Poker is a card game in which players wager money on the likelihood that they hold the best hand. The game has many variants, but all share some essential characteristics. Each player places an ante, after which he or she is dealt five cards. He may then choose to discard one or more and draw new cards, or he or she can “hold pat.” Players can also bluff by betting that they have a superior hand when they do not.

At the start of each hand, any player has the right to open the betting by saying “I open.” Once opening, betting passes clockwise to the next player. After each round of betting, the dealer shuffles the deck and offers it to the player to his or her left for a cut. If the player declines a cut, another player can do so.

The earliest known description of poker is in J. Hildreth’s Dragoon Campaigns to the Rocky Mountains (1836), followed by the published reminiscences of two unconnected witnesses, Jonathan Green in his Exposure of the Arts and Miseries of Gambling (1843) and Joe Cowell in Thirty Years Passed Among the Players in England and America (1844). It is thought that these references refer to an earlier form of poker than that played today, where the cards are arranged into a range of combinations: one pair, two pair, three of a kind, four of a kind, and the ‘full’ – the only hand in which all five cards are active – and then compared.