Muck
The term Muck has more than one meaning in the world of Poker. In the first case, it is a general term used to describe a situation where a player may have folded her/his hands for whatever reason. It is also termed as the act of not revealing one’s cards after a player has won, usually.
This is a situation when a player may win a round without having to go all the way to a showdown. In such a case, if another player, who folded before the showdown, revealed a better set of cards, then a player may choose to not show her/his cards. While it might not be a necessity to have poorer cards for it to count as a muck, a player has the complete freedom to choose to show or not, the cards that s/he holds.
In some card games, a discard pile also comes into play. This usually happens in the case of draw poker where a player has to discard some of the cards that s/he receives in the initial deal. The pile of discarded cards, kept aside from the pack of cards that is being used to deal, is known as the muck. The cards in the muck cannot be seen by all members who are playing on the table and therefore, it doesn’t give anyone the advantage of counting cards and doesn’t let anyone track which cards are not in play anymore.
Cards are placed in the muck for several reasons, which may include things like wrongly dealt cards, cards accidently dealt face up, folded cards, etc. Since many of these reasons are quite general and can be a part of any game, mucks are not common in variations of poker other than draw poker.
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