The Vocabulary of Poker
Most of my friends and family are not poker players, and when talking to them I realize how incredibly jargon-rich the poker world is. I have only been playing a year and these words and phrases have entirely different meanings to me now:
- Position:
- Button
- Cutoff
- Hijack
- Under-the-gun
- Set
- Boat
- Flush
- Straight
- Trips
- NutsPlayer types:
- Donkey
- ManiacActions during the game:
- Muck
- Flop
- Fold
- Turn
- RiverStarting hands:
- Hammer
- American AirlinesMiscellaneous:
- Undercard
- Kicker
- Out
- Busted
- Squeeze
- Dominated
- Back door
- Gutshot
- Cooler
- Draw out
- Coin flip
- No limit
Made Hands:
And these words or phrases had absolutely no meaning to me at all one year ago:
- Min-raise
- Check-raise
- Bad beat
- Overs
- Open-ended draw
- Calling station
- Re-pop
- Pot limit
- Big slick
- Offsuit
- Rivered
- Pre-flop
- Numpty
- Sit and go
- Re-squeezeDon’t forget the Sklansky phrases like:
- Implied odds
- Effective odds
- Reverse implied odds
- Pot odds
And I won’t even get into the abbreviations and acronyms. Next time you tell someone you were UTG in an MTT with an M of 20 and a Q of 1.2 with Big Slick, the cutoff re-popped, and you flopped two overs with a backdoor nut flush draw and 12 outs, consider how much of that is incomprehensible to your friends and family.
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So true!!