If you’re going to be playing a lot of poker, you should start learning the lingo.  It’ll help improve your table image, your own personal satisfaction of the game and you’ll be able to follow just about any poker conversation or topic of discussion brought up during the session.  Here are some of the most popular poker hand names you’ll come across.  Knowing some of the more obscure ones will definitely impress a lot of players.

A-A – Pocket Rockets

A-K – Big Slick

A-J — Ajax

K-K – Cowboys

K-Q – Marriage

K-J – Kojak

K-9 - Canine

Q-Q –Siegfried & Roy

Q-J – Maverick

Q-7 - Computer Hand

Q-3 – A San Francisco Busboy

J-J – Hooks

J-9 – T.J. Cloutier.

J-5 – Jackson Five

10-5 – Five and dime

10-2 – Doyle Brunson. (He won two World Series of Poker titles with this hand.)

9-5 – Dolly Parton

9-9 – Meat hooks

8-8 – Snowmen

7-7 – Hockey Sticks

7-2 – The Hammer

5-5 – Nickels

5-4 – Jesse James, for his Colt .45

4-4 — Sailboats

2-2 — Ducks

Everyone likes to think that they are the only ones that agonize about being bluffed and can’t stand to not know what they’re opponents are holding.  This curiosity can cost some players a lot of chips on the river if done often.  From the low limits even up to the highest of levels, you’ll see players throw in chips when they are practically 99% sure that they are beat in the hand.

There’s a big difference between making calls on the river with average strength hands when you feel that your opponent is weak, versus calling when you know in your gut that more likely than not they have you beat.  You must learn to control these urges to pay someone off just to reaffirm your doubts and to know for sure what the other players are holding.  You may think that in a $4-$8 limit game that a simple $8 call may be a small price to pay in order to keep your opponent “honest”, but do that consistently over a month’s worth of grinding and you can needlessly be throwing away considerable percentages of your profit margin.

When might it be a good choice to call when you think you’re beat?  When you’re trying to gather information on a player, info you can then use later to make better decisions against them.  But lets be honest, when was the last time you paid someone off with that intention in mind?  Perhaps it’s something you now need to add to your poker arsenal.
If you are not fully pot committed, are not gathering information on an opponent and strongly feel that you are beat, develop the discipline to save that extra call for when the situation is more in your favor.  Your bankroll will thank you.

There’s a very obvious connection between gambling and other vices, such as drinking and hard partying.  Quite often, the two can mix, leading to some very unfortunate results for the poker player who’s game is not going to be as sharp as when under normal personal conditions.  Many believe that serious poker players don’t allow themselves to play while chemically altered by alcohol or other substances, but in fact it happens more often that you think.

Impairing yourself in any way shape or form when you need to focus is a bad habit.  Whether behind the wheel or at the card table, you want to be as close to your mental peak as possible.  We’ve all sat down at some tables with very drunk poker players, and two things become immediately obvious:  A.  They’re very annoying to be around (usually), and B.  Their play tends to be very sloppy.  It’s not to say that when inebriated they’ll happily play 7-2 offsuit like it’s a pair of aces, but you’ll notice that they tend to chase draws a lot more often and pay almost no attention to what’s going on around the rest of the table.

Like I’ve stated in the past, if you want to play poker, you should want to win while playing poker.  Winning is fun and giving yourself every edge imaginable is necessary for consistent victory.  The beer will be waiting for you back in the fridge when you get home.  Lose your whole stack though because you can barely read the lamented ink on the cards however, and you might not be able to afford the six-pack in the first place.

If you talk to a lot of winning poker players, both live and online, you’ll hear them say that they spend a considerable amount of time observing great poker players.  In a live casino this might be a little taxing on your patience and ability to see what’s going on, but online you can openly view high stake matches and pro players.  The reason for doing this, even though you’ll probably never see their cards more than just a handful of times over the course of dozens and dozens of hands, is that you can still learn a lot from seeing how players call, make plays and act while in the middle of a hand.

Becoming a student of the game is really what separates the profitable players from the ones that lose their bankroll constantly.  Outside of just reading poker books and watching DVD’s, you need to see real players in action to watch how some of the techniques you’ve read about are put into play. With online poker one of the only ways you can pick up on what your opponent has is through his betting pattern, and learning to recognize betting patterns will also hugely benefit you during a live game as well.

So next time you’re online waiting for a tournament to start up, jump into a few different rooms and see if you can learn anything from the players simply from watching them play while you yourself aren’t in any of the hands.  You always realize more about players and their style when you’re not involved in the hand then you’ll ever learn while actually playing against them.

Many players treat suited cards like a small pocket pair.  However, the odds of making a flush on any given hand is not nearly as high as most players would think, yet they’ll continue to call big bets on the flop and turn in order to try and catch that final heart or spade.  Flushes can payoff big when you hit them, but the goal is to draw at them for the right price without getting overly invested in a pot.

Like any two cards, you should prefer that your suited cards be face cards, like QJ, KQ, etc.  Small suited cards like 97 are hard to play even if you do make a flush, because there’s a chance that you can be crushed by a player with a higher flush.  And in general, remember that having suited cards before the flop only adds 2% extra to the strength of your starting hand.

Flushes, if you have big suited cards, are great to catch against multiple opponents.  If the flop comes with two suits that match your hole cards and one player bets an average amount and 2-3 players call, this is a hand worth drawing at.  However, if it’s heads up on the flop against just you and one other guy and he moves all-in for a large amount and all you have is the flush draw, the correct play is probably to fold.  Yes, your chip and stack and type of poker game your playing (cash or tournament) does play a factor, but during the beginning stages of your poker hobby, you want to play most situations the same.

Pre-flop, especially against a raise, whether or not your cards are suited shouldn’t play a factor unless you’re looking at AQ or similar hands.  Calling a pre-flop raise with J9 suited or K10 suited maybe look tempting, but in the long run you will end up folding your hand a lot more than you will be raking in chips with it.

Poker etiquette is something many veteran players feel is more important than winning or losing at any particular poker game.  Poor sportsmanship, not knowing the rules and inconsiderate behavior will not make you any friends at the table, and it’s just plain disrespectful to the game in general.  Now, there are some forms of bad table manners, such as talking aggressively to opponents, that some players believe is a part of the strategy of the game, and it is true that there are a few that have turned a nasty mouth into considerable profit.  However, there are some hard fast rules of etiquette that pretty much every poker player in the world will expect you to adhere to.

1.  Don’t act out of turn
Eventually you will do this, everyone does, but to do it regularly is inconsiderate.  Acting out of turn is when you fold/call/check/raise before the action gets around to you.  If the player before you hasn’t decided what to do yet, acting out of turn might influence their decision.  For example, he might be hesitant to raise because he doesn’t know if you’ll call, re-raise or fold.  But if you fold before he even has a chance to make a move, you’ve now made the decision easier for him, which is unfair to the rest of the table.  Waiting your turn to act is simple, so show a little patience.

2.  Do not talk about a hand you’re not in
Much like acting out of turn, you should do nothing to influence a hand outside of making your own plays.  If you’ve already folded your cards and now it is heads up between two other players and you start talking about how you think the guy on the button has a flush or that he’s bluffing, you are disrupting the flow of the game and being disrespectful.  What they have or don’t have is none of your business, your money is not in the middle and the decision to call or fold is not yours to make.

3.  Don’t splash the pot
This one isn’t as severe as some of the others on the list, it’s more annoying than anything else.  Splashing the pot is when you sloppily throw your chips into a pot.  The reasons this is bad is because you might get your chips mixed up with chips already in the middle, which will confuse the dealer and the other players.  Secondly, the dealer will have to gather your chips and re-stack them anyways to make sure you bet/called the correct amount, which will slow down the game.

4.  Don’t Slowroll
Inexperienced players do this all the time without knowing, but veterans have no excuse.  Slowrolling is the act of waiting too long to flip over your hand during a showdown when you think you have the best hand.  If you think you have your opponent dominated, proper etiquette dictates that you should flip your hand over immediately so that the other player doesn’t have to sit in suspense wondering if he won or not.

5.  Pay attention to the game
If the dealer and/or players have to keep reminding you when it is your turn to act, or if you have to keep asking how much it is to call because you’re not paying attention, these are very rude tendencies.  You can watch the football game and still know when it is your turn to act.  Remember, you’re there to play poker.  If you want to focus on the something else, go do that instead.

You might have heard this already, but who you get involved in a pot with has almost as much to do with winning poker than the strength of your cards.  You might see a table stacked with elite pros on televised events, but when the cameras get shut off, those sharks head back out to the aquarium and look for the games full of amateur level fish.  If the best played only against the best, their winnings would be at an absolute minimum.  To maximize your poker profit potential, you need to identify the weak and strong players at the table and try to attack one group while avoiding the other.

ID’ing these groups are not as hard as you might think.  Experienced players are easy to spot because of the way they talk, their confidence at the table, how well their known to the other players in the cardroom, etc.  If you’ve played at the same cardroom on varying days over the course of a month, you’ll see the same veteran local players there again and again.  These are the guys to avoid.  They play non-stop, have tons of experience and will often be the strongest player at any given table in the room.  There are such things as terrible frequent players, but they’ll be equally as easy to spot because they’ll always be losing and complaining about it to the world, trust me.

Weak players can often be spotted by their mediocre play.  Is the same guy calling every bet and constantly turning over the worse hand?  Maybe he’s someone you should try to single out.  Are there a few players at the table that are noticeably nervous, aren’t talking to anyone and even visually appear uncomfortable?  These can all be signs of weak, inexperienced players.  The less they know about poker, the easier they are to trap, exploit and win off of.  Against a good, experienced player though, you’re going to need a hand in order to win, and even then the amount won might not be premium.

Next time you sit at a table, take in your surroundings, pay close attention to each player and see if you can ID and label at least 75% of them as either weak or strong players.  Fold less than ideal hands to the strong players, and capitalize on the scared calling stations and watch the money roll in.

Firing a bullet, also known as taking a stab at the pot and a billion other silly names, is when you are making either a semi-bluff or full bluff at a pot.  Bluffing is considered the hardest part of poker to master, because you really can’t master it.  No matter how great of a player you are sometimes you are going to get called no matter what, so rule #1 when bluffing is to understand that even under optimal conditions, there is no guarantee that your bluff will work.

Then the question becomes, how many times should you bluff at the pot?  If you’re heads up against a player you don’t know anything about and you miss the flop completely, pretty much the only way you’re going to win the hand is if you bluff at it (fire a bullet).  There’s a great saying among poker pros, and that is if you want to fire a bullet at the pot on the flop, you should only do so if you’re prepared to continue to fire on the turn and on the river.  Bluffing at every stage in the hand is incredibly hard to do, especially when you’re opponent is calling your bets quickly.  Could they have you dominated already?  Are they drawing at a gut shot straight?  All of these questions are ones you should try to answer in your mind before firing that first bluff.

In my opinion the hardest players to make continuation bluff’s against are aggressive beginners.  These are the players that think that constantly calling and trying to catch their card is a sound strategy, and they’ll only fold on the river after they’ve called off a bunch of their chips and missed their hand.  Experienced players will tend to call a bet only if that is the correct play, such as knowing whether or not it’s worth calling a large bet to try and catch a flush, and at the same time good players could also re-raise someone they think might be bluffing.  Still, no matter what type of opponent you’re playing against, you must make sure that your bluff can induce a fold.  Did you’re opponent raise before the flop?  If they did and the flop comes all low cards, it’s likely that they didn’t flop a pair, and despite the strength of their hand pre-flop, their cards are now very weak.  Now would be a good time to fire a bullet, whether you hit your own cards or not.

Bluffing shouldn’t be done often, but the ability to do so will allow you to pick up chips when you are card dead, keep your opponents guessing and help build your nerve and confidence in your personal game.