short term, good poker players realise that the expectation of a decision is far more important than short term results.