Poker Idioms: Betting Terms
Before you start playing poker online, there are several common used terms in poker you may want to understand. Not only will understanding these terms makes playing poker online a lot more enjoyable, you can also understand different poker strategies and make the right decision easily once you get to know the basic betting terms. Let’s look into some of the commonly used terms, shall we?
Buy-in would be the first term you should understand. As you approach a poker table, you have to pay certain buy-in nominal to enter the game. Different poker tables – or online poker room if you are playing online – have different predetermined amount of buy-in.
Another common betting term is blind. All tables have blinds, mainly small blind and big blind. If you are playing Texas Hold’em poker, for example, two players must pay small blind and big blind respectively. Make sure you approach poker tables with blinds you can afford based on the poker bankroll you have, because they highly represent the actual stake of that particular table.
Call is when you agree to meet your opponents’ bets, while raise or bump is when you raise the bet. If you are raising the bet, other opponents will have to call the bet in order to stay in the game. They can also re-raise you by a certain amount, forcing you to at least call the new bet if you want to keep playing. Make sure you think twice and assess the relative strength of your hand before you call, raise, or re-raise the bet to keep the risks minimum.