Think of a Texas Hold’em hand as a seven-letter word built from a 52-card alphabet. To hear the words is to understand them, but at the poker table, your “words” are bets, actions, the casual tossing of two useless cards into the muck, the spill of meaningful color we call the flop, the turn, the river, whatever. The words and the meaning they convey are one and the same. The rituals of the poker table are a kind of language, and as a fluent speaker of this language, you don’t stop and think about what the individual words mean, or whether the grammar is correct. Wash, shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, cut, don’t forget the deck guard, go. Two months before you were sending cards flying over the table rails in curlicues, now you’re tossing them with pinpoint accuracy. Your dealing improves, as your hands learn the curt yet unhurried, almost lazy rhythm of high-throughput dealing. You get to where you can cut three, five, eight chips from a stack in one clean motion. You get to where you can eyeball a stack of chips and tell it’s one chip short of twenty.

Two minutes to gently coax a table of beer-drinking adults through four rounds of betting, keeping your sanity in the midst of two and three-way all-ins, split pots and side pots, pot bets and string bets, kills, half-kills, straddles, and other inventions of bored-out-of-their-mind poker players.Īfter a while, it becomes automatic. Two minutes to wash, shuffle, cut the cards, deal them out in two concentric rings. Thirty hands an hour, or roughly one hand every two minutes, like clockwork. When you’re dealing a real-money game of No Limit Texas Hold’em, that’s what you’re shooting for.

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