Poker Glossary

1. (n)   cow; usually preceded by la.¹

1. (n)  cow. If a player says "Vaca vaca" to a floor person (or another player), it generally means, "Do you want to go half and half with me in this game?"¹

1. (n)  Jack (the card); comes from French.¹

1. (n)  Any 3, 5, or 7; comes from the game of panguingue, in which those cards have value (which is the meaning of the word valle) and for which other players pay a player who melds them.¹

1. (adj)  As in "bet for value." This means that you would actually like your opponents to call your bet (as opposed to a bluff). Generally it's because you have the best hand. However, it can also be a draw that, given enough callers, has a positive expectation²

2. (adj)  There are many potential reasons to bet or raise (e.g., to get people to fold, to manipulate the size of the pot, to express anger, to impress someone watching from the rail, etc.). Betting for value is one of the better ones. Value means the return you get on your investment; the expected increase in your equity in the pot (your return), as compared to the size of your bet or raise (your investment). Typically this means either that you believe you will receive action from inferior hands, or that the the chance you will win the hand makes the bet worthwhile.³

3. (n)  Getting paid off for a good hand (by someone who calls); often part of the phrase full value. A player in a lowball game who holds a pat bicycle, and busts three other players with it because of the way the action comes down, might say that he got value out of the hand. If he was not prone to understatement, he might even say that he got full value out of the hand.¹

4. (n)  The worth of a hand in comparison with its chances of winning. Compare with return.¹

1. (v)  bet for value.¹

2. (n)   A bet so made.¹

1. (n)  A measure of the up and down swings your bankroll goes through. Variance is not necessarily a measure of how well you play. However, the higher your variance, the wider swings you'll see in your bankroll. ²

2. (n)  If you have a sufficient advantage at the game you're playing, you expect to make money over the long haul. This is true whether the game is poker, blackjack, or craps, and whether your advantage is due to skill, cheating, or psychic powers. However, over a small period of time, you may do better or worse than what your average should be. For example, you may expect to make one big bet per hour at the poker table, but in a given hour it may not be uncommon for you to win or lose twenty big bets. Variance is the statistical measure of dispersion, or just how widely your results will be distributed. When variance is high enough, a small advantage may be of no use during your lifetime. When variance is low enough, a small sample will be much more likely to reflect your real advantage (or disadvantage). In other words, variance describes just how long the long haul is. In poker terms, high variance means that a small number of hands will not be very representative of your long-term expectation. Here's a simple non-poker example. A slot machine that pays you $1 every time you put two quarters into it (or vice versa) has no variance whatsoever. Your expected win (or loss) is $.50 per spin, and you get exactly that every spin. On the other hand, a slot machine that takes the same two quarters (or $1) and usually just eats them but one time in ten thousand spits back $10,000 (or 5,000) will have identical expectation. If you play enough games, you will tend to average the same $.50 per spin profit (or loss). But because you need so many more spins to get a representative sample of the possible outcomes, your variance is very large. Variance is such a strong contributor to poker results that it often obscures the importance of good play. The best player at the table may start with the best cards and still have far less than a 50 percent chance of winning the hand. A skilled professional can lose money over days or weeks, without necessarily doing anything wrong. And while bad play may have negative expectation, it is often rewarded in the short term - players who draw for incredible longshots do sometimes get lucky, despite their poor judgement. Variance is what makes losing players think they have a chance in the long run, and what gives them a real chance in the short run. Situations in poker may be higher or lower in variance. For example, in a situation where you know it will cost you a few bets to draw for a real longshot, but the pot is large enough to justify the calls, your expectation may be positive while your variance will be much higher than you'd like. This sort of situation is typical of high-variance bets - high potential payoff with a small probability of winning. As well, different qualities of the other players at the table can contribute to your overall variance at a given table. If many of the players are maniacs, willing to cap the betting and see the flop with any two cards, your variance may be high at that table. On the other hand, exceptionally weak and passive players, who may fold a high proportion of the time when they are raised, will reduce your variance. Obviously the variance you experience in your play will be affected not just by the nature of the game, but also by your style of play and by the styles of those you play with. Although in the context of poker it's often used loosely, "variance" is a statistical term with a precise definition. Given accurate estimates of your variance and expectation (along with some assumptions about the distribution of your outcomes), it is easy to calculate confidence intervals, or ranges, within which your results are most likely to fall over different periods of time. If all this is news to you, pick up a book. Learning a little about statistics wouldn't kill you, especially if you want to play poker seriously. ³

3. (n)  A measure of the spread of a statistical distribution about its mean or center. With respect to poker, the distribution of your results over a a set of hands or sessions, or the swings in a positive or negative direction of cash flow. The greater the variance, the wilder the swings; the lower the variance, the more likely a given session results will be close to one's average result. As an example, suppose you average $20 an hour in winnings in a particular game. You calculated this over a long period of time, say 1000 hours, in which you made $20,000. You didn't make exactly $20 every hour you played, but a graph of your winnings was a generally upward-sloping line. Some hours, you might have lost $50; others you might have won $70 or $100. Some playing sessions you lost; others you won. The closer each hour to plus $20 were your results, the lower was your variance, and the farther from this number were your results, the higher was your variance. In mathematical terms, variance is the square of the standard deviation, a topic beyond the scope of this dictionary. Various poker plays can be described as high variance or low variance. A very tight player who rarely made risky plays might be a steady winner; likely his play would show low variance. An aggressive player who made frequent risky plays might win more overall, but his play would show high variance. The higher your variance, the larger the bankroll you need. Playing very few hands and only those with a high expectation of success is a winning strategy for many players, particularly in low-limit games. Such a low-variance strategy produces consistent results, with few deviations, but also at a relatively low hourly rate. Playing more hands, particularly hands that are purely speculative, frequently betting aggressively when having only a small edge, and other risky plays might produce a greater win rate for another player, but the high-variance player is also subject to be stuck considerably more at any juncture. An example of a high variance play is raising on the last round of betting with a pure bluff in the hopes of getting a player who appears to be betting a weak hand to fold. The bluffer wins more pots than someone who rarely makes this play, but also frequently finds himself in the position of having lost multiple bets on a hand the low-variance player would have just quietly folded.¹

1. (n)  oral bet.¹

1. (n)  oral declaration.¹

1. (n)  A kind of holdout machine. A vest holdout is worn under a thief's coat. Also called breastworks.¹

1. (n)  In a draw game, at the showdown, spreading your hand triumphantly. (It's usually done in the same manner that a blackjack or poker dealer spreads an entire deck fanned face up on the table in front of her. Spreading one's hand in this fashion, by the way, is something of a needle, and is not practiced by a refined player, who, when he has an obvious powerhouse, gently and diffidently turns it face up on the table.) ¹

2. (n)  A similar method of showing down in any form of poker.¹

1. (n)  victory rip.¹

1. (n)  The game played on a video poker machine.¹

1. (n)  A computerized slot machine (video slot machine) based on draw poker (but not really a form of poker), with card symbols, on which players try to make certain poker hand combinations, a casino game that can sometimes be beaten by skill, the fastest-growing form of mechanized gambling.¹

1. (n)  vigorish.¹

1. (n)  vigorish.¹

1. (n)  House take; time; rake.¹

1. (n)  Four queens. ¹