Texas Hold'em has gained international fame in recent years as the preferred game of the World Poker Tour and the World Series of Poker. Texas Hold'em is a fun and fast game with many variations. These rules apply to the Tradiional form of Texas Hold'em as played at Ultimatebet.
In a full ring game, Texas Hold'em is played with a standard 52-card deck and as many as 10 participants. A dealer "button" is used to indicate the position of the player who would be dealing the cards if the players were actually dealing the cards themselves. The player holding the button acts last and thus has a positional advantage that remains throughout the hand.
Holding the button is an advantage, because as the player to act last, you have more information available to you when your turn to bet arrives. For exactly the same reasons, being forced to act first is a disadvantage. The players acting in the middle are, as you might imagine, somewhere in-between on the advantage/disadvantage scale; the later you act, the better your position.
The two players on the button's immediate left must post "blind" bets...that is, amounts they place in the pot before they see their cards. Typically, the player in the very first position posts a blind bet one-half the size of the player in the second position, although in some games, the first bet (called the "small blind") may be as little as one-third or as much as two-thirds the size of the second bet (called the "big blind").
All participants in the Texas Hold'em game are now dealt two cards face down. These cards belong exclusively to their "owners," and are not seen by the other players at any time until the showdown at the end of the hand. A round of betting takes place during this point, which is called "before the flop" or "pre-flop."
After each hand, the button is moved one position clockwise, so that all players in the game have, after a full round, had exactly the same number of opportunities to hold positional advantage.
