Online casino gambling has really become a major leisure activity in Ireland over recent years, and poker gambling in particular has become a firm favourite. Online poker gambling takes many forms, but the most popular format is Texas Hold’em poker. Texas Hold’em has become the poker format used in almost all the serious poker tournaments around the world, including the prestigious Irish Open, and is therefore a must know game for anyone wishing to start gambling on poker. If you have never played Texas Hold’em poker, you should start by checking our individual casino games pages where we have detailed the rules and how the game is played. Texas Hold’em is a poker format which uses community cards which are available to all the players at the table which they can then use in conjunction with their own two dealt cards to form their showdown hand. What really makes Texas Hold’em the most popular online poker gambling format is the multiple betting rounds which form part of every hand, and the bigger pots which inevitably result from these betting rounds. Some fans of this form of poker gambling also point to the fact that the final hand is selected from seven cards instead of five, so that the quality of the hands around the table is usually higher than other formats of the game. Each player is dealt two cards face down, which is followed by the first betting round. Five community cards are then dealt into the middle of the table, one at a time, and a betting round takes place after each of these cards is dealt so that any player winning the hand will have matched the highest bet in six betting rounds. There is no doubt that gambling on Texas Hold’em poker is exciting, but it is a casino game which requires skill and experience to be successful, and is not a game for gamblers with a limited budget. Remember that the outlay required to stay in a hand is always far more than the original table stake.