SportsBetting presents an online casino experience that is second to none. All of your favorite casino games are available to you at the touch of a button. Simply, with fixed limit poker, the amount you can bet or raise is fixed for each round of betting. If you’re playing a $2-$4 fixed limit game, every player can only bet or raise $2 for the first few rounds (usually the first two) of betting, and can only bet or raise $4 for the last rounds of betting.
Ed. note: For those who might have missed it before, we're reprising Robert Woolley's series of articles for poker players who are new to live poker. The series is great for newcomers, and likely useful as well to those with experience playing in casinos and poker rooms.
This article continues the explanation I began last time regarding rules and procedures surrounding poker chips in brick-and-mortar casinos. Today I want to discuss how to handle your chips when making bets and raises. All of the following points apply equally to tournaments and cash games.
How to Handle Chips When Betting
To make a bet, count out the needed or desired number of chips and put them neatly in front of you, several inches beyond your cards. Do not 'splash the pot,' meaning tossing or dropping the chips. They tend to scatter in all directions, making it hard to tell how much you bet and wasting everybody's time while they are gathered up again.
Poker Betting Order
As soon as you release the chips, they belong to the pot, not to you. However, they are kept in front of you, separate from the pot and from the chips bet by other players, until the end of the round of betting. That way, if there is a raise after your turn, it's clear how much you have already bet and, therefore, how much you will need to add to your bet in order to call the raise.
When putting chips forward for a bet (or raise or call), you can either leave them all in one stack, break them down into a few stacks for easier counting, or lay them down neatly in a row, which makes the number of chips visible to overhead cameras. There is no standard way of doing this. Some dealers will take a stack and break it down; others will take a row of chips laid down and rearrange them into a stack.
You will often see players grab a handful or large stack of chips, reach forward, and 'dribble' one or two at a time until they have deposited the number they want. This is a bad habit that you should avoid, for several reasons.
First, a few casinos have a rule that any chips moved forward past your cards will all be counted as your bet or raise, whether or not you drop them on the felt. Second, you might accidentally drop more than you intended to. Third, this is much slower than counting out the right amount first, then moving them forward all at once. Fourth, other players might accuse you of trying to adjust the size of your bet or raise on the fly while watching their reactions, which is considered shady.
Betting Lines
Some poker rooms have a 'betting line' on the table, and only chips that are moved past this line are considered to have been bet. This is intended to eliminate the occasional ambiguity in determining whether a player moved chips sufficiently far forward to be deemed an intentional bet.
However, betting lines on the felt sometimes cause more problems than they solve, opening up opportunities for angle-shooters to try to trick you.
If you're playing in such a room, be alert for players who move chips forward to a point just short of the betting line in an attempt to manipulate you into responding, so that they can decide whether or not to actually make that bet, based on your reaction.
This is, of course, terribly unethical, but not all poker rooms will do anything about it, so protect your own interests by making sure that the others players' actions are fully completed and clear before you take your turn.
If in doubt as to whether another player's chips have been validly bet or not, ask the dealer to clarify the situation for you. Do not be shy about this. It is both your right and responsibility to know where things stand before you take any action.
How to Handle Chips When Raising
You might think that making a raise would be so simple that it couldn't get messed up. If so, you'd be wrong. In fact, the rules regarding the legal ways to make a raise trip up new players new more often than just about any other aspect of the game.
You need to understand these two basic principles:
- When it is your turn, a verbal indication of your intended action is as binding as the physical action itself.
- Other players have a right to be able to tell unambiguously when your turn is over, so that nobody inadvertently acts out of turn.
These principles work in tandem to produce three equally legitimate ways of making a raise.
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First, without saying anything, you can simply slide forward, in one continuous motion, all of the chips constituting your bet, i.e., both the amount needed to call and the extra amount of your raise.
Importantly, you cannot put out some chips, then go back to your stack, pick up more, and move them out, too. Such double motion would violate principle #2 above, because other players would not know whether you were done with your turn after the first bunch of chips was moved forward. For this reason, if you try to go back for more, the dealer will disallow it. This is called a 'string raise,' and it is against the rules everywhere.
Second, you can announce the word 'raise' with no amount specified. This commits you to at least a minimum raise, but not to any particular amount. You can then either move out the entire amount of your bet with one motion, as above, or you can first put out the number of chips needed to constitute a call, followed by a second motion with the amount of your raise.
In this case, the verbal announcement before your first motion alerts the other players that more chips will be coming, so that you are not in violation of principle #2 above. However, your raising chips must be all in one motion, as in the first example.
Third, you can verbally announce both 'raise' and the intended amount. For example, if the current bet is $10, you can say 'Raise to 25' or 'Raise, make it 25.' Saying just '25' technically has the same force. However, it's better to start with the word 'raise,' because poker players and dealers are tuned into that word, and hearing it has an alerting effect that a number alone does not have.
Regardless of how you make the announcement, once you have done so, you are committed to that exact amount, and it therefore does not matter how you put the $25 in chips in front of you.
My next article will conclude the discussion of poker chips with a number of miscellaneous chip-related topics, including the 'oversize chip rule,' handling chips and 'chip tricks,' making change, and even some talk about collecting chips.
Robert Woolley lives in Asheville, NC. He spent several years in Las Vegas and chronicled his life in poker on the 'Poker Grump' blog.
Poker Betting Strategy
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Bravado, Bravada, and Bovada are spellings that many people bring up when they’re arguing over how it’s properly spelled or how it’s meant to be pronounced. Some will say that there should be a Bravada betting, others will say the term should be coined as a Bravado betting, and those that are correct will say Bovada Betting. People will bring up key terms like Bravado gambling, Bravado sports betting, Bravado poker, Bravado gambling site, Bravado sportsbook, and Bravado gambling site, but those are all incorrect.
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Bovada is an online casino that specializes in poker and other gambling games that revolve around sports events. Being referred to like the games within the game, sports fans at Bovada can enjoy the games, bet on horses and teams, and even play with live dealers. Aside from those features, Bovada even has some special awards for new players as well as those who are frequently involved with the online casino.
For anyone that wants to be a part of this online casino, first, they will have to create a Bovada account, adding in their information like one would when going into new websites. Then, the member will be able to select either a section for the Super Bowl, sports betting events, featured casino games, poker tournaments, or sportsbook guides. Finally, once new members play a couple of games, they would get their welcome rewards and continue playing other casino games and bet on sports events.
At the online Bovada casino’s sports section, people can select any bets on the events they would choose as well as look for any future sports events or horse races to make bets on later on. At the casino section, players can look for any gambling games of their choice, from Gold Rush Gus to Blackjack, among many other games to select; players can also jump into leaderboards and compete with other people in live events. At the Bovada poker section, players can play games such as $250K Tournament, Jackpot Sit & Go, and Mad Monday Tournaments; on the top header, there are instructions to see how it goes as well as the options to play either normal poker games or join some poker tournaments.
Live dealers are one of the prominent features available on the Bovada website, and there, players can compete with other people in tables that require them to pay for a seat. Some of the gambling games include Blackjack, American Roulette, and Baccarat, and Super 6. With these live events, knowing how online gambling works will be one of the more important things to know about when going up against some of the more experienced Bovada gamblers.