Author: horse-racing-free-tips

When playing poker, it is important to understand that the poker hand you hold, how well you bet and how well you bluff will ultimately determine if you will win or lose that hand. Before you can play the game with competence, you will need to understand the card suits and ranks, as well as what makes a good poker hand.

Suits of cards for example are the clubs, diamonds, hearts and spades. This information is imperative to how you will play any of the hands that you are dealt. It is important also to understand the value of a given card. Cards increase in value according to their number or face, they will increase from 2 to 10 J, Q, K and A.

You will also need to learn what cards make a winning hand and what doesn’t make a play at all. The most common hands in order of importance are:

One pair (any matching set of numbers, regardless of suit)
Two pair (any 2 matching sets of numbers, regardless of suit)
Three of a kind (any 3 matching numbers, regardless of suit)
Straight (any 5 cards in numerical sequence, regardless of suit)
Flush (any 5 cards not in numerical order, of same suit)
Full house (any 3 of a kind and 2 of a kind in same hand, regardless of suit)
Four of a kind (any 4 matching set of numbers, regardless of suit)
Straight flush (any 5 numerical order of cards, of same suit)
Royal flush (contains the 10, J, Q, K, A of same suit)

With any hand beating the hand that is placed before it on this list. Therefore, a Royal
flush will win over any other hand that is dealt to the table.

While you are working on mastering these poker hand rules, you may also be faced with a game that calls for wild cards. This could be aces wild, or whatever card the dealer chooses. The point of this rule is that the wild card is available to become the value of whatever card, giving a greater possibility of obtaining a straight flush (or five of a kind).

Generally, a hand that uses a wild card is considered the best hand, but the dealer can choose to have it second to a royal flush; either way the dealer decides and must indicate the choice before the poker hand is dealt.

These are the basic poker hands that you will need to know to play an effective round with any level of player. It is best to memorize this list so that you don’t forget what a winning hand is when you get to the table.

Britain is attempting to catch up with the rest of Europe in terms of providing its employees with the opportunity of working from home. It is one of the least flexible countries in the EU when it comes to allowing its workforce the opportunity to telework. But will this provide the opportunity for staff to play online games like poker or casino.

Only 20% of UK employees are given the opportunity to work from home, compared to countries like Denmark and Germany which have twice the numbers of people working from home.

However, this is likely to change dramatically in the near future, as many large organisations are putting plans together to ensure more and more employees are enticed to work from home. Companies like HSBC, Britain’s largest bank, threw its weight behind a program to remove 4000 of its London based staff from the group’s Canary Wharf building and get them working from home. Its latest challenge is to have around 50% of its headquarters empty in order to sub-let to someone else. It suggests the advances in technology should provide more of an opportunity for its staff in making the choice to come in to the office or work from home.

A report of the Chamber of Commerce last April showed that 38% of businesses offered staff the opportunity to work from home. A survey of its members suggested that 75% were engaged in providing some form of home work. One similar survey conducted by Peninsula, an employment law firm, suggested that 91% of workers polled, said they would love to work from home.

But how does working from home affect people’s work rate, and will it lead to abuse of company time. Will people, who are not being managed during office hours, use company time to go online and spend time looking at poker sites and other online gambling sites? Certainly in the office there are ways to block access to specific websites. However, working from home will provide less of an opportunity to prevent people from visiting online poker sites.

While it is estimated that home workers are 20% more productive and that absenteeism is down 63% for staff who work from home, it cannot be ignored that employees may utilise company laptops and company time to play online poker. Indeed jobs that do not require constant involvement, perhaps business development or customer services, where phone work or computer time may be sporadic, will offer gaps during the day which allow people to view the internet for brief moments, or perhaps keep an online poker game running in the background.

There are dangers in allowing more people to work from home. The social interaction that is gained at work disappears. Some people can become distant and feel isolated from the organisations they work for if they work continuously work at home. Surely this is another reason to believe that workers will search for other forms of communication during home office spells.

Online poker games provide a further level of social interaction which can fill that gap. Chat rooms and interactive gambling games provide players with the opportunity to meet and greet people while having fun attempting to win money online.

So while we would all love to work from home it seems, it cannot be ignored that there is potential for isolation that will only lead to the search for improved social communication and perhaps an increase in the desire to play poker games online.