“Poker is a family of card games that share betting rules and usually (but not always) hand rankings”. That is how Wikipedia defines poker, a game which you have surely heard of. It is thought this game originates back in the 30s, but it started to gain popularity only recently.

Playing poker is not as hard as many people think it is. It principally involves dealing cards and struggling to find the right combination. In addition to that, the player has to be quite intelligent and open-eyed. If you think you possess these qualities, you can immediately begin learning the basic rules of poker.

There are a few versions of poker, but all of them have the ultimate goal: finding the best combination for five cards before others do. The most valued card in poker is ace, while the deuce is the lowest. On the other hand, the suits do not play any role at all as regarding to the card value.

‘Hand ranking’ is a term you should be familiar with. The player who has the best hand ranking wins the game. This term refers to the cards that a player has in hands, and the entire point of poker is to make the best poker hand possible. There are several types of poker hands, and all of them have different significance and importance.

The most common poker hands are ‘Straight Flush’, ‘Straight’, ‘Flush’ (separate), ‘Four of a kind’, ‘Full house’ and so on. But the list does not end here. In fact, the total number of possible hand rankings is – about 2,600,000 hands! That’s amazing, huh? But let’s take a look at some of them individually.

Straight Flush is a hand which contains five consecutive cards that belong to the same suit. A common example for that would be 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10, all of hearts. ‘Royal Flush’ refers to the best straight flush combination possible, which includes these cards: 10, J, Q, K, A. This combination beats all the other straight flush hands.

Full house is another noteworthy hand which includes a combination of three cards of the same rank, and two other cards of another matching rank. An example for that would be 5, 5, 5, A, A. The value of the cards is added up to determine whether the hand wins over another full house hand or not.

While these are only some of the basic rules of poker, you must know there is a lot more to it. Before playing poker for the first time, you must look into the rules depending on the type of poker you decide to play. But they all have something in common – they’re all very entertaining!