Poker is a card game where players compete to form the highest ranked hand based on the rules of the game. Each player has two cards and the goal is to make a five-card poker hand using those two cards along with the 5 community cards dealt. The player with the highest ranked poker hand wins the pot at the end of each betting interval.
To start a hand of poker, players ante (put in an amount of money – the minimum is usually a nickel). When it is your turn to bet, you can either call the previous player’s bet, raise the bet or fold. “Raising” involves adding more money to the betting pool whereas calling means matching the amount of the previous bet. “Folding” means that you do not want to place any more money into the pot and give up your cards.
The value of a poker hand is in inverse proportion to its mathematical frequency; in other words, the more unusual a combination of cards is, the higher it ranks. As the game became more popular, various strategies developed that increase a player’s expected winnings and may involve bluffing.
In most forms of poker, a player can choose to bet by placing chips into the pot based on his or her estimated expected value and his or her assessment of other players’ likely reactions. Unless forced by the rules of the game, a player places chips into the pot only when he or she believes that a bet has a positive expected value or is making a bluff for strategic reasons.