Call them rules, conventions, or Poker etiquette, some guidelines are common to all forms of Poker, especially Poker in card clubs or casinos. Although you may find some minor variations from one casino to another, many card casinos are working diligently toward a uniform set of guidelines. Going all-in If you don't have enough to cover the bets and raises, you are said to go all-in and are simply contesting that portion of the pot your money covers.

If you've watched a few Poker games in a card club while waiting for a seat, you'll notice that players don't play as many hands as they do in home games. Although there is seldom a spoken agreement to play every hand in a home game, because of the chummy atmosphere, many players simply play lots of hands. That's not the case in a casino.

The kinds of players sitting at your table in a Poker parlor will vary with the limits you play. If you play in low-limit games, you are not going to find either last year's World Series of Poker winner, the eight toughest card players in your hometown, or any legends of the game.Although there are many ways to classify players as you try to build a book on your opponents, the easiest way is to group your opponents into the following four types.

Casino Poker differs from typical home games. Although kitchen-table Poker may be long on camaraderie and unusual variants of the game, there are many reasons to play in a public cardroom. The most important factor may be that there is always a game. In fact, you frequently have a choice of games, which are often available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Without betting, Poker would just be a game of luck, and the best hand would always win. Betting is the key to Poker, and minimizing losses when holding a poor hand while maximizing wins with good hands is what Poker is all about.Every betting interval requires a check or a bet from the first player to act. Each player to the left of the first player to act may either check or bet if no one else has bet.

You have to pay to play Texas Hold'em, but all that play isn't going to last very long if you don't have enough supporting cash behind your game to survive the bad times. You don't have to play Poker to win. It's perfectly fine to just have your time at the table as a form of entertainment, but if you're playing to win, the total cash available to you (your bankroll) will make the difference between ongoing enjoyment of the game and sitting on the rail wondering what's on TV.

Seven-Card Stud and Texas Hold'em are the two most popular forms of Poker in which the highest ranking hand wins. These games are played with a 52-card deck — there is no joker — composed of four suits: spades, hearts, diamonds, and clubs.Each suit is equal in value, and there are 13 ranks in each suit. The ace is the highest ranking card in a suit, followed by king, queen, jack, and 10 through 2 (or deuce), in descending order.

In Spread-Limit Texas Hold'em games, you're allowed to bet any amount, within a given range, during a betting round. So in a $1 to $5 game you're allowed to bet $1, $2, $3, $4, or $5.About the only place you find Spread-Limit Hold'em is playing at other people's kitchen-table home games. Professional card houses dealing a Spread-Limit game are very rare, indeed, tending to happen only in places sitting in Poker backwaters.