Poker is a card game of chance and skill, played by two or more players. Its rules and jargon are widely publicized and the game has become a part of popular culture in many countries. Poker is a game of high risk, and winning requires careful strategic decisions to minimise losses with weak hands and maximize wins with strong ones. Its rich mosaic of strategies and psychological nuances provides a wealth of metaphors to help writers build more engaging narratives for their stories.
Poker has many variants, but all of them have a common feature: betting intervals where players place chips in a pot that represents money. Each player in turn can either call the bet, raise it, or drop (fold) his or her hand. In addition, each player has an overall goal to maximise their expected winnings with their best 5-card hand.
To achieve this goal, a player must extract maximum value from the hands they have and bluff to make up for the ones they don’t. This is called “Min-Max” or minimising losses with weak hands and maximising winnings with good ones.
A player’s strategy also involves determining whether to continue to invest in their weak hands in order to force their opponents into raising their own bets, or to “fold” their hand and take their losses. This is also known as “playing a hand to its full potential.”
The rules of Poker allow for many different betting strategies, and the game has gained popularity because of its unpredictability. The game’s ambiguities can create a dramatic and exciting narrative. The fact that a player’s cards are concealed from other players also adds intrigue to the story.
When a player has the highest-ranking hand, they win all of the chips in the pot. In a tie, the pot is shared between the players with the best hands. Players who fold will not receive any money for their bets.
The game of Poker is based on mathematical principles and has been the subject of much study by mathematicians, economists, and psychologists. In 1944, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern published their foundational book on Game Theory, which included a simplified game of poker as a key example. Their analysis showed that a player with the best cards can profit from making bluffs and can be made to lose by aggressive bluffing. These insights remain valid today. Moreover, studies of multiplayer Poker solvers have both confirmed some well-known strategies and overturned some popular misconceptions. For instance, AIs have been shown to successfully “donk bet”—making the first bet in a round of betting after calling another player’s bet on a previous round—despite folk belief that this is an amateur mistake. This is because a Poker solver, like a chess engine, doesn’t simply repeat what a human has already done but takes into account the broader context of that move and any new information about their opponent. This makes it easier to spot bluffs and identify good calls.