Casino Hold'em Strategy Explained With Simple Models

Published: September 18, 2014

The game of casino hold'em is known for being one of the most difficult casino poker games to quantify because of how in-depth the strategies have to be when it comes to reading the board and your own hand. Mathematics can prove that you will have to raise about 80 percent of the time, so you can't stray very far away from that, but it can be really hard to figure out which 20 percent of the time you're supposed to fold. We're going to walk you through the basics of this game and give you an idea of some models you can use to try to decide on your play.

When you place your ante bet, you get two hole cards with three community cards dealt, and the dealer also gets two random cards. Your first option is to fold and give up your ante and all chances of winning, and your second option is to call and make another bet worth twice the size of the ante. Then two more cards are dealt for the turn and the river. The dealer has to qualify with at least a pair of fours. This is important for reasons we cover next.

If there is a pair of fours or higher on the board, then you have a special situation where you can be more aggressive with your calls because you only have to get a hand that's better than the dealer's on average to win. Even hands that are slightly worse than average should call because you don't quite need to win 50 percent of the time for a call to be profitable since there's money already in the pot. This is called pot odds in regular hold'em, but the idea is that you are going to win more than you are being asked to bet, so your necessary odds for winning to make the call are lower.

In situations where you don't have at least a pair of fours on the board, you have to use a different model for your play. You're going to need to take into consideration the fact that the call bet will push and the ante will pay 1:1 if the dealer doesn't qualify which is going to happen different amounts of the time depending on how many cards on the board are a four or higher.