Playing Pineapple poker Hi/Lo seems to be a lot like playing Omaha poker Hi/Lo, but the similarities are deceptive when you remember that you need only use one (or none) of your remaining hole cards to form your low hand after the river has been dealt. Here is the strategy we recommend for deciding which [...]

Pineapple poker, also known as Crazy Pineapple, is a relatively new flop game that you don’t see played a lot in brick-and-mortar casinos. In fact, the only time we’ve seen it played live was in a firehouse game in Maryland back in the early 1990s. You can find the game online at UltimateBet and ParadisePoker [...]

Picking good starting hands in Omaha Hi/Lo is even more difficult than picking hands in Omaha high, but once again Ed Hutchison spent the time to develop a hand scoring system that you can use to determine whether a four-card poker hand is playable in Omaha poker Hi/Lo.
The first step is to figure out whether [...]

Here are five Omaha poker hands for you to score using the Hutchison system. You’ll find the answers below the final hand.
A♠A♦J♠4♣
K♥Q♥J♠8♦
T♣T♠7♥7♠
9♥8♦7♠6♣
5♥5♠4♥4♠
You should assign the following scores to the sample hands:
A♠A♦J♠4♣ receives 4 points for the Ace-high flush draw in spades, 9 points for the pair [...]

Because the Hutchison system determines a hand’s approximate winning percentage if every player stayed through the river, we can test its accuracy in Wilson Software’s Turbo Omaha High. We decided to start at the top, with A♠A♣K♠K♣ (“Ace, King double-suited�?). The Hutchison system assigns this poker hand points in the following manner:
4 points for [...]

Hutchison used Mike Caro’s Poker Probe software to find the winning percentage of selected four-card poker hands against nine opponents. After he finished running the simulations, he correlated the hand’s winning percentage with characteristics of that hand, such as card rank, suitedness, pairs, and the distance between cards that could be used to make straights. [...]

Omaha high is a devilish game. Because each poker player is given four hole cards, there are all sorts of ways to make trips, quads, straights, flushes, and full houses. There are so many cards in play, in fact, that every starting hand has what seems to be a decent shot at winning a given [...]

When you’ve put in money as either the small or big blind in Texas Holdem, you have a lot of leeway in deciding which poker hands to play. If you’re the big blind and no one has raised, you get to play for free. You can raise, of course, and should with a big hand [...]

As you have probably guessed, if no one has raised in front of you, you can play a lot of hands when you’re last or next to last to act. You can also raise a lot with the goal of stealing the blinds, but you have to be on the watch for players who will [...]

You have to be conservative when you’re close to the blinds, but when you’re four, five, or six seats from the blinds, you can loosen up a bit and play more hands. Table 1 lists the additional poker hands we believe are playable in middle position if no one has raised in front of you. [...]

Texas Holdem may seem like game where any set of hole cards can win. That argument is true in that it’s possible for any two, three, or four cards to win, but there are some poker hands that are much more likely to take down the pot than others. In Texas Holdem, the best two-card [...]

After you’ve played at a poker room for a while, you’ll probably start running into the same players, particularly if you consistently play at the same time of day. Here are a few characteristics you can watch out for:

Same players always at the same table
Same players always in the hand together [...]

In a brick-and-mortar casino, a player is not allowed to be in more than one poker game at a time. The beauty of the online poker world is that playing multiple games at once is permitted! When playing Texas Holdem, a player will usually see at least 100 poker hands per hour per table. Two [...]

There are a few other topics we’ll need to cover to get you fully up to speed for the online poker environment, and here they are!
The Rake
As we’ve mentioned previously, a poker room makes its money by taking a percentage of each pot for itself. Remember, unlike traditional casino games such as slot [...]

When the cards come out, you will be presented with some check boxes to automate your actions. In a typical poker room there will be two types of check boxes. The first type allows you to automate actions for all poker hands; the second type is what you want to do for your next action. [...]

For best results, a poker player aspiring to make a profit over time should be strong at as many games as possible and should also be a strong ring game and tournament player. Over time, you will be able to use the lobby as a tool to put yourself in situations in which you are [...]

To log on to your poker room, double-click its icon on your desktop (which will have been created when you installed the host software) and let your and their computer do the connection-establishing thingy they do. Enter your user name and password in the appropriate places, and you will see something similar to Figure 1. [...]

The best way to gain experience in playing tournaments is to jump right in and buy in to some poker tournaments on your online poker rooms of choice. UltimateBet has no-limit Holdem tournaments for buy-ins as low as $5, plus a $0.50 entry fee.
Two nice things about those $5 Texas Holdem tournaments are that [...]

Some poker tournaments, called freezeouts , only allow you to buy in once. The chips you get at the start of the day are all you can buy for that tournament. Many poker tournaments, particularly those with buy-ins of $100 or less, let you rebuy one or more times during the first hour of the [...]

Winning any money in a poker tournament is an exhilarating experience, but you find the real money in the top three positions. As an example, consider the data in Table 1, which shows the standard payout structure for a $40 PokerStars tournament with 500 players.

You can find the full standard payout schedule for PokerStars [...]

When you survive in a poker tournament long enough to be in a prize-paying position, you are in the money . The most critical time in any tournament is often when you are a few positions away from getting paid. There’s nothing more nerve-wracking than seeing a player who was all-in win a hand without [...]

You’ll eventually need to get all of the chips into your stack if you want to win a tournament, but you can’t get them all in the first 10 minutes unless it’s a really small field. But, because poker tournaments increase the limits you play at as time goes by, you need to win money [...]

Regardless of the type tournament you enter, you’ll have to have at least one chip, and preferably a lot more, in front of you to keep playing. In a tournament, you must base every decision on the impact a win or loss will have on your chances to remain in the tournament. You must be [...]

Buying an entry into a poker tournament seems like a straightforward affair: You put down your money and pick up your chips. That’s true for smaller poker tournaments, but you can also try to qualify for tournaments with large entry fees, typically $200 or more, by winning a smaller poker tournament where the prize is [...]

Are you the sort of poker player who likes to sit in a game for a long time and grind out your wins, using your skills to keep your losses to a minimum while you wait for those big poker hands to come along? Or are you the sort of poker player who likes to [...]

In a high-low split game, a player could always win the entire pot, or scoop, by having both the highest and lowest poker hand, such as with a Five-high straight flush (remember, straights and flushes don’t count against you when you’re going for low).
But what would happen if a player had the highest possible [...]

Because you can use both, one, or neither of your remaining hole cards to create your high and low hands, Crazy Pineapple poker is a bit more of a guessing contest than are poker games where you don’t have to discard a card after the flop.
Work through the following three practice poker hands to [...]

Work through the following three practice hands to form the highest and (if possible) lowest five-card Omaha hand from the board and the assigned hole cards. Once you’ve determined the best hands you can create using your hole cards, try to figure out the best possible poker hands you could create using any set of [...]

Unlike poker games played for low only, which allow any hand to be considered a low poker hand, high-low split games require that a low hand consist of five unpaired cards where every card is an Eight or lower. Thus 8432A qualifies as a low poker hand, but 9432A does not. You also need to [...]