Poker has many variations, all following a similar pattern of play and generally using the same hand ranking hierarchy. There are three main families of variants, largely grouped by the protocol of card-dealing and betting:

Straight A complete hand is dealt to each player, and players bet in one round, with raising and re-raising allowed.

Stud poker Cards are dealt in a prearranged combination of face-down and face-up rounds, or streets, with a round of betting following each.

Draw poker A complete hand is dealt to each player, face-down, and after betting, players are allowed to attempt to change their hand (with the object of improving it) by discarding unwanted cards and being dealt new ones.

Community card poker (also known as flop poker) A variation of Stud, players are dealt an incomplete hand of face-down cards, and then a number of face-up community cards are dealt to the center of the table, each of which can be used by one or more of the players to make a 5-card hand.