Poker is a card game that involves bluffing and strategic betting. While the outcome of any particular hand involves significant chance, a good player minimizes their losses with poor hands and maximizes their winnings with good ones. Poker also requires a high degree of skill, with the ability to read other players and their tells being one of its most important elements.

Before the cards are dealt, each player puts an initial contribution, called the ante, into the pot. After the antes have been placed, a round of betting begins. Players may choose to bet on their hand, fold, or raise the amount that is being staked. The goal of the game is to make the best five card “hand” with your own two cards and the five community cards. The player who makes the best hand wins the entire pot, called the pot limit.

A game of Poker is always played with chips, which are usually white or some other light-colored chip and have specific values. Each player must have a supply of chips that is sufficient to cover all of the possible bets in a given game. For example, a white chip might be worth a single unit of a bet, while a red chip might be worth ten units, and so on.

Poker is a game of incomplete information, and as such, it is a good training ground for learning how to decide under uncertainty. As former professional poker player Annie Duke says in her book Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts, deciding under uncertainty requires an open mind and an ability to estimate probabilities of different outcomes.