Texas Hold'em

Every hand starts with the blinds: the two players to the left of the dealer button put in a small and a big forced bet, so there is something to play for. Each player then gets two cards face down, and the first round of betting starts with the player to the left of the big blind. On your turn you can fold, call the current bet, or raise it; when nobody has bet you can check or bet instead.

Then three community cards are turned face up in the middle — the flop — and there is another round of betting, this time started by the first player still in to the left of the button. One more card, the turn, another round; one last card, the river, a final round. If two or more players are still in at the end, they show their cards and the best five-card hand made from each player's two cards and the five on the board takes the pot.

This table plays it as a sit-and-go: everyone starts with 1,500 chips, the blinds go up as the hands go by, and a player who loses every chip is out. You win by taking all of them. Lose yours and you can fast-forward to see who does, or start again.

The hand rankings are the standard poker ones, highest first. You always play your best five cards out of seven — both of your own, one of them, or none at all if the board itself is best — and the seven cards you do not use never count.

Those are all 133,784,560 ways to hold seven cards from one deck — your two plus the five on the board — sorted by the best hand in them. Two things stand out. A pair or better is in front of you 82.6% of the time by the river, so a pair alone is rarely enough in a big pot. And with seven cards, ending up with nothing better than high card (17.4%) is rarer than making two pair (23.5%) — the reverse of five-card poker — yet two pair still beats it, because the ranking is fixed and does not follow the seven-card odds.

Ties are broken by the cards that play. Two players with a pair of kings compare their next-best cards — the kicker — one at a time. The ace can be high or low in a straight, so A-2-3-4-5 is the lowest straight, five high; it cannot wrap round, so K-A-2-3-4 is no straight at all. Suits never rank: two identical hands split the pot.

The button marks the dealer for the hand and moves one seat to the left after every hand. The player on its left posts the small blind and the next player the big blind, which counts as a bet: to stay in before the flop everyone else must at least call it. The button acts last on the flop, turn and river, which is why it is the best seat at the table.

The blinds double every ten hands, so the tournament cannot stall: by level 6 a single big blind is more than a third of the 1,500 chips everybody started with. With two players left the rules change slightly. The button posts the small blind and acts first before the flop but last after it, and when a game first goes heads-up the button is placed so that nobody pays the big blind twice in a row.

A player who cannot cover a bet can still call with everything they have. They can only win what they matched from each other player; anything bet above that goes into a side pot that only the players who covered it can win. Suppose you are all-in for 300 and two other players put in 1,000 each. The main pot is 900 — your 300 matched three times — and the other 1,400 is a side pot between the two of them. If you hold the best hand you take the 900 and the better of the other two hands takes the 1,400.

When hands tie, the pot is split evenly. If it does not divide exactly, the odd chip goes to the first of the tied players to the left of the button. And when nobody is left who can bet any more, every hand still in is turned face up and the rest of the board is dealt out.

Each of the five has a style of its own, set by how many hands they play and how often they bet rather than call: Ada is tight and aggressive, Bruno loose and aggressive, Cleo tight and cautious, Dara loose and hard to bluff, and Emil balanced and tricky. Which of them you face, and in which seats, is drawn at the start of each tournament.

Before the flop they read their two cards from a table of all 169 starting hands, ranked by how often each wins against one random hand and against three, and they play more hands the fewer players are left to act behind them — position matters. Once the stacks are down to 12 big blinds they stop making small raises: in a pot nobody has raised yet, they move all-in or fold.

After the flop, and whenever they face a raise, they deal out the rest of the hand 300 times in simulation against the kinds of hands your betting suggests — a big bet is treated as more likely to be strong — and compare how often they win with the price of calling. Now and then they bluff, and with a flush or straight draw they sometimes bet it as a semi-bluff. Every decision is drawn from the tournament's own number, so a tournament replays exactly when you make the same choices.

No. These are play chips: they cost nothing, cannot be bought, won, cashed out or transferred, and a new tournament hands everybody a fresh 1,500. There are no accounts, no deposits, no purchases and no links to anywhere that takes a stake. It is here as a card game against the computer. If you want the same cards with a pay table instead of opponents, video poker is next door; blackjack is the other chips-and-cards game on the site.