If you love nothing better than perfecting a betting strategy, weighing up the odds and calculating your risk against your potential rewards then Cash tables, also known as ring games, are the poker tables for you.
Ring games are ad hoc poker games where anyone can join the table provided they’ve got the cash in their wallet to cover their bets.
Unlike in tournaments, where you pay a fixed buy-in fee, get a set number of chips, and win a fixed amount of money, at cash tables you convert your money into the equivalent value of chips and start playing.
The minimum and maximum amounts of chips that you can buy varies from one table to the next – you can play for change, or join the high-rollers, depending on your tastes.
You can play for as long as you like, buying more chips if necessary, converting your chips back to cash whenever you like, or playing until your chip stack is gone.
And because the value of your chips correlates directly to the cash you’re risking or winning there’s a different pace and a different type of excitement with ring games – one that many people prefer to the all-or-nothing adrenaline of tournament play.
Choosing a cash table
You’ll find a huge variety of cash tables at ATR Poker Club, with comprehensive details of each one on show in the Poker Lobby.
You’ll see that different tables have different levels of action; some with a higher percentage of players betting on after the flop and some with bigger pots on offer than others.
Cash tables can have between two and ten players, playing for stakes ranging from “micro” sizes – as little as 10 cents for the big blind – to high-roller levels. And you don’t just have to play Texas Hold’em – ATR Poker Club features a variety of games, including Omaha and Stud and all their variants and more.
When you’ve chosen a table, just click to take your seat, or, if it’s a popular table, you may have to join a waiting list. When a seat becomes available you’ll be taken to your table automatically.
The play at many tables is in US Dollars or Euros rather than pounds sterling; when you buy your chips you’ll do so at a published exchange rate, which will be the same exchange rate used when you convert your chips back to cash.