Poker is a card game in which players place bets and try to control the amount of money in the pot (the sum of all bets) by predicting how their opponents will behave. The rules vary between poker variants. In Texas hold’em, for example, individuals compete for an amount of chips contributed by each player (called the pot) until one player has all of them.

The game is fast-paced, and betting continues until one player has all the chips or everyone else folds. Those who remain in the hand then reveal their cards and the winner collects the pot. A common way to distribute the winnings is to divide them equally among the remaining players, although some tournaments have a set percentage that goes to the winner.

A strong poker hand typically consists of three matching cards of the same rank and two unmatched cards of another rank. The highest ranking is a full house, followed by four of a kind and then flushes, which contain 5 cards of the same suit in consecutive ranks but from more than one suit.

Expert poker players use many tactics to misinform their opponents, including using tells to reveal the strength of their hands. These can be as subtle as a change in posture or as overt as a gesture. They also employ analytical tools to extract signal from noise, such as building behavioral dossiers on their opponents and even buying records of previous hands they played.