Poker is a card game played by two or more players. It is a game of chance and skill, and it is very popular. People play it for fun, for pennies or matchsticks, or professionally for thousands of dollars. It is not only a game of skill, but it can also be a useful training ground for learning how to make decisions under pressure.

The game is usually played with a standard 53-card pack of playing cards, including the joker (or “bug”), which is used as a wild card to complete straights or certain other hands. There are also rules about how the cards should be dealt, and there may be one or more betting intervals.

Each player has a set of five cards, and they place their bets before the cards are revealed at the end of a betting round. The best hand wins the pot. The aim is to extract the maximum value from winning hands and minimise losses from losing ones. This is called “min-max.”

The game can be played with a number of different chips. A white chip is worth a single unit of ante or bet, while a red chip is worth either two or four whites. Other colors of chips are often used to indicate other amounts of money, such as a blue chip being equal to 20 or 25 whites. In addition to the standard chips, there are a variety of other tokens, which are also used as a way to keep track of the stakes and the status of individual players’ hands.