Quotes About Poker

Watch, hell,' Walt said. 'This is strip poker. What kind of homo wants to sit around and watch four guys get naked?

I thought poker might be a perfect environment to start to learn probabilistic decision-making, and to live what it means to have skill versus chance and to see how that played out. I would dive in head first into the poker world.

In tournament play, it's generally advisable to avoid risking large sums of chips in coin flip situations, like pocket sixes versus A-K. After all, the pocket pair is only a very slight heads-up favorite.

I've been studying, playing, living, breathing poker for eight to nine hours a day. Every day! When I'm between events and in New York, I'm reading, watching videos or live-streaming very good players.

I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?

I mean maybe I was holding all of the aces, but what was the game?

Maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?

Poker is a shifty game played by shifty characters. Outside the two official card rooms in London, most games take place in illegal spielers with heavy rake money. Debts and revenges are rife, names are changed, multiple passports are not unheard of. The majority of regular players have no interest in advertising their lifestyle, their whereabouts or even their existence to tax inspectors, thieves, neighbours, creditors or old enemies. Television? You'd have to be a complete ice cream.

Things seem a little prickly between the two comics. Stephen Fry is the next player out and the two of them end up in a cash game back at the hotel. I hear that Fry gets the better of Gervais again, is not above a few cheeky put-downs when he wins the pot, and Gervais snaps, 'I might be bad at poker, but at least I'm not gay.

Is it a reasonable thing, I ask you, for a grown man to run about and hit a ball? Poker's the only game fit for a grown man. Then, your hand is against every man's, and every man's is against yours. Teamwork? Who ever made a fortune by teamwork? There's only one way to make a fortune, and that's to down the fellow who's up against you.

No way, Eve replied. If you're going, go big. Remind me to play poker with you later, Michael said. I love a girl who'll go all in. She hip-bumped him. That's what you want to do with me later? Dude. Respect the dress, at least. Michael trailed his pale fingers down her back, following the line of her spine, all the way to the red rose. Eve shivered, and her eyes went half-closed. Whatever Michael whispered in her ear, Claire thought it was probably way too personal to hear.

You play everything so close to your vest, it's like your entire life is one long poker hand.

Ace-king is a fine hand. Ace-queen is a little weaker, but still good. With ace-jack, you're already sliding rapidly down a slippery slope. With ace-ten, you've slid down the slope, fallen off the cliff, and lie in wreckage at the bottom with hands like ace-five and ace-six.

Fooling around with marginal hands is just a tool for the players who knows how to let a hand go when he gets in trouble (which will often be the case!).

Checking shows weakness, and is best used when you think that a bet on fourth street will prompt a fold, but a check, showing weakness or uncertainty, will prompt a call on fifth street when your bet gets interpreted as a steal attempt. This strategy is also best used when you have position on your opponent

At a tight table with a full complement of players, you need to assume that bets mean pretty much what they're supposed to mean.

For a continuation bet to be a profitable move, the amount of the bet has to be carefully chosen in comparison to the pot. In essence, you are hoping to buy the pot right now. If you overpay, you'll lose too much money when your opponent calls with a hand better than yours. If you underpay, you'll be offering your opponent correct pot odds to stick around with a drawing hand. Neither situation is good, so the exact amount of the bet is very important.

probing bets to be a little smaller than my continuation bets, since I'm starting from a weaker position. (It was my opponent, rather than me, who took the lead in the hand.) Anywhere from 30 percent to 50 percent of the pot is a good range.

There's opportunity in poker.... If Horace Greeley were alive today, his advice wouldn't be "Go West, young man, and grow up with the country." Instead, he'd point to that deck of cards on table and say, "Shuffle up and deal.

Poker is a microcosm of all we admire and disdain about capitalism and democracy. It can be rough-hewn or polished, warm or cold, charitable and caring, or hard and impersonal, fickle and elusive, but ultimately it is fair, and right, and just.

You have it in your power to turn a bad-beat around simply by realizing this simple truth: The more bad beats you encounter, the luckier you are. It's a sign that you are playing against opponents who continually take the worst of it, and if you can't beat someone who always takes the worst of it, you can't beat anyone.

Hold'em — like life itself — has its defining moment. It's the flop. When you see the flop, you're looking at 71 percent of your hand, and the cost is only a single round of betting.

I believe in poker the way I believe in the American Dream. Poker is good for you. It enriches the soul, sharpens the intellect, heals the spirit, and — when played well, nourishes the wallet.

Most of the money you'll win at poker comes not from the brilliance of your own play, but from the ineptitude of your opponents.