Poker is a hugely popular card game that’s often played for money. The game involves chance and risk, and while there are a number of variant games, they all share some fundamental rules. Poker requires a lot of practice to become good, and it’s important to learn the basic rules before playing.

While most people think the goal of poker is to have the best hand, the truth is that the object is to get more chips than other players. This is accomplished through a combination of skill, reading opponents, and betting aggressively. It’s also important to be able to read the odds of each hand, which will help you know when to call or raise.

When you play poker, you put in a small amount of money (the exact amount depends on your game), called either the blind or the ante. This is placed into a pot in the middle of the table. Once everyone has their cards, players then place bets. The highest hand wins the pot.

The cards in poker are ranked from high to low: Ace, King, Queen, Jack, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5. There are four suits, and one suit is wild (sometimes jokers are used as wild cards). If you have two matching rank cards, it’s called a pair; three matching rank cards is a flush; five of a kind is a straight; and a full house is three matching rank cards plus three unrelated side cards.