This week’s term is case. In poker, case refers to the last card of a particular rank in the deck. For example, if you are holding pocket aces and the flop comes 7-A-2, the turn is a 9, and the river is an ace, then that river ace would be considered the case ace.

This week’s term is burn. In poker vernacular, burn means to discard—face down—the top card from the deck. This is done between each round of betting before placing the next community card on the board and is done to prevent any player from seeing the next card to be dealt.

This week’s term is rock. This a slang term for a player who is “tight.” Rocks can remain at a table, orbit after orbit without playing a single hand, perfectly content to give up his/her blinds. However, when a rock enters a pot, you can be sure that s/he has a hand.

This week we have a two-for because these two terms are closely related and because I was a couple of days late getting this post out.. This week’s terms are add-on and rebuy.

First, an add-on in a live tournament permits players to buy more chips before busting. All players are eligible to purchase the add-on regardless of the amount of chips they have. Typically, add-ons are only permitted once, usually after the re-entry/rebuy period or before a break.

Second, a rebuy is an amount of chips that is purchased after the buy-in to re-enter the tournament if you bust out or, in some cases, if your chip stack falls below a certain level. In some tournaments, players are permitted to rebuy a certain number of chips (usually the original buy-in amount) an unlimited amount of times for a specified period.

This week’s term is pot limit. Often used in Pot Limit Omaha (PLO), this is a particular structure in which bets and raises are restricted by the current size of the pot. Thus, in pot limit games, players can bet up to the pot size but no larger, and there is no cap on how many bets/raises can be made on any given street.

This week’s term is cold call. Whereas this term can elicit a number of images, in poker, a cold call occurs when a player calls a raise after there was already a bet and one or more raises.

In other words, if a player bets and another raises before the action reaches you and you call, then you are cold calling.

This week’s term is satellite. In poker, in its most basic sense, a satellite is a tournament with a smaller buy-in amount that awards seats to higher-value, more prestigious tournaments rather than cash.

Satellite tournaments can also be used as qualifiers for events which may have a larger popularity than capacity. Satellite tournaments are also used to divide the player pool by a certain region, country, or other location, whether for accessibility purposes or to ensure varied representation. Finally, online satellites—in addition to providing entry to larger online tournaments—are oftentimes used for land-based events

This week’s term is calling station. While this term may elicit different ideas, in poker a calling station is a derogatory term for a weak and somewhat passive player who almost always calls—and rarely, if ever, raises or folds—regardless of the strength of his/her hand.

This week’s term is tell. A tell is a hint or a clue that a player unknowingly provides about the strength/weakness of his/her hand, next action, or other potential move. In essence, the player tells you what s/he is going to do. Some believe this word originated from “telegraph.”

The best and most successful poker players don’t provide many tells themselves, and many are adept at detecting their opponents’ tells during play.

In fact, poker pro and casino executive Mike Caro devoted an entire book to identifying potential tells entitled Caro’s Book of Poker Tells: The Psychology and Body Language of Poker (2003) hailed as one of the ten greatest poker books ever written.

This week’s term is side pot. Quite simply, a side pot is a pot that is separate from the main pot that is created when a player goes all-in. Thus, the pot to which the all-in player(s) contributed is the main pot. This can get tricky when there are multiple all-in players and multiple side pots are created. It is important to realize that any all-in player is only eligible to win a pot to which s/he has contributed chips.