How to Deal Poker

How do you deal in poker without the game grinding to a halt every third hand? Honestly, the cards are the easy bit. What slows a home game down is the stuff around them, like who’s on the button, why the small blind is short, and whose turn it was when the dog barked. Get the routine right and the night flows; we’ll go through it for Texas Hold’em, the game almost every kitchen table plays.

Before anyone touches the cards

Settle the stakes and the blinds while everyone’s still taking their coats off, because nobody wants that conversation with chips already in the middle. A nice way to pick the first dealer is to give everyone one card face up and hand the button to the highest. After that it travels one seat to the left every hand, with the player just past it putting in the small blind and the next one the big blind. At most home games whoever has the button deals that hand, though if there’s someone happy to deal all night, the button keeps moving anyway so the blinds go round fairly.

Chips are worth a minute’s thought. Something like 300 to 500 in four colours covers six to eight players comfortably, and the CasinoCalcs poker chip calculator will tell you how many of each colour to hand over for a £10 or £20 buy-in. If it’s a tournament, put the blind timer on a phone in the middle of the table so nobody has to remember when the levels go up.

How to deal a poker hand, from shuffle to showdown

A decent shuffle is three or four riffles, a quick strip, and one more riffle to finish, with the bottom card kept out of sight the whole time (people notice more than you’d think). The player on your right gets offered the cut, they lift part of the deck off, and you put the bottom part on top. Then the hole cards go out one at a time, face down and clockwise, beginning with the small blind and ending on the button, and round you go a second time so everyone has two. Sliding the cards low across the felt rather than tossing them saves a lot of “I saw that was a king”.

The player to the left of the big blind starts the first round of betting. Once it’s done, you burn the top card, which just means sliding it face down into the discards, and turn three cards up in the middle for the flop. Another round of betting, another burn, one card for the turn. Same again for the river. The burn card exists because a marked or bent card on top of the deck would otherwise tell someone what’s coming, and in a home game with a well-loved deck that’s a real worry.

At showdown, the last person who bet or raised turns their cards over first, or if everyone checked the river, the first player still in to the left of the button goes first. Best five cards wins.

Pushing the pot and side pots

A tidy habit that saves no end of argument: leave each player’s bet in front of them until the betting round is over, then pull it all into the middle. That way, if someone asks whether Dave called the raise, the answer is sitting on the table. Things get more complicated when somebody goes all in for less than the others are betting. Their chips form the main pot, which they can win, and anything extra that the others put in goes into a side pot they can’t. It’s the single biggest source of confusion at home games, and the side pot calculator exists because we got tired of doing it on the back of a beer mat.

When the dealer slips up

Everybody flips a card by accident sooner or later. If it happens during the hole cards, that card is swapped for the next one off the deck and the exposed card becomes the first burn. If the flop gets dealt before the betting has finished, the three cards are mixed back into the stub of the deck and a new flop comes out once the action’s done. And if someone’s been dealt the wrong number of cards, most tables simply redeal, unless they’ve already looked and acted, at which point the hand is usually dead.

One rule deserves saying out loud before the first hand, which is that the cards speak for themselves. A player who misreads a flush as nothing still has a flush. If anyone’s unsure what beats what, point them at the poker hand rankings rather than arguing about it.

Running a good poker night

The best home games we’ve heard about have a start time, a finish time and a buy-in that was agreed by text before anyone arrived. Keep a note of who bought in for what, especially once rebuys start, and settle up with the poker ledger so nobody’s doing long division at one in the morning. A printed poker cheat sheet on the table is a kindness to newer players, and it means fewer hands stopped while somebody checks whether a straight beats three of a kind.

The best home games are the ones where losing a stack doesn’t spoil the night. BeGambleAware.org has free support if poker stops being fun.