I’ve been in the Texas Hold’em world for so long that I just kinda assume that everyone in the world understands the basics. Luckily, every time I talk to my parents about what I do, I remember otherwise…because I have to explain it. All over again. and tell them why Texas Hold’em is different than an online casino USA.

Texas Hold’em is so hugely popular now that when you say “poker”, you probably mean Texas Hold’em.

But of course it hasn’t always been that way, and in fact it hasn’t been like that for more than ten or fifteen years. Not too long ago, when you said “poker”, the other person probably assumed that you meant Draw Poker, which is about as different from Hold’em as lions are to tigers, or online slots are to the land-based equivalent.

They’re both cats, though. All poker games share some basic things in common, and (aside from a few rare exceptions), you can count on many of the same things.

• the basic equipment is a deck of 52 cards and a bunch of chips. You can replace the chips with actual cash or anything else (if you really want to), but you can’t replace the cards.
• A “hand” starts with ‘forced’ player contributions (called an ante or a blind, but don’t sweat that just yet)
• one of the players acts as the dealer, who shuffles and hands out the cards. The dealer position rotates clockwise around the table after each hand, for obvious (and less obvious) reasons.
• you’re trying to take as many chips as possible from the other players. If you just can’t win, you can at least lose less for now and try to make up for it later. The last guy standing will have all the chips (unless you just have to end the game, or unless you’re in a tournament, but let’s keep it simple for now).
• each “round” consists of more or different cards (from the same previously-shuffled deck) which may change the overall situation, and then more betting based on the ‘new’ arrangement of cards.
• suits almost never matter; card values do. Check out my page on poker hand values — I’ll go into a little bit more depth about the difference between a straight and a flush, between a kicker and a handful of garbage.