Poker is a card game that is often seen as a mind sport. It is an iconic game played among a group of 2-10 players, where the aim is for players to form the best poker hand combination. Poker card games demand your deep concentration, emotional control, and long-term strategic thinking. Bluffing, reading opponents, and showing your unpredictability in front of your opponents are key psychological tools every player must utilize. Poker games may seem complex but with thorough understanding of poker game rules and the right strategies, you can sharpen your skills and master the game. Let us start by understanding the basic poker game rules.

The most important rules of a poker game revolve around the poker hand rankings. You must first understand the different poker hands to know the possible hand combinations you can make as per the poker game rules. Here the various different poker hands in a standard game of poker.

A standard game of poker involves placing of bets followed by dealing of the cards. After the cards are dealt the betting rounds begin and in each round players can either choose to bet, call, raise, check or fold. At the end, if more than one player is left in the game a showdown occurs where all players reveal their cards and the one with the best hand wins.

Poker games usually begin with mandatory bets like the Small Blind and Big Blind in Hold’em and Omaha. These bets create the initial pot, which is the first incentive players have to win the hand. As the hand progresses, additional betting rounds grow the pot even more.

Once the initial cards are dealt, players take turns making their moves in a clockwise direction around the table.

Each player can usually take one of the following actions when it is their turn to act:

• Check – To check is to decline the opportunity to open the betting. Players can only check when there is no bet during the current round, and the act of checking passes the action clockwise to the next person in the hand. If all active players check, those players remain in the hand and the round is considered complete.
• Bet – Players may bet if no other players have bet during the current round. Once a bet has been made, other players must ‘call’ by matching the amount bet, in order to remain in the hand.
• Fold – Players who fold forfeit their cards and cannot win or act again during the current hand.
• Call – Players can call if other players have bet during the current round; this requires the calling player to match the highest bet made.
• Raise – Players may raise if other players have bet during the current round; this requires the rising player to match the highest bet made, and then make a greater one. All subsequent players are required to call the raise or raise again (‘re-raise’) to stay in the hand.

3. Betting Rounds

Betting rounds varies among poker variants. Texas Hold'em and Omaha are the world's two most popular poker games and they have identical betting structures consisting of four rounds: pre-flop, flop, turn, and river.

The pre-flopbetting round begins as soon as all players have received their hole cards, before any community cards have been dealt; betting on the flop occurs after the first three community cards are dealt; on the turn after the fourth community card; and on the river after the fifth and final community card.

On each betting round, betting continues until every player has either matched the bets made or folded (if no bets are made, the round is complete when every player has checked). Once the betting round gets completed, the next dealing/betting round begins, or the hand is complete.

Below is an example of a Texas Hold’em hand after all the cards have been dealt. As you can see, players may use any of their two hole cards with any of the five community cards to make the best five-card hand they can make - in this case, you can use both your hole cards and three of the shared community cards to make a straight.

4. Showdown

Once the last bet or raise has been called during the final round of betting, a showdown occurs; the remaining active players must show or ‘declare’ their hands, and the player(s) with the best ranking hand(s) win the pot.

Players frequently show their hands in sequence, rather than all at once. Multiple players can share a single pot, which is divided in various ways based on the game rules and each player's hand ranking against their opponents.

Limits Of Betting

Betting limitations refer to the maximum amount that players can open and raise. Poker games are typically classified into three types: no limit, pot limit, and fixed limit.

• No Limit – in poker games with a no limit betting structure, each player can bet or raise by any amount up to and including their full stack (the total number of chips they possess at any given time) in any betting round, whenever it is their turn to act.
• Pot Limit – in poker games with a pot limit betting structure, each player can bet or raise by any amount up to and including the size of the total pot at that time.
• Fixed Limit – in poker games with a fixed limit betting structure, each player can choose to call, bet or raise, but only by a fixed amount. The fixed amount for any given betting round is set in advance.

In No Limit and Pot Limit games, the ‘Stakes’ column in the PokerStars lobby shows the Small Blind and Big Blind amounts. For Mixed Games, the listed stakes represent the betting limits during Limit rounds, while the blinds in Pot Limit and No Limit rounds are typically set at half the Limit game blinds.

Table Stakes and All-in

You may have seen a poker scene in a movie or on TV where a player is faced with a bet for more chips than they have at the table, and is forced to wager a watch, a car or some other possession in order to stay in the hand. This may make for good drama, but it is not generally the way poker is played in real life!

All games on our site are played ‘table stakes’, meaning only the chips in play at the beginning of each hand can be used during the hand. The table stakes rule has an application called the ‘All-In’ rule, which states that a player cannot be forced to forfeit a poker hand because the player does not have enough chips to call a bet.

Players who do not have enough chips to call a bet are declared All-In. The player is eligible for the portion of the pot up to the point of his final wager. All further action involving other players takes place in a ‘side pot’, which the All-In player is not eligible to win. If more than one player goes All-In during a hand, there could be more than one side pot.

Now that you know the rules , what’s stopping you? Download the pokerstars app and play!