Poker is a card game where the players place bets to win a pot or share a hand. The cards are dealt from a standard 52-card English deck and can include one or two jokers or wild cards. The game can be played by two to seven players. The games are fast-paced and betting occurs continuously through several rounds.
The first step in the game is to determine how much money you want to invest in the pot. This is called buying in and can be as low as a single white chip or as high as five red chips. Once everyone has purchased their chips, the dealer shuffles the deck and then deals each player a card face down (their hole card) followed by a betting interval.
During the betting rounds, some players may choose to bluff other players for various strategic reasons. While the short-term outcome of any given poker hand heavily involves chance, long-run expectations are largely determined by actions chosen on the basis of probability, psychology, and game theory.
Each player will then create a poker hand using their own two personal cards and the community cards that are revealed on the table after the “flop”. Once action is complete at each of the betting streets, the dealer reveals the final fifth community card known as the river and the remaining players show their hands to declare a winner. In a showdown, the player with the highest poker hand wins all the bets in the pot.