Poker is a family of card games that involve betting over which hand is best. It is played in many countries and is the most popular game in North America, where it originated.
Poker has several different variants, each with its own rules. The key elements of the game are a set of cards, betting intervals and the showdown, in which the highest hand wins the pot.
A hand is a combination of five cards and can be made from the cards in your hand or from the cards on the table. The rank of the hand is in inverse proportion to its mathematical frequency; that is, the more unusual the combination, the higher the rank.
The player with the best hand wins the pot, which is usually a fixed amount of money. The player with the worst hand loses all of his chips, regardless of their value.
In the game of poker, each player is dealt one or more face-up cards. These are then used to form a poker hand.
Each player must place at least as many chips into the pot in the first betting interval of a deal as the player before him. The next player may then make a bet, called a raise, by placing the number of chips required to match the previous bet.
The betting interval ends when the bets have been equalized or when a player has dropped out of the game. In each of these betting intervals the players may also bet in side pots, which are separate from the main pot and which do not count against the total chips in the main pot.