Poker is a card game that has been extremely popular for years, where the Player with the best combination of cards wins. Here, a hand is formed by each player with a total of five cards. The win in poker is either the player with the strongest hand or the one who is the only one left in the game. The winning amount in the middle is called the Pot in poker. Generally, a distinction is made between the categories Hold'em, Stud and Draw. Originally, poker had an extremely bad reputation as a game of chance. Poker was already developed in the course of the 19th century. The charm of poker is especially that it is not a pure game of chance, but that psychological aspects also play a role.
In poker, there are card combinations of different strengths. While the so-called high card (= highest card) is the lowest hand, the Royal Flush (= straight in one suit with ace as high card) is the strongest card combination. We will now list the most important card combinations in poker in descending order:
According to estimates, there are currently more than 600 online platforms that offer poker. In Germany, poker accounts for about 5.8% of the total online gambling market, according to Statista. Accordingly, there are currently around 22.2 million players worldwide who play poker for real money on the Internet. The platform with the highest traffic is PokerStars, with GGPoker a competitor close on the heels of the industry pioneer. While gross gaming revenue in online poker in Germany in 2016 was still 124 million euros, according to Statista, it was only 118 million euros in 2017, only 95 million euros in 2018 and even only 56 million euros in 2019.