In poker, position refers to when a player must act on his hand relative to the other players in the pot. When a player is one of the fust to act, he is in early position. When a player is last or nearly last, he is in late position. Similarly, players with several opponents on either side of them are in middle position.

Late position advantage.

As you begin to play hold'em, you quickly become aware of the numerous advantages of having late position in a hand. One of the most important advantages is that you generally have a decent idea of what kind of strength you are up against. For example, suppose you are holding 8-8. This looks like a good hand, and, in absolute terms, it is just that. It is not, however, a great hand, and it is often unclear how (or whether) to proceed with it.

If you are in late position with your pocket eights, the actions of the other players influence how you play. Suppose everyone has folded to you, and only the blinds are yet to act. It is highly probable that you have the best hand, so you should choose to play it aggressively by raising the pot. Assuming the blinds call your raise, you now hold a positional advantage over them for the remainder of the hand. This means that on the flop, turn, and river, they must act before you, giving you the advantage of making your decisions with more information about your opponents' cards than they have about yours.

By far, the most common type of playing error you see in the fast tournaments will be the failure to play with sufficient aggression. If you are the first player into the pot preflop, you should almost always come in with a raise, regardless of your hand or position. If you do not feel comfortable raising with your hand, then throw the hand away. Do not limp into a pot unless there are other limpers in from of you and you feel that the table is passive enough that no player yet to act will come in with a raise behind you.

Never just call or "slowplay" high cards or any decent pair before the flop in a fast tournament. If you have aces, kings, queens or jacks, tens, nines, eights, sevens, A-K, A-Q, A-J - raise if the pot has not already been raised. And with A-K or any of the high or medium pocket pairs, you should reraise and seriously consider pushing all in on any player who raised in front of you.

The turn provides one more piece of information in the jigsaw. The whole picture is very nearly visible now, but two rounds of betting still remain, so you need to plan your strategy carefully.

When the turn hits the table, you need to take a long, hard look at what you have. If you stay in on the turn, you'll have a hard time dropping out at the river. Maybe that's why you call it the turn - your turning point in the hand.

From this point on, the bets in limit Hold'em are doubled. The stakes go up, and you have only one more card to make your hand, if you haven't done so already. On the bright side, you've obtained more information about your opponents' hands, so you're in a good position to reevaluate your hand.

As a general rule, if you believe you hold the best hand after the turn, don't be afraid to bet or raise in order to protect your hand. However, if your hand is clearly behind, caution is the word. This is the prime time to fold your hand, before you start throwing your money away by calling the expensive bets. And if you're drawing to complete your hand, be sure to have the correct pot odds when doing so. Calculate your outs to see how much it will cost you to remain in the hand, and what the calculation of risk versus reward works out to.

The prime rule of anything economic - but especially poker - is to maximize your wins and minimize your losses. With all betting actions at a poker table, this concept should ride paramount in your mind (well above the fact that the cocktail waitress has really nice hair).

Making the Bet.
If there has been heavy raising and reraising pre-flop, especially if any of it has come from behind you, you're better off checking around the table than letting that player bet again - regardless of what happened with your hand on the flop. Nine times out of ten the raiser will be on some kind of adrenaline rush anyway from looking at a nice pair of hole cards, and he'll go ahead and fire a bet right on out when given a chance.

By checking to him, you save yourself a raise, and even if you want to raise, the check-raise will almost certainly work here.

Assuming you don't have any maniacal super-aggressive beasts prowling at your table, if the flop has fit your hand, you should bet it. If you're playing the cards, you're going to be folding the vast majority of hands. You'll be folding so much that when you do play a hand, you need a return on your betting investment.

In general, it takes a better hand to call than it does to bet, so by betting you're gleaning (somewhat imperfect) information about the hands around the table. You're also taking control of the game, which has some value.

If you get raised when you make a bet, consider both your opponent (for example, is she the kind of person who typically does this) and especially reexamine the flop (is there something in the flop you're missing?).

Straight draws and flush draws are the obvious threats, and they can easily sneak up on you. The other thing that will nail you is hidden trips. Someone (usually in late position) holds a smaller pair and may have managed to match the board.

As Mike Sexton likes to say, "Texas Hold'em takes a minute to learn and a lifetime to master." The fact that it does look deceptively simple to play on TV causes many to fail to understand the deeper nuances of the game. The biggest misconception comes from believing that poker is all about bluffing and that the best players are the ones who move all-in with any two cards. Although bold aggression may work for some pros, it's a bad strategy for normal players, especially at lower-limit tables.

Preflop strategy.
Probably your most important decision in Hold'em comes before the flop, your first round of betting. This is where you may make a lot of errors that can prove very costly later. Are your first two cards good enough to play? Because you have only two cards of your own (the remainder are community cards), the entire outcome of the game hinges on the strength of those two precious cards.

Make sure you always evaluate your style of play in order to identify and plug any potential leaks (weaknesses that drain money from your pocket). Many different styles of play exist, but the one we recommend for most people is to play tight. In other words, be extremely selective about which hands you're willing to risk your money on. That style may not always be optimal, but it does keep you out of trouble and should put you on the path to becoming a consistent winner.

Related to keeping track of your wins and losses is the maintenance of your bankroll; which is the amount of money you have set aside that is "poker money". If you are a professional player, it is critical to maintain a bankroll large enough to make a living without fear of going broke.

Like the stock market, your poker bankroll will tend to move up and down. Overall, however, it will move up if you are a winning player. A common analogy in the world of the stock market is that of a man walking his dog on a long leash. The man walks through a park in a straight line. He follows the sidewalk. The dog, on other hand, will run back and forth, hither and yon. They will both wind up at the other side of the park. Think of the man as your growing poker bankroll. Slowly but surely, he makes his way across the park; slowly but surely, your poker bankroll grows. The dog is your individual poker sessions or even individual hands. It will skip and hop in various directions and there is no way, in the short run, to predict where it will go next. Overall, however, it is headed to the far side of the park.

If you are a professional player, you will need to have a bankroll sufficient to withstand the standard deviation of the dog. You will need to have deep enough pockets to weather the storm and the storm is coming. There will always be a storm in your poker future. No matter how good you are, you will eventually hit a losing skid.

Many of the top online poker rooms now offer tournaments that range in size from two-player head's up to short-handed (five or six participants, depending on the poker-room) to full single-table tourneys. At any given time, you can find tournaments for Texas Hold'em (no limit and pot limit). You also see scheduled tournaments that you can pre-register for and start on a certain clay and time. Pre-registration tournaments are always large multi-table affairs. To choose any of these tournaments, just click on the tournament button of the poker-room's home page.

Play-money tournaments online are almost always of the sit-and-go variety. They require a buy-in, usually represented as $XX/$X, in which the first figure represents the amount you pay to get your starting chips, and the second figure is the fee that the poker room charges to facilitate the game. So at a 50/5 play money table, your play-money account would be debited by 55 chips.

Before you sit down at the poker table, always be sure you understand the rules and limits of any game you choose to play. Knowing proper poker etiquette is also critical. Otherwise, the dealer may reprimand you for making novice mistakes, and other more experienced players at the table may criticize you. Keep the following tips in mind so you can stay out of trouble when you first start playing:

• Keep your cards hidden from other players by shielding them, but don't take them off the table. Even though modern casinos are far removed from the seedy Wild West days, cheating is still a valid fear for many players, and consequently everyone is expected to keep all their cards on the table at all times.
• Never fold or bet or out of turn. Doing so is considered rude and can also give an unfair advantage to other players. For example, knowing you're either going to fold or raise (increase the bet) your hand behind them makes their decision making easier.
• Never turn your cards face-up for others to see when you fold. Simply slide your cards toward the center of the table and into the muck - the area on the table where you and other players place all the dead cards, including hands that have folded.

One of the most common calculations you have to perform in Hold'em is figuring your chances of your improving your hand with a favorable flop, turn, or river. You also have to try to calculate what hands your opponents may have, and whether they can make their hands. However, when first beginning to play, stick to, considering only your hand's odds.

The following list gives you a feel for the calculations you may need to work out at the table (in your head, of course; 
unless you don't shy easily). For all the calculations that follow, it shouldn't surprise you that your chance of making your hand on the river (the fifth community card) is about half of what it is when going from the flop to the turn (the fourth community card). The logic is that after the flop, you have two chances to draw a magic card; after the turn, only one.

• If you have a pair, the chances that you'll make three of a kind (trips) on the flop are 1 in 9. If you don't make it on the flop, you have 1 chance in 12 of making trips on the turn or river.
• If you hold two cards to a flush in your hand and the flop comes up with two cards in that suit, the chances that you'll complete your flush on either the turn or the river are just better than 1 in 3. The flush odds are very similar to the chances that you can complete an open-ended straight, where you have four cards in sequence after the flop, and you can complete the straight with two different cards on the turn or the river (7-8-9-10, for example). The odds here are just less than 1 in 3.
• If you're drawing to an inside straight - one that you can complete only with a specific draw (7-8-10-J, for example), the odds are 1 in 6 that you'll make your straight on the turn or the river.

The hierarchy of winning hands is as follows:

Royal Flush. A, K, Q, J, and 10 of the same suit.

Straight Flush. Five cards in sequence, all of the same suit.

Four of a Kind. Four cards of the same rank, one of each suit. (The fifth card doesn't matter.)