Poker is a card game that may be played with two or more players. It is a betting game, in which each player can choose to call the bet placed by any other player or to raise it. The object of the game is to win the pot, which is the sum of all the bets placed during one round of betting. The game also involves bluffing.

There are a wide variety of poker games, and the rules vary somewhat from game to game. However, there are some basic principles that apply to all of them. For example, it is important to understand that, when you play poker, your opponent’s betting patterns are an indication of how strong or weak your hand is. Moreover, there is often a correlation between how strong your hand is and how aggressively you play the game.

In fact, the foundational 1944 book on mathematical game theory by mathematician John von Neumann and economist Oskar Morgenstern cited poker as an example of a game in which optimal strategy could be determined. More recently, research in multiplayer poker solvers has both confirmed some of the conventional wisdom about how to play Texas Hold’em and overturned some of the folk maxims that players had gotten wrong.