Learning to speak Texas Hold’em as well as you play it is all part of the fun and excitement of the world’s most popular poker game!
Some of the terms and slang used are self-explanatory, some humourous, others startlingly apt, but all very relevant to the game and your knowledge of it.
To help you along we have put together a comprehensive list of terms. Read them, memorise the ones you find worthy of repeat, and begin to speak Hold’em as well as you play it!
This covers the letters P-Q. The remainder of the alphabet will be gradually introduced to allow meanings to soak in.
Have fun reading!
P is for:
Pair:
• A fairly obvious starter! 2 cards of the same rank
Paints:
• Picture or Face cards: Jacks, Queens, Kings
Pass:
• When a player folds
Pay Off:
• When a player calls on the final round. This is regardless of whether they think they may or may not have the best hand
Play Back:
• When a player raises or re-raises another players ‘play’
Play the Board:
• When playing Hold’em, any player whose hole cards are worse than the hand all cards on the board show, means that player will use the 5 community cards as their hand
Pocket Cards:
• The 2 face-down cards a player is dealt that belong solely to them
Pocket Pair:
• This donates a player holding a pair as their 2-hole cards
Pocket Rockets:
• When you are dealt a pair of aces as hole cards. Chances are slim! The odds for getting dealt this hand are 220:1
Position:
• A player’s position as to where they are sitting in relation to the dealer button. As the button moves you will be classed as being in an early, middle or late position. There are also individual names for certain positions such as: Small Blind (SB), Big Blind (BB), Under the Gun (UTG), Hijack, Cutoff and Dealer
Post:
• Placing your chips in the pot is ‘posting a play’. A player must post the Blinds
Pot:
• Make it yours! The pot is the amount of money made up of bets and calls that sits in the middle of the table
Pot Committed:
• In general, if there is a huge pot compared to a players remaining stack then they are ‘pot committed’ to that hand and can’t fold
Pot Odds:
• Amount of money in the pot at any time compared to how much a player needs to call in order to stay in that hand. Pot odds should be used to make decision during a game. Example: $200 in the pot and the bet you need to call is $20 – The pot odds are 10:1. This means that if your hand should win 1 in 10 times or more – make the call
Pre-Flop:
• Refers to before the 1st 3 community cards being dealt as well as during the 1st round of betting
Prize Fund/Prize Money:
• This is calculated on the number of tournament entrants and is multiplied by the entry stake to give the total amount in the prize fund
Protect:
• When a player makes a bet in order to get others to fold. Meaning their hand has better odds of a win against fewer other opponents
Push:
This has two meanings:
1. When the dealer pushes the chips to the winning player at the end of a hand
2. When dealers rotate to other tables
Q is for:
Quads:
• 4 of a kind
Qualifier/Qualifying Low:
• A hand needs to be eligible for half of the pot in High-Low games
Quarter:
This has 2 meanings:
1. It can be a $25 chip, or a $2,500 bet, dependent upon the game stakes
2. In High-Low games when a player wins a quarter of the pot. It occurs when a player has the same low hand as another player. In this case they only win 50% of the low half of the pot
That’s it for the letters P-Q in our installment of “Texas Hold’em – The A-Z of Poker speak”. There is little doubt you will be familiar with some of the terms above, but hopefully you have added to your Texas Hold’em vocabulary with ones previously unheard of.
There’s lots more to come:
Do keep a close eye out as we build this extensive compendium on the A-Z of Hold’em jargon. It will add to your knowledge of common terms as well as the more obscure ones. What is more, you will be able to impart your knowledge to friends as well as foes!
Our next article continues with the letter ‘R‘ and includes the reasons why ‘Rags’ are not what you want, a ‘Royal Flush’ is definitely what you do want and the ‘Rabbit Hunt’ is interesting to see!