what does every thing mean

Poker Strategy
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being extremely new to the game what does all this BB UTG and every thing mean reading forums on how to play and advice forums is so confusing when they speak a foreign language i know its english but believe me being knew trying to pick up the lingo is not that easy please some one explain what these technical terms mean thank you

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We have a couple of glossaries in our Help Center that may help out! Check them out here:

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@Tony2294, if you get confused, it’s probably best to ask in the threads that are confusing you. While the glossary that @fizzymint just posted can definitely be helpful, it often helps more to ask what those things mean in context. My apologies if it were one of my posts that caused the confusion - I tend to get a bit jargon-y.

The two terms you mention, BB and UTG, are both positions at the table. BB, short for Big Blind, is the last player to act preflop. UTG, short for Under The Gun, is the first player to act preflop. Replay had a blog post about a year and a half ago on table position that gives a bit more information. Some other positions that aren’t mentioned there include the following:

  • CO, or Cutoff - player to the immediate right of the dealer
  • HJ, or Hijack - player to the immediate right of the cutoff
  • LJ, or Lowjack - player to the immediate right of the Hijack
  • UTG+X - player X positions to the left of the UTG player. For example, UTG+1 will act immediately after the UTG player, and UTG+2 will act right after UTG+1.

Some people also refer to players by the distance from the button. You’ll see this written as “XOTB,” or X spots Off The Button. This can be useful in games with a variable number of players - say, a 9-handed table where people are frequently standing up and sitting back down, so the number of actual players fluctuates between 5 and 9. In this terminology, 2OTB is the same as HJ, since both players are two positions to the right of the button. With five players at the table, this player would also be UTG, but if there were six players at the table, he would be UTG+1.

Hope that helps!

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And keep in mind that the “dealer” rotates each hand. The current dealer is always marked with a little circle with a “D” in it. This circle is a chip in real life, and is called the dealer’s button, or just the button.

Now, as a matter of historical fact, in the old days, they didn’t have a fancy button. The rugged frontiersmen used a knife to keep track of whose turn it was to deal. These knives usually had buck horn handles, so they called them a “buck.”

It was kind of dangerous to deal, because everyone was usually drunk and armed to the teeth, so a fella was allowed to skip his turn dealing by “passing the buck” to the next guy. The phrase “passing the buck” is still used today when someone is ducking their responsibility.

President Harry Truman, an avid poker player, had a sign on his desk that said, “The Buck Stops Here.” This had nothing to do with money, as many people think. It meant that he was willing to accept the responsibility, and by golly, it was his turn to do the job and he was gonna do it.

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