Poker is a card game in which players have chips to bet with. Each player is dealt two cards, called their hole cards, and five community cards are then revealed in stages (three cards known as the flop, another single card, the turn, and the river). The aim is to make a 5-card poker hand using your own holes and the community cards. The best poker hand wins the pot.

There are several mechanisms for players to strategically misinform other players about the strength of their hands. For example, players with weak hands may place small bets to keep the pot growing, while players with strong hands may put in large bets to intimidate their opponents into folding before “showdown” – at which time all remaining players reveal their cards.

Expert poker players are masters at extracting signal from noise across multiple channels, and integrating this information both to exploit their opponents and to protect themselves. They use a range of tools to make up for the absence of in-person knowledge of other players, such as body language cues, and they create behavioral dossiers on their opponents by collecting or buying records of their play.

Despite the popularity of online poker, many people still do not understand the rules and nuances of the game. A lot of research has been done into the origins and various varieties of poker, culminating in a set of definitive rules that first appeared in 1904. There is also a rich literature of anecdotes about famous hands and bets, and films like Rounders (Matt Damon) have elevated poker to mainstream culture.