Showdown occurs at the end of a poker hand where all remaining players must reveal the strength of their hole cards. At this point, the player with the strongest hand will win the entire pot. If two or more players have the same hand at showdown then the pot is split equally between all winners. The term showdown values means that hand is strong enough to occasionally win at showdown, even if not an especially strong hand overall.

A short stack is any player that has less than the usual amount of chips for a certain game. As an example, in cash games, many players rebuy if their stack falls short of 100bb. As such, any cash game player with a stack less than 100bb may be referred to as a short stacker. Professional short stackers are players who deliberately buy in with a smaller than average stack in order to exploit the fact that they have explicitly studied short stack strategy.

A semi bluff is a bluff made with a hand that has potential to improve to a strong hand. The most obvious examples are bluffs made while holding flush draws, open-ended straight draws and gutshots. Semi bluffs are always more profitable than pure bluffs, because we essentially have two chances to win the pot. Either our opponent folds, or he calls and we make our strong made hand.

A scare card is card that potentially makes our opponent less comfortable about his situation (and hence more likely to make the fold when facing aggression from us). The term originated with Stud games where we are dealt an Upcard that is of high rank and/or co-ordinates with the rest of our board. It’s often used by Hold’em players describe a turn or river card which has higher rank than any other card on the board, although the concept of scare cards typically fits better to Stud games than Hold’em.

A satellite in poker is a type of poker tournament that awards tickets to an even bigger tournament as prizes. Satellite tournaments are also sometimes referred to as “qualifiers”. They allow players without a large bankroll to potentially be able to enter tournaments more expensive buyins.

Runner runner in poker refers to catching two required cards, one after the other, in order to complete a strong holding. It is most frequently used to describe catching running cards on the turn and river in Hold’em and Omaha. For example, we hold QJ on a T52 texture in Hold’em. It’s possible to catch runner runner straight on a number of different board runouts.