Casino Poker Rules: Overview

The game of Poker is, without doubt, one of the all-time classic card games involving betting. It is one of a group of card games described as ‘vying games' in which a player holds a hand of cards, either fully or partially concealed to opponents, and lays bets to win. A winning hand is the best when judged with reference to fixed card ranking

Poker has many variants, but these can be broken down into three common styles:

Draw Poker
Players receive a hand of five or more cards all ‘blind' to opponents (i.e. face down, so that only the player dealt the hand can lift them to see what is held). In turn, each player can then discard and replace one or more cards in that hand in a fixed number of deals from the deck, aiming to form the highest-ranking hand they can.

Stud Poker
Players receive the their full hand of cards in separate rounds of play. The cards are dealt ‘open' or ‘blind' depending on which round they are dealt in. Players bet by assessing the strength of their hand in comparison to how strong they guess their opponents hands are based on the ‘open' cards on the table. Three Card, Five Card and Caribbean Stud are all types of this style commonly found at UK online casinos.

Community Card Poker
Players construct their hands from a number of cards dealt to them individually, read with a pool of ‘community cards' used by all of them, which are dealt face up on the table. Texas Hold'em is one example of this style which has become extremely popular in tournament competitions over the last few years.

Casino Pokers are played against the ‘house' with the sole aim being to beat the casino's dealer, and not other customers who may be playing simultaneously at that table. The Pokers you'll find to play at the UK online casinos we recommend are usually Stud games, although you may find the occasional variant based on a Community Card style. The specific rules of the most common styles found online are included in this section and can be accessed using the tabs above.

The Name Of The Game

The commonly accepted origin of the word ‘Poker' for these games is believed to derive from Poque, a French game, itself developed from a Teutonic game called Pochen which translates as ‘to knock' in German or ‘to brag' in Dutch. Interestingly, there is far less accord with respect to the origin of the rules of the modern game. One popular school of thought rejects Poque / Pochen as the historic ancestor in favour of a Persian game, Al Nas, belived to have travelled west with Persian traders. There is also thought to be some rules in Poker that may have their roots in older European card games such as Brelan, Primero and Bragg.