Texas hold 'em is one of the most popular variants of the card game of poker. Two cards, known as hole cards, are dealt face down to each player, and then five community cards are dealt face up in three stages. The stages consist of a series of three cards, later an additional single card, and a final card. Each player seeks the best five-card poker hand from any combination of the seven cards: the five community cards and their two hole cards. Players have betting options to check, call, raise, or fold. Rounds of betting take place before the flop is dealt and after each subsequent deal. The player who has the best hand and has not folded by the end of all betting rounds wins all of the money bet for the hand, known as the pot. In certain situations, a "split pot" or "tie" can occur when two players have hands of equivalent value. This is also called "chop the pot". Texas hold 'em is also the H game featured in HORSE and HOSE.
Doyle Frank Brunson was an American poker player who played professionally for over 50 years. He was a two-time World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event champion, a Poker Hall of Fame inductee, and the author of several books on poker.
David Sklansky is an American professional poker player and author. An early writer on poker strategy, he is known for his mathematical approach to the game. His key work The Theory of Poker presents fundamental principles on which much later analysis is based.
Anne LaBarr Duke is an American former professional poker player and author in cognitive-behavioral decision science and decision education. She holds a World Series of Poker (WSOP) gold bracelet from 2004 and used to be the leading money winner among women in WSOP history, and is still in the top five as of April 2023, despite being retired from poker, last cashing at a tournament 2010. Duke won the 2004 World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions and the National Heads-Up Poker Championship in 2010. She has written a number of instructional books for poker players, including Decide to Play Great Poker and The Middle Zone, and she published her autobiography, How I Raised, Folded, Bluffed, Flirted, Cursed, and Won Millions at the World Series of Poker, in 2005. Duke also authored two books on decision-making, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts, and How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices.
Howard Henry Lederer is an American professional poker player. He has won two World Series of Poker bracelets and holds two World Poker Tour titles. Lederer has also contributed to several books on poker strategy and has provided commentary for poker programming. He is known by poker fans and players as "The Professor" and is the older brother of professional poker player Annie Duke.
Lyle Arnold Berman is an American professional poker player and business executive.
Johnny Moss was a gambler and professional poker player. He was the first winner of the World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event, at the time a cash game event in which he was awarded the title by the vote of his peers in 1970. He also twice won the current tournament format of the WSOP Main Event in 1971 and 1974. He was one of the charter inductees into the Poker Hall of Fame in 1979.
Two Plus Two Publishing is a private company established and owned by statistician and poker player Mason Malmuth. The company publishes books on poker and gambling written by professionals in the field such as David Sklansky, Dan Harrington, Bill Robertie, Collin Moshman, Ed Miller, Ray Zee, Sunny Mehta, Alan Schoonmaker, William Jockusch, and Malmuth himself.
John Ferguson, known by his pen name, Stanford Wong, is a gambling author best known for his book Professional Blackjack, first published in 1975. Wong's computer program "Blackjack Analyzer", initially created for personal use, was one of the first pieces of commercially available blackjack odds analyzing software. Wong has appeared on TV multiple times as a blackjack tournament contestant or as a gambling expert. He owns a publishing house, Pi Yee Press, which has published books by other gambling authors including King Yao.
Ivo Donev is a Bulgarian, with Austrian passport, who is a professional chess and poker player.
BARGE, the Big August Rec.Gambling Excursion, is a yearly convention held in Las Vegas during the summer, usually a weekend in late July or the first weekend of August. It consists of a series of tournaments both of poker and other gambling games, as well as a banquet and a host of informal social and gambling activities organized by attendees. Some of the well-known poker players who have participated either as speakers or players in the no limit holdem tournament include: Howard Lederer, Chris Ferguson, Phil Hellmuth Jr, Greg Raymer, Mason Malmuth, David Sklansky, Mike Caro, Matt Matros, Linda Johnson, Phil Gordon, Paul Phillips, Andy Bloch, William Chen, Doyle Brunson and many others.
Edward Raymond Miller is an American professional poker player and an author of books about poker. He wrote Small Stakes Hold 'em: Winning Big With Expert Play with David Sklansky and Mason Malmuth in 2004. In 2005, he completed Getting Started in Hold 'em, a beginner's book.
Russell Aaron Boyd, commonly known as Dutch Boyd, is an American professional poker player from Culver City, California.
William Chen is an American quantitative analyst, poker player, and software designer.
Stewart Reuben is a British chess player, organiser, arbiter and author. He has also been a professional poker player, been called "one of Britain's foremost poker players" and "one of the best two or three players in England", and written several books on the topic.
Sunny Mehta is an American hockey executive, data scientist, and former professional poker player, writer, options trader, and musician. Currently the Assistant General Manager and Head of Analytics for the Florida Panthers, he pioneered the first full-time analytics department in the National Hockey League as Director of Hockey Analytics for the New Jersey Devils. He is co-author of two bestselling poker strategy books.
Harrington on Hold 'em is a series of poker books about poker strategy, particularly for Texas hold 'em poker tournaments. They were all written by Dan Harrington and Bill Robertie and published by Two Plus Two Publishing.
In poker, the Independent Chip Model (ICM), also known as the Malmuth–Harville method, is a mathematical model that approximates a player's overall equity in an incomplete tournament. David Harville first developed the model in a 1973 paper on horse racing; in 1987, Mason Malmuth independently rediscovered it for poker. In the ICM, all players have comparable skill, so that current stack sizes entirely determine the probability distribution for a player's final ranking. The model then approximates this probability distribution and computes expected prize money.
Matthew "Matt" Matros is a professional poker player and author from Brooklyn, New York, who has won three World Series of Poker events.
Steven "Steve" L. Heston is an American mathematician, economist, and financier. He's also prominently active in the field of gambling-related research, where he sometimes uses the pen name Kim Lee.
