History of Poker
Poker is a card game in which players wager with chips that are placed into a pot. The player who has the best five-card hand wins the money in the pot. Players may also bluff, betting that they have the best hand when in reality they do not. This type of bluffing is called “raising.”
In Poker, each player has two cards, and the remaining five are community cards. The highest hand is a royal flush, which consists of four matching cards of the same rank in a suit. The second-highest hand is a straight, which contains five consecutive cards of the same suit. The lowest hand is a pair, which is two matching cards of the same rank.
The game is usually fast-paced, with players continuously raising and folding their hands until one player has all the chips or everyone else has folded. Some players may choose not to raise, which is known as checking. A player who checks cannot raise in the next betting interval.
Some variants of Poker require a contribution to the pot before each player is dealt their cards, called an ante. If a player does not put into the pot at least as many chips as the previous player, they must fold their cards and forfeit their stake in the pot.
Another variant of Poker uses blind bets, which are placed by players who do not have any cards in their hands. These bets can either replace the ante or be in addition to it, and are rotated around the table. The highest-ranking poker hand is a straight, followed by a full house and then a pair.
The earliest recorded references to Poker date from the late 18th century, and it was popularized in America in the early 20th century. However, the ancestor of Poker is a much older game, and it has been described under various names. It is likely that it evolved from the three-card game of Piquet (French, 16th – 18th centuries), and its derivatives Brag (18th – 19th centuries) and Bouillotte (18th century French). Articles on the history of Poker mention a wide variety of other earlier vying games, but not all of them have much bearing, if any, on Poker.
