Poker is one of the most popular card games in the world and has been played for centuries. It is believed to be the ancestor of other card games, including blackjack and rummy. It is a game of chance and requires careful thinking to make smart decisions. It is also important to be able to tell when you are being bluffed.

There are several rounds of betting in poker before the players show their cards and the winner is declared. The first round of betting is called the flop. Each player puts up a mandatory bet of at least one chip into the pot to see their cards and start the hand. Then there is another round of betting, starting with the player to the left of the dealer.

When it’s your turn to act, you can either raise the amount of your bet or call it. Saying “call” means that you’re calling the bet made by the person before you, and that you’ll place an equal amount of money in the pot.

Poker is a complex game with many different strategies, and a lot of luck involved. But it can be analyzed, and mathematically optimized, by professional players. In the 1944 book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, mathematicians John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern used poker as a key example of a simple game that could be studied to reveal fundamental principles of behavior. These insights paved the way for game theory, which has since expanded to cover many other complex situations, and for modern statistical methods such as Monte Carlo simulation.