Obviously not really poker, despite the theme. Strange things happen with the cards in your hands, the poker terminology rapidly descends into insular gibberish, and probability is controlled - but tantalizingly never fully in your control, one always feels the freedom found from giving oneself over. Maximum difficulty runs have a sub-50% winrate, as far as I know.
It's not actually replicating the flow of a poker game. It's about endlessly seeking less so wins and losses, but simply spending more time in The Zone before you're kicked out; of ditching the flashy presentation and exciting music and narrative overtures of its competitition and being a smooth ride to get you into The Zone, of gradually ramping up stimulation to change your baseline level of what's satisfying, of abandoning your agency and accepting that the house always wins and that we will die and it's better to spend your time on the way there insensate and comfortable.
It's not poker, it's a slot machine.

I wrote a lot of substantive critique and compliments in a bunch of different places for the few hours i played this as a filler inbetween Rebirth (review pending) and Dragon's Dogma 2 (review probably not happening) but i think the real core of this is just... it's still a combo-focused game, it's got that DMC DNA and all your moves are built around linking them together and styling on enemies, right? But the combos aren't as interesting as the games that it's building off of, because it's shit-scared to push back or make the player feel like they ever failed, and everything you're doing is ultimately just filler inbetween mashing out your cooldowns during stagger - which does the vast majority of the damage in any given fight for about 5% of the brain cells. At that point, why am i not just playing DMC4?

It's a plot about coming together with a combat system about fighting literally with your lone wolf. People fuck a lot and present it as a sign of maturity. I'd rather just get caught up on One Piece.