Table of Contents

Texas Hold'em is a multi-player poker variant played at staffed poker tables. Two parallel tables exist on the shard, sharing identical rules but differing in stake currency:

A minimum of two seated players is required for a hand to start; play begins as soon as a second player joins.

Gambling losses are not refunded except in two explicit circumstances: a server crash, or a Game Master toggling the dealer to inactive. In both cases, the player's remaining stack is returned to the bank box.

How to Start Playing

Step 1 — Join a table

Double-click an active poker dealer. If the dealer is active, has valid buy-in limits, and has open seats, a join gump is presented. Dealer NPCs are blessed and frozen, dressed in fancy shirt, long pants, shoes, and a body sash.

Step 2 — Buy in

The join gump displays the table's small blind, big blind, minimum buy-in, maximum buy-in, and the player's bank balance. The player enters a buy-in amount that must satisfy:

If the buy-in is invalid, the join request is rejected with a message stating the legal range.

Step 3 — Play the hand

Each hand cycles through the following phases:

Inactive → Deal Hole Cards → Pre-Flop → Flop → Pre-Turn → Turn → Pre-River → River → Pre-Showdown → Showdown

A standard 52-card deck is constructed and shuffled five times at the start of each hand. Each seated player in the round is dealt two hole cards. The flop adds three community cards, the turn one, and the river one.

The action gump offers four choices: Check/Call (whichever applies), Fold, All-In, and Bet/Raise. The bet text field defaults to the big-blind amount.

Blinds and dealer button

Blinds and seating rotate each hand:

Blind amounts are configured per dealer by staff.

Turn timer

A per-turn time limit is enforced. A player receives a warning after 45 seconds (“You have 15 seconds left to make a choice”); if no action is taken by 60 seconds, the player is auto-folded.

Hand Ranking

The supported hand ranks, from lowest to highest, are:

Ties between equal ranks are broken by kicker cards. A royal flush is treated as a single rank with no kicker comparison.

Pot, Rake, and Jackpot

When the showdown resolves, the pot is paid out as follows:

  1. The dealer's rake (default 10%, capped at 50,000 gold on the gold dealer) is skimmed off the pot and added to the shared poker jackpot. The Sosarian Dollars dealer has both rake and rake cap set to 0, so the Sosarian Dollar table does not accumulate a jackpot from its pots.
  2. Side-pot equalization: any winner's surplus contribution above the lowest contributing winner is returned to them.
  3. The remaining pot is split evenly among all winners with matching rank.

The Poker Jackpot display board shows the current jackpot total and the leading hand on file. Double-click it within 4 tiles to view. The award itself is paid into the winning player's bank box as a bank check.

Leaving the Table

A player may request to leave through the leave gump. The request is honored at the next round boundary, where the player is folded and removed from the table. On removal, any remaining stack is returned:

The player is then teleported to the dealer's configured exit location.

If the server crashes mid-game, or the dealer is set to inactive, every seated player is removed with their full remaining stack returned to the bank box.

Joining and leaving the gold table broadcasts a notification to a Discord webhook.

End