Poker terms, explained in plain English

The moment you sit down

These are the words that describe the furniture of the game. Nothing here is strategy, but a table will not slow down to explain any of it.

• Buy-in: the amount you exchange for chips to join a game. In a cash game you can usually buy in for a range; in a tournament it is a fixed price that includes an entry fee for the house.
• Stack: the chips in front of you. Experienced players count it in big blinds rather than currency, because that is what tells them how much room they have to play with.
• Pot: all the chips wagered so far in the current hand, sitting in the middle of the table. Winning the pot is the entire objective.
• Blinds: the two forced bets posted before the cards are dealt, by the players to the left of the button. Without them nobody would ever have a reason to play a hand.
• Ante: a smaller forced contribution from everyone at the table, used mainly in tournaments to build pots and speed the game up.
• Button: the disc marking the nominal dealer. It moves one seat clockwise every hand and determines who acts when.
• Hole cards: your own face-down cards. Also called pocket cards, as in pocket Aces.
• Community cards: the shared face-up cards in the middle, usable by every player. Collectively they are called the board.
• Burn card: a card the dealer discards face down before each new community card, a live-poker precaution against marked or exposed cards.
• Muck: the pile of discarded cards, and also the verb for throwing your hand away without showing it.
• Rake: the house's cut, taken as a small percentage of each pot or as an hourly seat charge. It is the reason a poker room exists and a real cost you are playing against, and it is the first item on the ledger once poker is played online for money.

If any of the above is unfamiliar in context, the walkthrough on the poker rules page shows where each piece sits in an actual hand.

The streets: how a hand is divided

A round of betting is called a street. In Texas Hold'em there are four of them, and every player at the table will name them constantly.

• Preflop: after the hole cards are dealt but before any community card appears.
• Flop: the first three community cards, dealt together, and the betting round that follows.
• Turn: the fourth community card. Occasionally called fourth street.
• River: the fifth and final community card. Occasionally called fifth street.
• Showdown: the end of the hand, where the remaining players turn their cards face up and the best five-card hand wins.
• Runout: the specific cards that came on the flop, turn and river, spoken of after the fact.

Betting actions and the moves built from them

The first five are the only legal actions in poker. Everything after them is a name for a pattern of those actions.

• Check: pass without betting, available only when nobody has bet in the current round.
• Bet: put chips in first.
• Call: match the current bet exactly.
• Raise: increase the current bet. The minimum raise is the size of the previous bet or raise.
• Fold: give up your hand and any claim on the pot.
• All-in: betting every chip you have. You can still win the portion of the pot you covered; anything beyond it becomes a side pot.
• Limp: calling the big blind preflop rather than raising. Widely considered weak, because it lets everyone in cheaply without building a pot.
• Three-bet: the first re-raise. The big blind counts as the first bet and an opening raise as the second, so the re-raise is the third. A raise on top of that is a four-bet.
• Check-raise: checking to invite a bet, then raising it. Strong, and considered perfectly fair everywhere except some home games.
• Continuation bet: betting the flop after you were the last raiser preflop, continuing the story you started.
• Squeeze: raising large after one player has opened and one or more have called, using the callers' chips as the reason.
• String bet: reaching for more chips after your hand has already released a bet. In live poker this is ruled a call, not a raise. Announce the amount first and the problem disappears.

Position names

Position is where you sit relative to the button, and it decides when you have to act. Acting last is worth more than any single starting hand.

• Under the gun (UTG): first to act before the flop, directly left of the big blind. The hardest seat to play.
• Middle position: the seats between under the gun and the late positions.
• Lojack and hijack: the two seats before the cutoff. The names come from raising to take the pot away from the players behind.
• Cutoff (CO): directly right of the button, so it acts last whenever the button folds.
• Button (BTN): acts last on every street after the flop, and therefore the most profitable seat at the table.
• Small blind and big blind: the two forced-bet seats. They act last preflop and first on every street afterwards, which is the worse trade.
• In position / out of position: acting after your opponent, or before them, for the rest of the hand.

The texas poker guide shows how the same two cards change value depending on which of these seats you are sitting in.

Hands, boards and draws

These are the words for what you actually hold and what you are hoping to make.

• Kicker: the side card that decides a tie between two players holding the same pair. A-K beats A-Q on an Ace-high board for exactly this reason.
• Set: three of a kind made from a pocket pair plus one board card. Well hidden, and one of the most profitable hands in Hold'em.
• Trips: three of a kind made from one hole card plus a pair on the board. Same hand ranking as a set, far more obvious to your opponents.
• Overpair: a pocket pair higher than every card on the board, such as Queens on a J-7-3 flop.
• Top pair: pairing the highest board card with one of your hole cards. A decent hand, and one beginners over-value.
• Suited / offsuit: whether your two hole cards share a suit. Written as A-Ks and A-Ko.
• Connectors: two cards in sequence, like 8-7. Suited connectors can make both straights and flushes.
• Draw: an incomplete hand that needs one more card. A flush draw is four to a flush; an open-ended straight draw is four in a row that can complete at either end.
• Gutshot: a straight draw missing one card in the middle, such as 9-8-6-5 needing a Seven. Half as likely to hit as an open-ended draw.
• Backdoor: a draw that needs both the turn and the river to arrive. Worth a little, never worth much.
• Nuts: the best possible hand given the board. There is always exactly one nut hand, and knowing what it is should be your first thought on every flop.
• Counterfeited: when a board card makes your hand redundant, such as holding 6-5 on a board that pairs twice higher, leaving you playing the board.

The money and maths words

Poker maths at a beginner level is arithmetic, not algebra. These six terms cover almost all of it.

• Outs: the cards left in the deck that would complete your hand. A flush draw has nine outs, because thirteen cards of the suit exist and you can see four of them.
• The rule of two and four: with one card to come, multiply your outs by two for a rough percentage. With two cards to come, multiply by four. Nine outs is therefore about 18 per cent on one card and about 36 per cent on two. These are approximations, deliberately, so that they work in your head.
• Pot odds: the price you are being offered. If the pot holds RM100 and your opponent bets RM50, you pay RM50 to win RM150, so you need to win about 25 per cent of the time to break even. Compare that against your outs and the call answers itself.
• Implied odds: the money you expect to win later if you hit, which can justify a call that pot odds alone would not. They rely on your opponent paying you off, so they are a judgement, not a calculation.
• Equity: your share of the pot expressed as a percentage, based on how often your hand would win if all remaining cards were dealt out.
• Variance: the swing between how you played and how you did. Poker has enough of it that a good player can lose for weeks and a bad one can win for a night.
• Bankroll: the total money you have set aside for poker, separate from everything else. The point of a bankroll is that no single session can touch the rest of your finances.

Player types and table talk

Half of poker is describing other people. These labels are shorthand for how someone plays, and reading them correctly is worth more than any individual hand.

• Tight / loose: how many hands a player enters with. Tight players wait; loose players play most things.
• Aggressive / passive: whether a player bets and raises or calls and checks. Aggression, applied selectively, is generally the winning side of this pair.
• TAG and LAG: tight-aggressive and loose-aggressive, the two common winning styles.
• Nit: someone so tight they only ever play premium hands, and therefore easy to fold against.
• Fish: a weak player. Worth knowing mainly because if you cannot identify one at your table, it may be you.
• Bluff: betting a hand that cannot win at showdown in the hope of a fold.
• Semi-bluff: betting a draw. You can win immediately if they fold, and you still have outs if they do not, which is why it is safer than a pure bluff.
• Value bet: betting a strong hand hoping to be called. Most of your profit comes from these, not from bluffs.
• Tilt: playing badly because you are upset, usually after a bad beat. The only cure is standing up.
• Bad beat: losing a hand you were heavily favoured to win. It means the maths worked and the deck did not; it does not mean you played badly.
• Cooler: a hand where two very strong holdings collide and someone was always going to lose a stack.
• GTO and exploitative: two approaches to strategy. Game-theory optimal play aims to be unexploitable regardless of opponent; exploitative play aims to attack the specific mistakes the people at your table are making.

The words for breaking the rules

Some terms exist purely to name conduct that a floor supervisor will rule on. They are worth knowing so you neither do them nor tolerate them.

• Angle shooting: using deliberately misleading gestures or ambiguous statements to trick an opponent while staying just inside the letter of the rules. Legal in the narrowest sense, and treated badly everywhere.
• Slow roll: pausing before showing a winning hand at showdown to let an opponent think they won. The most disliked act in poker.
• Splashing the pot: tossing chips into the middle instead of placing them in front of you, making the bet impossible to count.
• Acting out of turn: folding, betting or even reaching for chips before the action reaches you. It gives free information to the players still to act.
• Talking about a live hand: discussing cards while a hand is still in progress, including with players who have folded.
• Misdeal: a dealing error serious enough that the hand is cancelled and re-dealt, such as an exposed first card or the wrong number of cards going out.

Tournament vocabulary

Tournaments add a layer of words that never come up in a cash game, because chips there stop being worth a fixed amount of money.

• Freezeout: one buy-in, no second chances. Lose your chips and you are out.
• Rebuy and add-on: formats that let you buy more chips, either after busting within a set period or once at the end of it.
• Freeroll: a tournament with no entry fee but a real prize.
• Satellite: a tournament whose prize is entry to a larger one rather than cash.
• Bounty: a cash prize for eliminating a specific player, paid immediately.
• Blind levels: the clock. Blinds rise at set intervals, which is what forces the tournament to end.
• The bubble: the point just before the prize places begin. The player eliminated here finishes last of the unpaid, and play around this moment gets noticeably more cautious.
• ICM: the independent chip model, a way of converting your chip stack into its real cash value given the prize structure. It is why a call that is correct on pure odds can still be wrong near the bubble.
• Final table: the last table remaining, usually the last nine or ten players, and where most of the prize money is decided.