First Time Playing Poker At A Casino
4/14/2022 admin
Never played poker online before? Maybe you’re new to the game entirely, or perhaps the coronavirus casino closures have hit you hard. Whatever the reason, here’s a quick guide for what to expect your first time playing on the virtual felt.
If you’ve played poker at a casino but not on a computer…
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- In casual play, the right to deal a hand typically rotates among the players and is marked by a token called a dealer button (or buck).In a casino, a house dealer handles the cards for each hand, but the button (typically a white plastic disk) is rotated clockwise among the players to indicate a nominal dealer to determine the order of betting. The cards are dealt clockwise around the poker.
- The first time at a casino can be a little overwhelming, so like duggs said, play tight in the beginning. When you start going with the flow then you can play however you want. I'd also suggest not.
- A casino can be dead empty, yet you’ll still be have your choice of the slots. You’ll probably be able to play blackjack, Pai Gow, craps and roulette. Yet you will not be able to play poker. Poker players depend on other members of the general public walking into the casino to sit down and play poker.
As I explain in my book A Girl’s Guide to Poker, the average casino poker table deals 30 hands per hour, while the average online poker table deals 90 hands per hour. (Multiply this by the fact that many people play on three or four digital tables at once!) Since you are making triple the amount of decisions, an online poker tournament will be much more mentally taxing than a live one and requires greater resilience. You may be able to coast through an entire live tournament and play a cash game afterward without a problem, but feel the grind halfway through a computerized one.
Online poker is more aggressive
Digital poker is not for the faint of heart. People will reraise you much more frequently (read: all the time) with a seemingly unorthodox range. At live poker tables, the reraise hands are usually as follows: AA, KK, QQ, AK, AQ, JJ, and sometimes TT. (TT = tens in online poker lingo!) Meaning if you’re reraised at a live poker table, you should almost always fold a hand like AQ because you beat nothing. But if someone reraises you online and you have AQ, you should probably reraise them back all-in. They could very easily be messing around clicking buttons or making a move on you with a worse hand.
Online poker has better players
Put simply, and the skill level online is higher. There are a few reasons for this. For starters, casinos get more passersby and recreational players looking for a night out. People go for the experience rather than poker. But when you play poker online or on an app, people are obviously there for the poker as their #1 priority. Money also tends to be more meaningful online. Many young kids or people from different countries play virtually where $100 to you is $1,000 to them.
Familiarize yourself with the software
The last thing you want to do is go all-in for all your chips when you meant to fold. Mouse-click mistakes do happen, especially if you’re not used to the software. Many programs and apps use sliders to place bets and they can be extremely sensitive (ex. You’re trying to increase a $5 bet to $10, but end up sliding up to $350 in a millisecond). There also are usually boxes where you can type in exact amounts but can be hard to find, or not recognized as clickable.
Even CrushLivePoker owner Bart Hanson said in a recent podcast it took him months to realize the PokerBros software allowed you to type in bets rather than fumbling with the slider. Different programs will also have different time clocks — you might be allotted 90 seconds for your turn on one site, but only 10 seconds on another. Little nuances like these are everywhere. Take some time to practice for play money or at micro stakes before you invest for real.
Watch for timing tells
Just because you’re not staring eye-to-eye with your opponent doesn’t mean they don’t give off tells. When players act with lightning speed, they generally have a medium-strength hand — if they had anything better, they’d at least contemplate raising. Players that take forever to make their decisions likely are not gambling and instead are playing multiple digital tables at once so they can only play the best hands. (for example: If you’re playing ten tables at once, you might fold everything other than aces and kings) Look for games where people are acting quickly and impulsively.
If you’ve never played poker before…
Welcome!
Online is a great place to start. (Psst! So is my poker how-to book!) The stakes are lower — quarters instead of benjamins — so it’s a lower risk environment to practice. Since the pace is so much faster, you’ll see an infinitely greater number of hands and be able to catch-up to casino regulars in no time. A more aggressive poker will be normal for you. If you can beat the tougher online players, then live casino poker will be a piece of cake. Seriously! Practice with the best, and you’ll be the best.
Every so often I think back to the first time I anted up at the felt, for real, in a Las Vegas casino. Growing up in Los Angeles, my parents used to take the family to Vegas about 5–6 times a year. They had promised me that they’d take me to gamble along with them for my 21st birthday. Though that didn’t end up panning out, I was able to make my first visit to Vegas as a legal adult back in 2004, when I was 23 years old. In the immediate wake of the prior year’s Moneymaker poker boom, I was determined to “follow in his footsteps” as it were, and play poker at Binion’s Horseshoe, the then-home of the World Series of Poker.
Poker In Casinos
But before heading off to the “big stage”, I felt the need to “test out the waters”, so I headed over to the Excalibur poker room, of all random places. This was back when Excalibur had a poker room, and it was stocked full of real tables, not the electronic PokerTek tables. Like I said, this was WAY back when in the wake of the burgeoning poker boom every Las Vegas casino wanted a slice of the action.
Sometimes, Even the Best Laid Plans…
Upon entering the room I noticed that a free poker lesson was about to begin, after which a real cash game would commence among the participants. With a grand total of about 1.5 years of sporadic home game experience under my belt at the time, I figured that I could bide my time sitting through the lesson for half an hour and pretend not to understand the game at all, ask stupid questions, etc. Then, when the cash game would start, I planned on “flipping the switch” and taking everyone’s money. I remember feeling absolutely 100% confident that my scheme would work.
As an aside, I remember feeling exactly the same way, 100% confident that I’d win the first time I pulled a slot machine lever, because I’d read a couple books on how to “beat the casino”. Naturally, I was completely wrong about the slots, losing my $20 roll of quarters at Wheel of Fortune (this was before Ticket In/Ticket our technology really took hold).
Anyhow, as you probably guessed, I was totally off regarding my “post-lesson plans” for the poker table as well. I got wiped clean of my initial $50 buy-in in just under an hour.
Reexamining My First Vegas Casino Poker Session in Retrospect
Looking back, it’s likely that half of the other people sitting through that free poker lesson had the same “brilliant idea” as I had and were far more skilled and experienced than I was. I might of course be exaggerating, but it’s possible that many of them were even locals who woke up each morning licking their chops at how they were going to suck dry the bankrolls of unsuspecting recreational players taking poker vacations like me.
Of course, nearly a decade later, I realize how silly and absurd my “plan” was. But you’ve got to remember, this was 2004, an eternity ago as far as poker is concerned. “Know-it-alls” like me saw poker on TV and thought it was easy; fish were a dime a dozen, and practically nobody sitting around the felt in those days had done any sort of serious studying of the game.
My, what anyone playing the game today, even recreationally, would give to be transported back in time to those golden years of the poker boom, but armed with a decade of poker knowledge and experience… It’s practically a shoe-in that even if you wouldn’t make it as a star, you could at the very least grind out a pretty darn nice bankroll in a relatively short amount of time.
Oh well…
All these years later, it’s fun to laugh at myself when reminiscing about my first live poker session in Vegas. At least I sustained just a $50 loss. Plus I got a really quick, painful lesson in humility that I’ll never forget.
Oh, and as for my poker session at the Horseshoe, that’s a story that’ll have to wait for another time…
Did you experience something similar in your first foray into a Las Vegas poker room? Share your memories with us in the comments section below or on our Facebook page.
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