Protect Your Hand - Big Poker

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If you’re new to poker, this tip will save you money. Possibly lots of it. If you’ve been playing poker for a while, and consider yourself experienced, it never hurts to revisit the fundamentals.

Protecting your hand is one of the most important concepts a new player can learn. It’s a combination of discipline and common sense, really, and while those two traits are vital to every poker player’s toolbox, they are especially indispensable when applied to the protection of one’s hand.

What do you mean by “protecting your hand”?

Well, a couple of things, actually. From a poker tactic perspective, it means raising to protect a good but vulnerable hand by making draws fold. But for the purpose of this column, it means physically protecting the cards you are dealt: your hole cards. Maybe you’ve just played in a casino for the first time, and you’ve noticed other apparently experienced players putting a poker chip, or a metal disc, or a rock, or a Niagara Falls snowglobe, on top of their cards, and you’ve wondered what the hell they were doing. They are protecting their hands from being accidentally (or sometimes intentionally) fouled or mucked. Imagine if you’ve been dealt pocket kings, you’ve capped the betting pre-flop (or, in no limit, gone all in), and some dummy fires his hand towards the muck and/or the dealer with a force similar to that required to launch a space shuttle, and his cards bounce off of the dealer’s forehead and become intermingled with your own. If you haven’t placed something over your cards, like a chip or any other aforementioned item, your hand is dead, sir. Dead. It’s as if you folded accidentally. Doesn’t matter if you held kings or seven-deuce, it’s as if your hand never existed. Sound like fun? It ain’t, no how, no way. And I speak from experience.

If you don’t have anything on top of your cards, how would you like it if the dealer, seeing nothing telling him that your hand is still in play, thinks you’ve folded and scoops your cards up? Once those cards have hit the muck, they’re deader than Chris Farley (or John Belushi, depending on your generation). You may have had a winning hand, but now you got diddly squat, and some other mope is cackling as he rakes in the pot. Your pot.

Your Hand is Your Receipt for the Pot

The other main thing you can do to protect your hand is to not muck it prematurely (or “premature muckulation”, as I like to call it; I’m so juvenile…). I’ve actually done this, too; believe me, you’ll only do it once, or if you’re reading this tip, imagine how lucky you are to have me protecting you. Picture this: you’re in a tournament hand, and you have the nuts. One guy is already all in; the pot is so big the table is bending under the weight of the chips in the middle of it. You make a little teaser bet on the river, but the third player in the hand isn’t biting, and he folds. You’re still happy, though, because you’ve just become a huge chip leader, and you throw your cards into the muck and tell the dealer to “ship it!”. But wait: you’ve forgotten about that all in guy! Your cards are in the muck, cannot be retrieved, and your hand is ruled dead; the all in guy takes the pot with his busted flush draw. See what we’re getting at here? Don’t surrender your hand until the pot is pushed to you. It’s like trying to pick up your dry cleaning without the little ticket the cleaner gave you: without that ticket, you might not have that Perry Ellis suit for that big date with Paris Hilton.

And even if the debatably lovely Ms. Hilton ain’t your cup of tea, I think you get my drift. So, protect your hand. Always.

By Mike McManus (aka North Shore Mike) a poker player, and customer support manager for online card room Full Tilt Poker.com.