Poker is a card game that involves betting, and it can be played between two players or more. Each player is dealt a complete set of cards face down and places an amount of chips into the pot before any betting takes place. In the end, the player with the best 5-card hand wins all the money in the pot. There are many variations of the game, but all of them have some common elements.

The game is popular for its bluffing element. It allows players to misinform each other about the strength of their own hands. The game is also known for having many strategies that aim to extract maximum value from winning hands and minimise losses from losing ones. This is often referred to as MinMax, and it is one of the main reasons why Poker is considered to be a game of skill.

Despite the fact that Poker has an uncertain history, it is still a very popular card game worldwide. Its development is outside the usual evolution of card games or gambling, and it is believed to have been created independently by two unrelated groups of people in the late 1700s and early 1800s.

The game is played with cards and chips, and it has been analyzed in depth by mathematicians and economists. The foundational 1944 book on mathematical game theory by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern incorporated poker as a central example, demonstrating how optimal strategy could be found by distilling the dynamics of the game to its most basic form.