What is Poker?

Poker is a five-card vying game played with standard playing-cards.

A vying game is one where, instead of playing their cards out, the players bet as to who holds the best card combination by progressively raising the stakes until either -

* there is a showdown, when the best hand wins all the stakes (‘the pot’), or
* all but one player have given up betting and dropped out of play, when the last person to raise wins the pot without a showdown.

It is therefore possible for the pot to be won by a hand that is not in fact the best, everyone else having been bluffed out of play. One of Poker's earliest names was, in fact, ‘Bluff’. Bluffing is as essential to vying as finessing is to trick-play.

A five-card vying game is one where, no matter how many cards may be dealt to each player, the only valid combinations are those of five cards. In orthodox Poker these are, from highest to lowest:

* straight flush (five cards in suit and sequence, Ace high or low, as heartAKQJ10 or spade5432A)
* four of a kind, fours (four cards of the same rank and one idler, as K-K-K-K-x)
* full house (three of one rank and two of another, as Q-Q-Q-4-4)
* flush (five cards in suit but not in sequence, as heartJ-heart9-heart8-heart7-heart3)
* straight (five cards in sequence but not in suit, as spade10-spade9-diamond8-club7-heart6)
* three of a kind, threes, triplet, trips (three of the same rank plus two of two different ranks, as 7-7-7-x-y)
* two pair (as Q-Q-9-9-x)
* one pair (as 3-3-x-y-z)
* high card (no combination: as between two such hands the one with the highest card wins)

(The highest possible straight flush, consisting of A-K-Q-J-10 of a suit and known as a royal flush, is sometimes added to the list in order to bring the number of combinations up to the more desirable ten, but of course it is not different in kind from a straight flush. Other five-card combinations, known as freak hands, are recognized in unorthodox Poker variants.)

Any vying game based on these five-card hands is a form of Poker, and any game lacking either or both of them is not, even if it contains Poker as part of its title.

Poker is of French-American origin and is the national vying game of the United States, though it has come to have a world-wide following in many different forms.