Poker is a card game in which players bet into a pot of money to see who has the best hand. It’s a fast-paced, social game where you can make friends and even earn some extra cash on the side. It is important to play within your financial and emotional limits. Losing your whole stack of chips is bad for both, and it’s often hard to recover from a big loss.

To begin, each player buys in with a fixed amount of chips, usually in increments of 10, 25, 50, or 100. Each chip represents a different value: a white chip is worth the minimum ante or bet; a red chip is worth five whites; and so on.

After everyone has bought in, the first round of betting begins with the player to the left of the blind. Each player is then dealt two cards face down, which are private and invisible to other players (called a hole or pocket). A third set of cards is then dealt face up on the table, called the “flop.” These community cards can be used by each player to build their best 5-card hand.

A good poker strategy is to maximise your winning hands and minimise your losses on losing ones – this is known as “MinMax”. To do so, it’s essential to understand how to read players’ behaviour: if you spot a player tending towards being conservative early in a hand, they can be bluffed easily by raising the bet.