Poker is a card game in which players place chips into the pot to compete for a winning hand. While it is a gambling game and does involve some luck, it also involves skill and psychology.

The game is played from a standard deck of 52 cards (although some games use multiple decks or add wild cards). There are four suits in poker: spades, hearts, diamonds and clubs; no suit is higher than another. The highest five-card hand wins. Some games have wild cards, such as two-eyed jacks or jokers, which can take the place of any card in the deck.

Players must ante (amount varies by game, usually a nickel) to get dealt cards. Then they bet into the pot if they think they have a good hand. The player with the highest hand at the end of the betting rounds wins the pot.

When it’s your turn to act, you can raise the bet of any player who is in front of you by saying “call” or something similar. You must match or raise the last bet in order to continue betting. If you have a strong poker hand, you should call every bet to force weaker hands out of the game and improve your chances of winning the pot.

A flush is a hand consisting of 5 matching cards of the same rank. A straight is a sequence of cards that skip around in rank but are from the same suit. A three-of-a-kind is a hand of three identical cards, and a pair is two distinct pairs of cards. The high card breaks ties.