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Effective stacks is a term used to describe amount of chips that are effectively in play. In a heads up battle, the effective stack is always the shorter of the two stack sizes. This is because the deeper stack can’t bet all of his chips even if he wants to. The most he can bet at any given point is the size of the smaller stack. Once the smaller stack is all-in, betting is over and we reach showdown.

Drawing dead means that we have zero chance of winning in a certain situation. For example, imagine we have a straight draw, but our opponent has already made the full house. No matter which cards we catch on the later streets, our opponent is guaranteed to win the pot; we are drawing dead.

Dry is generally used to describe board textures in community card games where the cards don’t co-ordinate well with each other. For example, in Hold’em, imaginethe flop is King, Eight, Three (K83) all of different suits. There is no possible flush or straight draw, so we can refer to this as being a dry flop texture. At the other end of the spectrum, he terms ‘wet’ and ‘drawy’ are used to describe a texture where there is lots of co-ordination between cards.

Downcard is the term used to describe hole cards in Stud. In seven card Stud, players are dealt 4 upcards and 3 downcards. Although all seven cards belong exclusively to us, the 4 upcards are visible to the table and give our opponents a clue regarding our possible hand strength. The 3 downcards are known only to us and are used in conjunction with the 4 upcards to make a 5-card hand.

Draw is the term used to describe a hand that can improve to a strong holding if the right cards fall. The two most common types of draws are straight draws and flush draws. Straight draw means we are waiting on one card to complete a straight while flush draw means we are waiting on one card to complete a flush. The term Draw also applies to a selection of poker variants that involve drawing cards from the deck before each betting round. The most widely known Draw variant is five-card Draw, although 2-7 triple Draw and Badugi are also popular types of Draw poker.

To cripple the deck means that our hand is so strong that it is virtually impossible for our opponent outdraw us. Imagine flopping Quads in Hold’em; we might say that we “have the deck crippled”. The term crippled is also used to describe a situation where we become hopelessly shorts tacked in a poker tournament. We are technically still alive in the tournament, but it’s extremely unlikely we’ll make a comeback given our stack is so small.