Poker is a card game where players bet on the strength of their hands. There are many variants of this game, but the aim is always to extract the most value from winning hands and minimise losses from losing ones. This is known as “MinMax”.
Poker has been played for over 200 years. It was first described in print in two slightly different ways: in Jonathan Green’s Dragoon Campaigns to the Rocky Mountains (1836) and Joe Cowell’s Thirty Years Passed Among the Players in England and America (1829). The earliest known top hand was four of a kind (Ace-King-Jack-Queen).
In Poker, each player is dealt cards, hidden from other players. Each player then bets on the strength of their cards, and the player with the best five-card hand wins the pot. The game is often won by players who make good bluffs, but a player’s chances of making a good bluff depend on their opponent’s reactions.
Before betting starts, a ‘dealer’ is chosen for each round. This person is responsible for shuffling the deck, dealing the cards to each player and determining how much the players should bet. In some games, the dealer is a non-player; in others, the dealer rotates between each player. During the betting phase, it is important to consider your opponents’ reaction to your bets and the size of their own hands.
After the betting phase, three more cards are dealt face-up in the centre of the table. These are called the flop, and they form part of everyone’s shared cards. Each player then combines their own private cards with the flop to build a five-card hand.
In the early rounds, it is usually best to call a bet if you don’t have a strong hand. Then, you can wait to see the flop and hope that your opponents call a bet too. If your hole cards are strong, you can raise the bet if the other players are betting heavily.
If the player with the highest pair has a high kicker, they win the tie. If the player with the highest straight has a high kicker, they win this tie too. If neither player has a high pair or a straight, they both win this tie.
In online poker, in-person knowledge of other players’ cues and body language isn’t available, but many of the game’s experts use software to create behavioral dossiers on their opponents and buy or even trade records of other players’ “hand histories.” This helps them both exploit their opponents and protect themselves from exploitation. It is therefore very difficult to say whether Poker is a game of chance or skill, although mathematical analysis and simulations show that skill dominates over the long run. The most famous mathematical game theory book, written in 1944 by mathematician John von Neumann and economist Oskar Morgenstern, used Poker as a central example of their Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Von Neumann and Morgenstern argued that optimal strategies exist for games with repeated shuffles and bets.