Poker is a card game played by two or more people. Each player has a set of betting chips that they use to place bets during the game. Players must act in turn, placing bets until they either call or fold. The object of the game is to make the best five-card hand using a combination of your own two cards and the community cards. If you have the highest-ranking hand, you win the pot.
Poker can be played with 2 to 14 people. The number of players determines the size of the pot, or the total amount of money that is bet during a round. There are two main types of poker: cash games and tournaments.
A dealer is responsible for shuffling the deck and dealing the cards to each player. The dealer is usually a non-player, but sometimes it is the same person each round. A “dealer chip” is passed to the next player after each round of betting.
If a player does not want to place a bet, they can choose to “check” instead. A player who checks must wait for the other players to act before they can make a bet again. If no one calls a player’s bet, that player can “raise” the bet by betting more money than the previous raise.
A player can also fold their hand when they think that it is unlikely to win the pot. This is known as folding, and it forfeits all of the money that the player has bet during that round.