Tournament Strategies
After receiving pocket cards, you are immediately faced with a choice: play your cards and either raise or call the blinds, or fold.
Practice Matters
But most Poker variations,
But most Poker variations, like hundreds of other games played with cards, combine the elements of skill and chance. Now, what's chance? How does it work? You'll forgive me if I sound a little pedantic about this. But it brings up a subject which I think should be taught along with the three R's in every elementary school. If it were so taught, gambling would be reduced from a national problem to a sporadic eccentricity, and gambling casinos would close. With a very few dangerous exceptions, the average educated citizen has no knowledge of the subject and no interest in it, and this high-mindedness costs average educated citizens of the United States many billions of dollars a year.
I'm talking about a branch of mathematics called the theory of
I'm talking about a branch of mathematics called the theory of probability. It is called by gamblers—erroneously—the law of averages. As far as we're concerned, the theory of probability affords a method of calculating what can be expected to happen in a situation in which some of the factors are not at hand or, being at hand, are too complex to be easily broken down, assimilated and used.