Poker for beginners

By Duncan Spiers

Why not up the ante with the guys and learn how to play a killer game of poker? In the first part of the iVillage poker school series, we take you through the basics of recognising and ranking the various poker hands

As a card game, poker is fairly one-dimensional and not very interesting, and anyone who played for matchsticks at school would probably confirm this. Poker without gambling is not dissimilar to a car without petrol. However, you need to understand how the card game works before putting together your best gangster's moll outfit and throwing a poker party, so that's what we'll look at first.

If we forget about the betting for a while, the game is pretty straightforward: essentially, everyone has five cards, and the person with the best five cards is the winner. The various types of poker - that stuff you see in movies, with people going "Seven card stud, deuces wild, dealer ante" or whatever - are basically just different ways of arriving at the five cards which make up your hand. You work out who has 'the best five cards' as follows, with highest card being the worst possible hand, and a straight flush being the best:

A number of these hands are self explanatory, specifically a pair (for example, 10♥ 10♣ 7♦ 5♥ 3♠), two pair (J♣ J♠ 10♥ 10♦ 6♠), three of a kind (6♦ 6♥ 6♣ 4♥ 2♠) or four of a kind (A♦ A♥ A♠ A♣ 3♦). The higher the cards, the better they are, so that two Aces beat two Kings, three Fives beat three Fours, and so on. And if two players have hands of the same value, the decider is the next highest card, known as a 'kicker'. So 10♥ 10♣ A♦ 3♥ 2♠ - 'a pair of Tens with an Ace kicker' - beats 10♦ 10♠ Q♦ J♥ 8♠.