When it comes to poker advice, most of it is about how to play it online, how to win at poker, and different strategies on how to make money on your poker playing. But playing cards is not just for competitive play – it can be a social activity as well. This article will help you with setting up a poker night at your place, where the game is played for laughs and enjoyment rather than money and fame.

First of all, invite some friends you feel comfortable playing with. Some people can get very competitive even when in social situations and you will quickly figure out who. They can be fun and make the game interesting, but can also steal focus from the enjoyment of others. Bad losers, rulebook-maniacs and high-betters are in this category as well. You want people who know the game enough to play it, but at the same time not take it too seriously. A good tip is to bet a small amount of money into the poker game even though you are just playing for fun. This way, there is still some small amount of prestige riding on the game – otherwise you could all just go too crazy with your bets. The excitement disappears if there is no tension in calling bluffs, raising stakes or in other ways using your poker face.

Lastly, make sure there is something to do for the people not currently playing. Sitting at a poker table when everybody else is playing can get boring and frustrating, so be sure to talk to everybody at all time or set another table up for people to hang by when they are out of the poker game. And remember to have fun. Poker can be a serious game for big stakes players, but you are not one of them. Make sure that you and your friends enjoy your evening together, not that you leave with a million dollars on your pocket.

Of course, in order to be able to actively partake of Poker, you do have to master these poker rules well. Players who are conversant with the rules won’t accept you near their table if you still have problems with the mastery of basic rules. Poker players you encounter will usually be struggling with the more technical aspects of the game- what stakes to put up, when to bet in order to increase chances of success, when to opt-out of the game to protect their interests…and so on; rather than the basic poker rules which they view as obvious and expect everyone to be conversant with.

It doesn’t help matters that poker is not a single universal game like, say, soccer; where you only have to master one set of rules, and be able to play anywhere in the world. As it turns out, there are numerous varieties of Poker, from the so-called Texas Holdem Poker, to the so-called Stud Poker and onto the so-called Omaha poker (with numerous other varieties in between); each with its own quite unique rules. Indeed, as you come to realize, the only thing that some of these variants share is the name and the fact that they are played with cards. Otherwise their rules can be extremely different.

Well, as a first step, you may consider reading through one of the poker tutorials nowadays widely available on the Internet. If you don’t like the idea of reading, you can still learn the game through the tutorials that are presented in video form. It helps, at this stage, to ensure that you take the most basic of the tutorials, because a vast majority of them are in fact meant for people who are already conversant with poker, and who are only looking to ‘up’ their game – which is not what you are.

There are some poker books out there, too, and this can give you good insight into the basic poker rules. It can be of some help if you can be reading about just one poker variant at this stage, in order to get a good general feel of the game, before proceeding to look at the variants once you have a good general idea of poker. Of course, you can’t claim to have proper mastery of poker rules until you have tried them out in an actual poker game. This is one of the areas where practice really makes perfect. And there are plenty of opportunities to practice poker, even online. You can, for instance, ask for a ‘demo game’ at one of the online poker playing rooms; where you can get to gauge your actual mastery of the poker rules.