Poker Strategies
After receiving pocket cards, you are immediately faced with a choice: play your cards and either raise or call the blinds, or fold.
Practice Matters
The surreptitious manipulation of cards by card mechanics, hand
The surreptitious manipulation of cards by card mechanics, hand muckers, holdout men, crossroaders, card sharks, base dealers or other card cheats requires considerable skill and practice, plus the courage of a thief. A top-notch card mechanic must be considerably more adept with a deck of cards than a first-rate magician. The magician is free to use a great deal of conversation and misdirection to fool his audience, but the card cheat is limited by the game's regulations. As a matter of fact, most present-day magicians—including most of those who advertise their act as an expose of crooked gambling tricks—know little about the operation of the modern card sharper. They themselves are as easily fleeced by a good card mechanic as the average layman. Much of the sleight of hand and nearly all of the mechanical gadgets they expose were discarded by the cheats decades ago.
There is a popular delusion that card cheats and magicians can take a
There is a popular delusion that card cheats and magicians can take a well-mixed deck of cards, riffle and shuffle the pack several times and then deal each player in the game a good hand—in Online Hold'em Poker, for example, four jacks to one player, four kings to another and four aces to himself.