Poker is a card game in which players place wagers on the value of their hands. The object is to win the pot by getting the best hand at the end of the hand. It is important to know how to read your opponents and how to bluff. Besides reading your opponents, you must also know the rules of the game and be able to use the various betting strategies.

There are many variations of the game, but all poker games involve cards and chips. They can be played with 2 to 7 people. Each player must put in a minimum of one low-denomination chip into the pot to start the betting. This is called the ante.

When a player puts in a bet, each player to their left must either call the bet (by putting in the same amount of chips as the previous player) or raise it. If a player doesn’t want to call or raise the bet, they can choose to “drop” their hand and lose all the chips that they have put into the pot.

The highest hand is three of a kind, consisting of 3 matching cards of the same rank. A flush is 5 cards of consecutive rank from the same suit. A straight is five cards of the same rank in two or more suits. The lowest hand is a pair of sixes. In most games, a king (K) or queen (Q) is considered higher than an ace, so the ace is usually treated as the lowest card and a pair of aces is the lowest pair.