Learning how to hold 'em
By Holden Lewis • Bankrate.com

Hold 'em poker is simple yet deep. It features "community cards" -- cards that are dealt face-up in the center of the table, and which all the players share when they assemble their best possible hand.

A hand begins when each player is dealt two cards face down (the "hole cards"). A round of betting follows. Then three cards are dealt face-up ("the flop"). Players bet. A fourth card ("the turn") is dealt face-up. Players bet. A final card ("the river") is dealt face-up. Players bet. The player with the best five-card combination among his hole cards and the community cards wins the pot.

Once all five community cards have been dealt, it's easy to figure out the best possible hand ("the nuts"). If you hold the nuts, you can't lose, and you bet accordingly.

In about 12 hours of play, I never held the nuts.

At noon on a Tuesday, I walked into the Palms poker room, a quiet refuge from the noisy casino floor, and sat at the table of Sandi, a dealer and our teacher for the day. There were seven other students, including a guy who said he worked as a producer for the "World Poker Tour" shows on the Travel Channel. Sandi handed us little crib sheets that ranked poker hands, from royal flush to high card.

Sandi taught us where to put our chips when placing a bet, how the deal rotates, how the blind bets (similar to antes) work, even how to peek at our hole cards without looking like dweebs. She told us that a sure sign of a novice is when a player looks at his or her hole cards more than once. She explained that in this particular low-limit game, bets and raises are in $2 increments in the first two betting rounds, and in $4 increments in the final two betting rounds. No more, no less.

She explained what the nuts are, and taught us a dollop of strategy -- namely, that most hole cards aren't worth playing and should be folded posthaste. Not everyone plays that way. "Some people call the low-limit game 'no fold 'em hold 'em,'" Sandi said with a grin.

After an hour of instruction, Sandi announced that the lesson was over. "So -- who wants to play poker?" she said.

I did. But I had only $35 in my pocket. I could go upstairs to my room and grab my Bankrate bankroll out of the safe, but people were waiting to play (Vegas residents eager to swoop down like owls and devour the novices) and I didn't want to give up my seat at the table. I bought $30 worth of chips and figured I would be broke in minutes.

But you can play for a long time at low-limit poker when you're a rock -- that is, when you fold almost every hand and bet only when you hold good pocket cards. That's what I did, and I regretted it at first. In one stretch of five hands, I folded immediately as soon as I saw my hole cards -- and watched incredulously as I realized that I would have won four of those hands if only I had stayed in. I folded after being dealt a pair of 4s, and I would have ended up with three 4s and two kings. I folded two clubs -- a queen and 3 -- and a woman won with a jack-high club flush. That one hurt.

The good hole cards kept coming, and I began betting, Over the next two hours I won money. I had an interview to do, so I left the table after a couple of hours, $37 richer.