Poker is a card game where players place bets into the pot based on the strength of their cards. The highest hand wins the pot. There is a little bit of chance involved in poker but when you add betting to the mix there becomes quite a bit of skill and psychology.
During the course of each hand players must ante something, usually an amount that is a fraction of the blinds (the exact amount varies by game). Then they get two cards. When betting comes around to them they can choose to hit, stay, or double up. If they hit they must reveal their other card to the rest of the table, if they stay then the dealer will give them another card and then betting continues, if they double up they say double up and raise the bet size by one.
Then they reveal their hands and the player with the highest ranked hand wins the pot which is all of the money that was bet during that hand. The rest of the players must either fold or call.
Learning the basics of poker is a good start but once you have that down you should begin to look beyond your own cards and think about what your opponents might have. This is called reading other players and it’s a big part of the game. A lot of poker “reads” aren’t subtle physical tells but rather patterns in the way a player plays.
