Emerging Sport!!!!
EMERGING SPORT
Poker is considered as the most popular in a class of games called “vying games” wherein players with fully or partially concealed cards place bets (called wagers) into a central pot, which is then given to the player with the best card combination or to the one who makes an uncalled bet.
Discovering exactly how the game started is still a contentious subject. According to Wikipedia.com, the name of the game most likely came from the French poque which, in turn, was derived from the German pochen.
The way poker is played also has various origins: the Persian game of as nas, the Renaissance game of primero, and the French game of brelan, which is the precursor of the English game “bragg” that incorporated bluffing.
“It is quite possible that all these earlier games influenced the development of poker as it exists now,” states the online encyclopedia.
The game has hundreds of variations, with the most popular loosely grouped into draw poker, stud poker, and community card poker. Draw poker players each receive five or more cards—all of them hidden—that can be replaced a certain number of times. In stud poker, players receive cards one at a time, with some of the cards displayed to the other players. In community card poker, the players combine individually dealt cards with a number of “community cards” dealt face up and shared by all players.
One thing is common in all these variations: the player with the best combination of cards—or the player who is able to bluff everybody into believing that he holds the best combination—takes home the pot.
Mathematician David Sklansky states that poker, a game of “decision-making in the face of incomplete information,” follows a “fundamental theorem.”
“Every time you play a hand differently from the way you would have played it if you could see all your opponents’ cards, they gain; and every time you play your hand the same way you would have played it if you could see all their cards, they lose. Conversely, every time opponents play their hands differently from the way they would have if they could see all your cards, you gain; and every time they play their hands the same way they would have played if they could see all your cards, you lose,” Sklansky points out in Wikipedia.com.
Therefore, every decision made while playing the game can be considered in terms of the concept of the expected value. A player, not knowing the cards his opponents have, assumes the values of their cards as opposed to his and decides to either raise the stake (bet) or give up (fold), depending on his assumptions.
This is why the love for the game is growing, says Atayde. “It seems like it’s just a game of luck, but there’s much skill involved in it,” he points out. “To be able to discern the value of the cards of one’s opponents, one does not simply guess what cards one’s opponents have. One has to be able to ‘read’ one’s opponents, to know when to bet or fold. All these go beyond chance.”
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