Before the cards are dealt, two players post forced bets called the small blind and the big blind, so there is always something to play for. A dealer button marks who is nominally dealing. It moves one seat to the left after every hand, so the blinds rotate around the table and everyone pays them in turn.
Texas Hold'em has four betting rounds. Preflop: you get two private cards (your hole cards) and bet. The flop: three shared community cards are turned face up, and you bet again. The turn: a fourth shared card, another round. The river: a fifth and final shared card, the last round. On your turn you can check or call, bet or raise, or fold.
If two or more players are still in after the river, there is a showdown: everyone left makes their best five-card hand out of their own two hole cards and the five shared cards, and the strongest hand wins the pot. If everyone else folds first, the last player standing wins the pot without having to show their cards.
If a player is all in for less than the others, they can only win the chips they actually matched. The extra goes into a separate side pot that the remaining players contest. That way a short stack can win the main pot they were good for, while the bigger stacks keep playing for the chips on the side. Chips are always conserved: every chip in every pot ends up with a player.
No. One hundred percent of every pot goes to the player or players with the best hand. There is no rake, no fee, and nothing held back. Every chip in the middle ends up with a winner.
No. The chips are play chips and no money moves through the site. The optional cash value setting (a chips-per-dollar rate) is just a convenience so a home game can tally who owes whom at the end. Settling up in real life is between you and your friends.
The ledger tracks what each player bought in for and what they end with, either their chips in a cash game or their payout in a tournament. Your net is simply the end amount minus your buy-ins. If a cash value is set, the ledger also shows the dollar figures and the smallest set of payments that settles everyone up.
Every hand, the deck is shuffled with the Fisher-Yates method, the proven shuffle that makes every possible ordering of the 52 cards equally likely. The randomness comes from the cryptographic random generator built into the server and your browser, the same source used for security keys, not the basic random function. We also use rejection sampling, which quietly throws out the rare draws that would skew the odds, so no card position is even slightly more likely than another. None of this is homemade. The shuffle is Fisher-Yates, the textbook method for an unbiased deal, and what counts as a secure random generator is defined by neutral standards bodies like the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), not by us. These are widely used, well understood methods and the same foundation established card sites are built on, not something we invented and asked you to trust.
The shuffled deck and its full order live only on the server that runs your table. They are never sent to any browser, so no player, and not even the host, can see the order or know which card is coming next. A card the site never sends is a card it cannot leak.
The server sends each player only their own two hole cards. Before anything goes out to you, every hidden card belonging to an opponent is replaced with a placeholder, and folded hands are never revealed, so a bluff stays a bluff. At a showdown the players still in the hand turn their cards over, and only then.
There is no code anywhere that looks at the deck, your stack, your name, or whether you are winning or losing in order to nudge a result. The cards come out in their shuffled order, the best five-card hand wins the pot, and that is the whole story. The site has no stake in who wins.
The game engine has a suite of more than a hundred automated tests that run on every change. They check the things that matter for a fair game: that chips are never created or destroyed, that pots and side pots are split correctly down to the last chip, that all-ins build the right side pots, and that five-card hands are always ranked correctly. If any of those checks fails, the change does not ship.
The total number of chips at the table never changes during play. Every chip put into a pot comes back out to a player, with leftover odd chips handed out in a fixed clockwise order, so nothing is ever lost or invented. The settle-up ledger is built on this, which is why the numbers always add up at the end.
A bot is just another seat. It sees only its own two cards and the shared board, exactly what a human in that seat sees. It cannot see the deck, the cards still to come, or the cards held by anyone else, and every move it makes is checked by the same engine that checks yours.
No. Your two hole cards are only ever sent to you, and a hand you win without a showdown is never turned face up, so nobody sees whether you were betting a monster or pure air. The game also keeps no bluff stat of any kind: nothing counts your bluffs, flags a hand as a bluff, or moves a number an opponent could watch to work out what you were holding. When you take a pot down without showing, all anyone sees is that you won. A bluff stays a bluff.
When you join, the server gives your browser a session token that is cryptographically signed with a secret unique to that room. You reclaim your seat by sending that token back, and the server checks the signature, so just knowing another nickname is not enough to take that seat. Your player id is never put in the web address.
Only what a game needs: seat positions and stacks, the table settings, the buy-in ledger, recent hand history, and any avatar image you choose to upload. Recent table chat is kept too, a capped rolling window, so players who reconnect still see the latest messages, and the host can clear it at any time. There are no accounts and no passwords. You are just a nickname in a room.
Yes, within reason. There are limits on how many connections and how many rooms a single source can open per minute, which blunt the kind of flooding used in denial-of-service attempts. These are best-effort guards rather than a guarantee, but they keep ordinary play smooth.
A tournament is one game with a clear finish. Everyone buys in for the same amount and starts with the same chips. The blinds go up on a schedule, so the pressure builds and the game does not run forever. When you lose your chips you are out, unless rebuys are turned on. The last player with chips wins. All the buy-ins form a prize pool that gets paid out to the top finishers. This is different from the normal cash game, where people can buy in for different amounts, rebuy whenever they want, and leave whenever they want.
In a cash game the blinds stay the same all night. In a tournament they rise in steps called levels. By default a new level starts every ten minutes, and each level the blinds get bigger. You can change how fast the levels come, in minutes or instead by number of hands, and you can change how steeply the blinds grow. Blinds only ever change between hands, never in the middle of one, so a level change will not affect a hand you are already in.
The clock counts down to the next level. You can see it next to the blinds, along with the current level, how many players are left, and the prize pool. If the host pauses the table, the clock pauses too. Time spent paused does not count, so a break will not push the blinds up while everyone is away. When play starts again, the clock picks up right where it left off.
Freezeout is the default and the classic format: one buy-in, and when you bust you are done. Rebuy lets you buy back in if you bust early, up until a set level passes, and after that it becomes a freezeout. Unlimited lets you keep rebuying for the whole game, which is the loosest and most casual option and feels closest to a normal cash night.
Every buy-in goes into one shared pot of chips called the prize pool. Rebuys add to it too. Chips are never created or destroyed during play, so the chips on the table at the end add up to the entire pool. That pool is exactly what gets paid out, nothing more and nothing less.
By default the number of paid places grows with the size of the field, about the top 15 percent. With up to six players, the winner takes everything. With seven to nine, the top two are paid, roughly 65 and 35 percent. With ten or more, the top three are paid, roughly 50, 30, and 20 percent. You can override this and pick winner take all, or a fixed top-three split. The amounts show up in the settle-up ledger as your winnings, so your result for the night is simply your payout minus what you put in.
When you run out of chips you are eliminated, in a freezeout. Your finishing place is set by when you went out. The last person eliminated finishes second, the one before that third, and so on down. If two people bust in the same hand, whoever started that hand with more chips finishes higher. The last player left with chips wins and takes first.
At the end, the results screen shows the finishing order and what each paid place won. The settle-up ledger shows the money side: your payout, your buy-ins, and your net, in chips and in dollars if a cash value is set for the table.
Yes. Bots play, bust, and can finish in the money just like anyone else. Whether bots are included in the money settle-up follows the same table setting you already have for the ledger.
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