Poker has its own language, and a new player who knows thirty words can follow almost any hand being described. This glossary covers about a hundred of them, grouped by where they come up: the table, the cards, the money, the math and the study room. Where a term has a formal definition in published rules, the note says so, because rooms sometimes treat a word more strictly than the players do.
Two rule sets are quoted below. Pennsylvania’s poker regulation, 58 Pa. Code ch. 637a, governs licensed rooms in that state. Robert’s Rules of Poker, by Bob Ciaffone, is a widely copied rulebook; the edition cited here is written for private games.
Actions at the table
Bet. The first chips put in on a betting round.
Call. Matching the current bet. Arkansas’s card-room rule defines it as a wager equal to the immediately preceding wager, which is as plain as it gets.
Check. Passing without betting, allowed only when no one has bet yet on that round.
Check-raise. Checking, then raising after an opponent bets. Allowed in most games. Pennsylvania permits it unless the table posts otherwise.
Fold. Giving up the hand. Also called mucking.
Raise. Increasing the bet. In no-limit, Robert’s Rules requires a raise to be at least the size of the previous bet or raise on that round, unless the player is all in.
Re-raise, 3-bet, 4-bet. Each further raise. Preflop, the big blind counts as the first bet, so the first raise is the “2-bet” and a re-raise is a 3-bet.
All in. Putting every remaining chip into the pot. Under Pennsylvania’s rules an all-in player can win only the share of the pot they contributed to.
Limp. Calling the big blind preflop instead of raising.
Open. Making the first voluntary bet or raise of a round.
Donk bet. Leading into the player who had the betting initiative on the previous street. Long called a beginner’s mistake; the Pluribus research discussed in the GTO meaning note found the AI used it far more often than professionals do.
Continuation bet (c-bet). A bet on the flop by the player who made the last preflop raise.
Slow play. Checking or calling with a very strong hand to disguise it.
Straddle. An optional blind raise, usually twice the big blind, posted before the cards are dealt. Robert’s Rules allows one live straddle in non-tournament games.
String bet (string raise). Putting chips in with more than one forward motion without announcing a raise. Robert’s Rules bans it and suggests a player protect a raise by saying “raise” or putting in the full amount in one motion.
Splashing the pot. Throwing chips into the middle so they mix with the pot. Listed as improper etiquette in Robert’s Rules. It annoys dealers more than any bad beat.
Angle shooting. Using ambiguous actions to mislead opponents within, or just outside, the letter of the rules. Not a crime, but rooms can and do penalize it.
The table and the seats
Button. The disk that marks the dealer position. It moves one seat left each hand.
Dead button. A method that keeps the button behind an empty seat so no one skips a blind. Robert’s Rules lists it alongside the moving-button method.
Blinds. Forced bets posted by the two seats left of the button: the small blind and the big blind.
Ante. A forced contribution from every player (or, in a big-blind-ante format, one payment from the big blind for the whole table).
Under the gun (UTG). The first seat to act preflop, left of the big blind.
Hijack, cutoff. The two seats to the right of the button. The poker positions note goes seat by seat.
In position / out of position. Acting after, or before, a given opponent on the remaining streets.
Heads-up. Only two players left in a hand, or a two-player game.
Short-handed, six-max, full ring. Tables of about six or fewer, a six-seat game, and a nine- or ten-seat game.
Rake. The room’s commission taken from pots. Robert’s Rules opens with a warning that no state lets a private individual run a poker game as a business, and names raking pots as an example, so a home game that rakes is asking for trouble.
Table stakes. A player can only bet the chips in front of them at the start of the hand. Robert’s Rules: it is the most a player can lose, or win from another player, in one hand.
The cards
Hole cards. A player’s private cards.
Board, community cards. The shared face-up cards in Hold’em and Omaha.
Flop, turn, river. The first three community cards, the fourth, and the fifth. Each is preceded by a burn card.
Burn card. A card discarded face down before each new street, to protect against marked or glimpsed cards.
Muck. The discard pile, or the act of discarding a hand.
Nuts. The best possible hand given the board.
Kicker. An unpaired side card that breaks ties between equal pairs, trips or two pairs.
Wheel. A-2-3-4-5, the lowest straight.
Broadway. A-K-Q-J-10, the highest straight. Also any card ten or higher.
Set / trips. Three of a kind. A set uses a pocket pair plus one board card; trips use one hole card plus a pair on the board. A set is better disguised.
Counterfeit. When the board makes a player’s hand worse relative to others, such as a second pair on board making a low two pair play as a kicker.
Suited, offsuit. Two hole cards of the same suit, or different suits. AKs and AKo for short.
Pocket pair. Two hole cards of the same rank. There are 6 ways to be dealt any particular pocket pair, and 78 pocket-pair combinations in all, so a player is dealt one 5.9% of the time.
Overcard. A hole card higher than every card on the board.
Draw. A hand that needs another card to become strong. Flush draw, open-ended straight draw, gutshot.
Gutshot. An inside straight draw, needing one specific rank. Four outs.
Outs. The cards left in the deck that would improve a hand to a likely winner. See the poker odds chart.
Backdoor draw. A draw that needs both the turn and the river.
Board texture. How connected and suited the board is. “Wet” boards (J♥ 10♥ 9♣) give many draws; “dry” boards (K♠ 7♦ 2♣) give few.
Rainbow. A flop with three different suits.
The money
Pot. All the chips bet in the hand so far.
Side pot. A separate pot built from bets an all-in player cannot match. Pennsylvania’s rules say only the players who contributed to a side pot can win it.
Bankroll. Money set aside only for poker.
Buy-in. The cost to enter a tournament, or the chips a player starts a cash session with.
Big blinds (bb). The standard unit for stacks and results, so a $200 stack in a $1/$2 game is 100 big blinds.
Stack-to-pot ratio (SPR). The effective stack divided by the pot at the start of a street. Low SPR means commitment comes quickly.
Effective stack. The smaller of the two stacks in a heads-up confrontation. It is the most either player can win or lose.
Rebuy, re-entry, add-on. Tournament options to buy more chips, or re-enter after busting.
ICM (Independent Chip Model). A way of converting tournament chip stacks into prize-money equity.
The math
Pot odds. The ratio of the pot to the cost of a call, or the equity needed to break even on that call.
Equity. A hand’s share of the pot if all the cards were dealt out with no more betting.
Implied odds. Pot odds plus the money expected to be won on later streets.
Expected value (EV). The average result of a decision if it were repeated many times.
Combinations (combos). The number of ways a hand can be dealt. 16 for an unpaired hand like AK (4 suited, 12 offsuit), 6 for a pocket pair, 1,326 for all two-card hands.
Blockers. Cards in a player’s hand that reduce the number of combinations an opponent can hold. Holding the A♠ cuts the possible AA combos from 6 to 3.
Range. The full set of hands a player could have in a given spot.
Fold equity. The extra value a bet gains from the chance the opponent folds.
Minimum defense frequency (MDF). The share of a range a player must continue with so that an opponent’s bluffs cannot profit automatically. For a bet of size b relative to the pot, it is 1 ÷ (1 + b). Facing a pot-sized bet, 50%.
Variance. The short-run swing of results around the long-run average.
Win rate. Average profit, usually in big blinds per 100 hands (bb/100) for cash games or return on investment (ROI) for tournaments.
Study-room words
GTO (game theory optimal). Play based on an equilibrium strategy that cannot be exploited.
Exploitative play. Deviating from equilibrium to take advantage of a specific opponent’s mistakes.
Solver. Software that computes approximate equilibrium strategies for a given spot.
HUD (heads-up display). Software that overlays opponents’ statistics on an online table, built from hand histories. Many online rooms restrict or ban them; the HUD software note lists which.
VPIP. “Voluntarily put money in pot,” the share of hands a player plays preflop. A HUD staple.
PFR. Preflop raise percentage.
Polarized / linear (merged) range. A polarized betting range is made of very strong hands and bluffs; a linear one is the strongest hands down to a cutoff.
Leveling. Thinking one step too many about what an opponent thinks the player thinks. Usually ends with calling down with ten-high.
Tournament words
Starting stack. The chips every entrant receives. Robert’s Rules has them placed at each paid seat at the start whether the player is present or not, with absent players dealt in and blinded.
Blind level. The period before the blinds go up. Robert’s Rules: limits and blinds rise at regularly scheduled intervals, and new limits apply from the next deal after the level ends.
Big-blind ante. A format in which the big blind pays one ante on behalf of the whole table, instead of every player anteing separately.
Late registration. A window after the start when players can still enter.
Bubble. The stage just before the paid places. The player who finishes one place out of the money is said to “burst the bubble.”
In the money (ITM). Finishing in a paid place.
Pay jump. The increase in prize money from moving up one finishing place. At final tables they get large.
Chip race (color up). Removing the smallest chips once the blinds no longer need them. Under Robert’s Rules, odd chips are raced off by dealing a card for each one.
Push or fold. A short-stack strategy of either moving all in or folding preflop, usually under about 10 to 15 big blinds.
M. A stack measured against the cost of one orbit of blinds and antes. A rival to measuring stacks in big blinds; both describe how much time a stack has left.
Satellite. A tournament whose prize is an entry into a bigger tournament.
Deal (chop) at the final table. Players agreeing to split the remaining prize money, often by chip count or ICM. Allowed by some organizers, not others.
Slang worth knowing
Bad beat. Losing with a hand that was a big favorite when the money went in. Every player has one story; most have about forty.
Cooler. Losing a big pot with a very strong hand to a stronger one, with no real way to escape.
Fish, whale, reg. A weak player, a weak player with deep pockets, and a regular.
Tilt. Playing worse because of frustration. The most expensive word on this page.
Run good, run bad. Getting better or worse cards than average over a stretch. A polite way to describe variance.
Chop. Splitting a pot. In some cash games, the blinds take their money back when everyone else folds; Robert’s Rules allows that by custom in non-tournament button games.
Real-money poker is for adults: 21+, or 18+ where state law allows. Free, confidential help is available by calling or texting 1-800-MY-RESET, and the responsible gambling page lists more.