Poker is a card game in which players place chips into a pot (the amount of money that has been bet during a hand) to win the hand. The player who has the highest ranked hand when all the other players have dropped out wins the pot.
Each round of betting starts with the player to the dealer’s left putting down a number of chips into the pot – this is called the first blind. The other players can either “call” by putting the same amount into the pot as the player who raised it, or they can raise the stakes themselves and say “raise.”
If you’re lucky enough to have a good starting hand, you can build a good poker hand through bluffing (aggressively betting when you think you’ve got a good one) and by using your knowledge of how other players play to make good decisions. A good poker story should use pacing to create tension and should include anecdotes that can be validated by other people’s experiences.
A good poker story should also highlight a player’s tells, which are unconscious habits that reveal something about their hand. These can be as simple as a change in posture or as complex as a gesture. A story without these details is likely to bore readers. Likewise, stories that describe too many famous hands such as 4 aces or a royal flush will lose credibility and become cliches. These types of hands are very unlikely to occur in a normal game.