Poker is a family of card games in which players wager over which hand is best according to a set of rules. These games vary in deck configuration, number of cards in play, and number of players, but all have rules that involve one or more rounds of betting.
Poker can be played for cash or in tournaments. In cash games, each player receives a stack of chips and bets continuously until one player has all the chips or everyone folds.
In a poker tournament, the buy-in is fixed and the game is played until the last player runs out of chips. The player who is last to act typically wins the pot.
A poker hand consists of five cards. These may be the cards a player was dealt or a combination of those and other cards on the table.
The highest possible hand is a Royal Flush, consisting of ten, Jack, Queen, King, and Ace all of the same suit. Two or more identical hands break ties; other combinations are broken by the highest unmatched card or secondary pairs (in a full house, three of a kind and a pair).
Bluffing
The player’s goal is to make a high-ranking poker hand out of his five cards. He can do this by betting that he has the best hand and then revealing his cards to the other players; if no one else calls, he wins the pot.
River Rat – A player who gets lucky and sucks out on the river, especially when they have clearly called too wide on the earlier streets.