Every hand is like being in a world war where you don't know how strong any enemies are until it's too late. Death is always one showdown away, avoided only through full use of your weapons: knowledge, reasoning, and intuition.

It was Wednesday. Today was the last night Joey would work at Angelo's this week, but unlike other jobs, he wasn't thrilled to escape the 9-5. He was starting to become accustomed to this lifestyle. The sounds and smells of the poker room. The feel of the cards on his hands. The wars of the mind.

As he walked up to Angelo's building, he felt a familiarity. It seemed he had grown fond of this place in this short time. Joey had to admit that recently, even beyond the cards, he could be considered lucky. Inside the card room, players hadn't arrived yet. He found Anwar speaking with Pedro about a hand that he saw on tv.

"And then he was like I'm all in and the other guy was like I call and then he busted him! That was the end of the tournament! He flipped over three 7s and two 9s!" Anwar told the story as Pedro just nodded his head in slow motion like the slowest bobblehead on Earth.

"Hey Joey, did you see that hand I just mentioned?"

"With the three by two? No," Joey replied.

"The what?" Anwar asked, eyes squinting.

"The three 7s and two 9s you just said, the three by two," Joey clarified.

At this moment, a rope from above fell merely centimeters in front of Joey's face. He looked up to discover Amy. It seems she was eavesdropping from the ceiling fan for some reason. Now, she slowly slid down the rope upside down, somehow entering a Spiderman pose, and only stopping when her head became level with Joey's.

'How does she do that?' Joey hadn't taken physics yet, but that still didn't stop him from being confused as to what the hell was going on here.

There, hanging inverted, she said, "It seems you've been slacking off." Without warning, she spun and made her legs wrapped around Joey, doing a Sonya Blade leg grab as she flipped her body and used the leverage to fling Joey across the room and into the poker table.

"AAAHHH."

*THUD*

Anwar and Pedro watched all this, sympathizing with Joey's plight. They wore expressions of anger, then sadness, and finally acceptance. This was the process of dealing with grief. Some things in life could only be accepted, suffering was inevitable, Amy was such an unstoppable force.

"Do I look like Johnny Depp to you?!? This is abuse!" Joey screamed.

"This is tough love, did you not feel the love?" Amy's eyes were glowing red.

Joey decided to make a tactical retreat.

"I think it's time to go over some basics. That nonsense you just said about a three by two made it clear you don't know the names of the hand types. You still have holes in your knowledge, young Padawan," she said.

Joey decided sometimes the best move was to no move at all. 'Wu wei. Go with the flow. Become one with world,' he recited the mantra. Spiritual awakening becomes easier when the alternative is being flung out a window.

Amy took out a deck of cards and sat Joey down at the poker table.

"So you know that the point of Hold 'em is to make the best five card hand out of a total of seven cards: your two private pocket cards, plus the five community cards on the board. Let's go over the hand rankings of what hands you can make, from weakest to strongest..." She began dealing some cards and started her lesson.

"First take a look at this..." The cards she dealt read [Q♥ K♥ J♦ 7♦ 5♦]. "Here you have no pair, no straight, and no flush. In other words, you have nothing. If you don't know what a straight or flush is, we'll get to that soon. With a five card hand like this, your hand strength is determined by your highest card, here that's king high, and it's very weak. The following point is intuitive enough, but here is the sequence of single cards from weakest to strongest: [2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 J Q K A]."

She picked up the cards, reshuffled them, and dealt out five new cards. The board read [3♥ 3♦ 4♥ J♣ 10♣]. "Here you have one pair. Any pair beats any high card, even if your pair is as weak as 3s. In addition, any higher pair beats every lower pair. So a pair of 4s beats a pair of 3s. A pair of aces beats all other pairs..."

"Let's say both you and your opponent have a pair of aces, the tiebreaker goes to the kicker card which is the high card in the remaining three cards besides the pair. For example..." She dealt out another hand: [3♣ 3♠ 4♦ Q♠ 5♣]. "Compare this pair of 3s and the pair of 3s from before. This new one has a queen as its highest card, it is stronger since it has a pair of 3s with a queen kicker, which would beat the 3s from before that only had a jack kicker."

She picked up all the cards and dealt again, stopping mid deal to ooze a dark aura as she asked, "Are you paying attention?"

"Yes...yes mam," Joey replied.

"Good boy..." She kept dealing. This time she dealt out this board: [4♦ 4♣ 6♥ 6♦ 8♣]. "This is two pair: 4s and 6s. Any two pair beats any one pair. Just so we're clear, any time I say a hand is stronger, that means it is stronger than every weaker hand in the chain already discussed, since the strength rankings are linear."

She dealt out another hand: [2♦ 2♣ 5♥ 7♦ 7♣]. "Here is another two pair. When you have two pair versus two pair, the one with the highest pair wins. So in this case, the 7s and 2s would beat 6s and 4s. In general, one and two pair hands can be considered anywhere from weak to somewhat strong depending on the situation." She picked up all the cards and dealt again.

[J♣ J♦ J♠ A♥ 5♥] "This is three of a kind or trips. Any three of a kind beats any two pair or weaker. Similar to one pair, higher trips beat lower trips."

[6♣ 7♦ 8♦ 9♥ 10♥] "This is a ten high straight. A straight is when all five of your cards are in sequence, suits don't matter. The sequence could be from 2 to 6 or from ten to ace, but higher straights beat lower straights. Straights beat all trips and weaker. One caveat about straights is that the ace can serve as both the highest and lowest card in straights, so [A 2 3 4 5] is also a 5 high straight, however [J Q K A 2] would not work. Trips and straights are strong hands."

[2♥ 6♥ 8♥ 10♥ K♥] "This is a flush which is when you have five or more cards of the same suit, in this case hearts(♥). It could be any suit, whether spades, hearts, etc. A flush is a very strong hand that beats all straights and weaker. There is one thing to note which is that the highest card often matters. This hand would be a king high flush and a higher flush beats lower flushes..."

"The high card for a flush is important because you often run into a situation where the five shared community cards have four or more cards of the flush. For example, if the community board is [2♥ 4♥ 7♥ J♥ Q♣], there are four hearts here, which means you only need one heart among your two pocket cards to have a flush. Now, the player with the highest heart in his pocket cards will have the highest flush, and thus the strongest hand."

"There are only three more hand types so hang in there." She had Anwar pass Joey a Gatorade and a towel.

[4♦ 4♣ 4♠ 5♣ 5♥] "This is a full house, also known as a full boat. This is when you have trips and a pair together. The tiebreaker for this first compares the trips. So if two people have a full house, the one with higher trips wins. If they both have the same rank of trips, then the higher side pair wins. Any full house beats any flush or weaker. A full house could be anywhere from strong to a monster."

[8♦ 8♣ 8♠ 8♥ 9♣] "This is four of a kind and is pretty self-explanatory. This beats any full house or below. Four of a kind is always a monster."

[5♠ 6♠ 7♠ 8♠ 9♠] "This is a straight flush. That's when you have a straight and a flush simultaneously. This is an absolute monster hand and beats everything discussed so far. Similar to straights, the higher the rank of your top card, the stronger the straight flush."

[10♣ J♣ Q♣ K♣ A♣] "This is a royal flush. It's really just a straight flush but it has its own title because it's the strongest hand in poker and extremely rare to see. In fact, as hand strength increases from a high card to a straight flush, the stronger hand types progressively become rarer and mathematically more difficult to make. For example, you will make one or two pair much more often than a flush."

"That's it. Now you understand poker hand rankings, so you can go die now."

Joey was confused, but then he started to feel woozy. 'Oh no...that drink Anwar gave me...she must have put white powder in it.' He fell off the chair and crawled on the ground like he was climbing under barb wire during army boot camp training. He barely managed to reach the sofa and pull himself up before passing out."

His dreams weren't sweet.

Author's Note:

I wanted to finally get the basic concepts out of the way. I hope by now, everyone who has read to this point understands the basics of how to play Hold 'em. That'll allow me to get more in depth into interesting situations. If you're still confused about something, please comment so I can clarify and improve the text. The poker action will start again next chapter.

A nuance about high cards: Technically high cards also go down from the highest to the lowest. So with [Qh Kh Jd 7d 5d] , is actually KQ high instead of just king high and would beat KJ high and worse. Occasionally that does come into play, but for simplicity, I did not discuss that in the chapter.

Thanks for reading!