How a hand is playedĪ Texas Hold’em hand starts with forced bets, called “Blinds”.

For instance, Ace-King-Jack-5-2 will beat Ace-King-Jack-4-2. If necessary, the second, third, fourth and even fifth card can be used to determine a winner. When two or more players are holding high card hands, the player showing the highest card wins, deuces being the lowest and Aces the highest. Kind of a desperate situation since you’re holding nothing: no pair, no flush, no straight, just five random cards. Don’t forget that in Texas Hold’em, you have seven cards available to construct your five-card hand: your two hole cards, plus the five community cards spread on the board.

Here are all the different card combinations you can have in Texas Hold’em, in descending order, from the highest ranked to the lowest.

No Limit Texas Hold’em is, as the name suggests, played with No Limit rules: this means that the betting amounts and number of raises is unlimited: every player can, at any time, bet as much as they wish, including all the chips they hold!.

To make this five card hand, every player can, according to the situation, use two, one, or none of their hole cards and combine them with three, four, or even five of the community cards.

In Texas Hold’em, every player receives two private cards, and must make the best hand possible using their two private cards and the five community cards which are available to every player.

Many factors contribute to its meteoric rise in the early 2000’s: its simplicity (you can learn the game in five minutes), the rise of online poker, the broadcasting of big poker tournaments on television (including the World Poker Tour), and the memorable victory of an amateur player called Chris Moneymaker (you couldn’t make it up!) at the World Series of Poker 2003.

No Limit Texas Hold’em is the most popular poker game of the 21st century.

The three key points about No Limit Texas Hold’em:

Official poker rules texas hold em