How To Play Poker

The poker card game, the "Texas hold'em" variant, has its specific rules. Some of them are written, some are unwritten.

We in our Kartáč Casino at Mariánské Hory try to maintain the international standard of the game.

Poker as such continuously develops and changes; what applied yesterday, does not necessarily apply today. Each casino respects slightly different game rules, and the player must willy-nilly respect them. In case of a conflict, the casinos have a "referee" called Floorman who must make the most difficult decisions, because with two conflicting parties, there will always be one dissatisfied.

The international rules of the game should eliminate the conflict situations as much as possible, so that the players keep meeting at the poker tables, and we try to observe those rules in our Casino.

Game ethic is important both in poker and in general. The players must respect each other. There is not a situation where 9 professional players meet at a table and play good poker under all circumstances. Everybody had some beginnings and collected information how to play.

We would like to mention below some rules for each beginning poker player to know.

1. If you wish to raise your stakes, you must put in at least the double of what your opponent has put. (There is also so called difference raise where the minimum stake constitutes only twice the amount of the difference of last two stakes. But such type of stakes causes a lot of misunderstanding even at prestigious tournaments, and that is why we have chosen so called double raise.)

2. If you are an inexperienced player, you should not allow your opponents to notice it. One of the most frequent mistakes is wrong staking. We do not mean the actual amount of the stake but its execution. It is important that you stake with one move and do not put the chips divided into smaller amounts. The best thing is to announce the stake value aloud in advance, and then you can stake your chips in any way you wish. It is also good to know that you should always announce the total amount to which you are rising the stake, not "by how much" you are rising it.

3. Your attention is very important. If you discard your cards at an incorrect moment, getting ahead some players, you give them additional information about your non-participation in the game, and they will adapt their current play to it. That is of course unfair towards the players who already have expressed themselves at their turn.
The most frequent really very serious mistakes include your announcing a "call" without noticing that the player before you has bet all. In such case, if the all-in stake was properly announced by the player or by the croupier, or if all chips had been visibly betted, the distracted player must keep to his/her promise and match the stake he/she has overlooked. Earphones or studying of tablets or other imaging devices constitute the most frequent cause of such distractions.

4. True players never show their cards unless they have to. It would deprive them of the opportunity to bluff at the right moment, or they would lose face and the opponents would call also a worse card combination that would finally eliminate them for the game. If you want to show your cards, show them to all players at the table, not to only one player. All players are entitled to get the same information.

5. A true player never say the word „Fold" when discarding cards, but only move or throw the cards conveniently towards the dealer. The word „Fold" has similar intonation to „Call" and it can easily provoke a situation where the dealer will contend to have heard „Call", and the player will have no other choice but call.

6. The cards are really discarded (so called dead cards) only when the croupier has collected them to so called "Muck", i.e. adds them to the other discarded cards.

7. Always keep an eye on your cards. You can either hold them (but in such way that it can be seen that you still have the cards) or you can put for example a chip on them. If the croupier takes your cards to the "Muck" by mistake, you will not get them back any more.

We hope these short instructions will serve you well. We are looking forward to see you in our casino where we play really good poker.

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