Poker is a card game in which players place chips into the pot for each round of betting. The player who has the best five-card hand wins the pot, which is the sum total of all the bets made at each round. The game can be played with any number of players, but the ideal number is six or seven. In addition to chance, Poker is a game of skill that requires strategic decisions. A player’s ability to bluff effectively and to recognize the range of hands that other players have improves his chances of winning.

After all the cards are dealt, a player may choose to call a bet, raise it, or fold his hand. The person to the left of him then takes his turn. If he chooses to call, he must put out chips equal to the amount raised by the previous player (the pot). If he raises it, the other players can either call it or fold.

Ingo Fiedler and Jan-Philipp Rock of the Institute for Law and Economics at the University of Hamburg analyzed 50,000 online poker hands and found that skill is more important than chance in the average hand. The analysis included a detailed breakdown of each player’s behavior and the chances of hitting a specific hand.

Say you deal yourself a pair of kings off the flop. Your opponent calls, you raise and the pot is two dollars. Annie writes that it’s easy to fall into the trap of what poker players call “resulting,” which is starting at the outcome and working backward to validate or lambast the decision that led to it. She suggests instead that you look at the process that led to the outcome and see if it was sound.