Poker is a card game that involves betting and the sharing of cards. It is a game that lends itself to a variety of variants and has resulted in the development of an extensive literature on strategy, rules and etiquette. In most games, players place chips (representing money) into the pot before they receive their cards. The player with the highest five-card hand wins the pot. Players may also bluff, betting that they have a superior hand while other players call their bets.

The first step to becoming a great poker player is learning how to read your opponents. This is done by studying their actions and finding out how likely they are to have certain hands. A good way to do this is by working out ranges, which are the selection of hands that an opponent could have.

Say you dealt yourself a pair of kings off the deal, not bad but not amazing. Then when betting starts you can choose to fold, call or raise. You call if you don’t have to ante (the amount that you need to put into the pot to participate in the hand). You raise when you think your hand is better than the one that the person before you called.

If the person before you raised, you can increase that bet by saying “raise”. It is common to announce your choices out loud in poker, but tapping the table and giving a non-verbal gesture can also signal these things.