Poker is a game that involves skill and strategy but mostly chance. Players place chips in a pot when betting gets around to them and the highest hand wins. Players can also put all of their remaining chips into the pot in a special move called an all-in bet.

When it comes to poker, the best players have a combination of innate card sense and psychological conditioning. They read situations and opponents, deceive their rivals, and use sophisticated bets to gain an advantage. But even the brightest talents acknowledge that poker has many mechanical aspects as well. In fact, tools have been developed that examine scenarios in a poker game and attempt to determine the optimal plays.

The rise of poker has fueled the gambling industry, and it has attracted amateur players in enormous numbers who invest small chunks of their regular income to play the game. These players eventually filter upward to a relatively small number of top players who take the game more seriously and make a living from it.

The game’s complexities have drawn the attention of researchers in fields as diverse as computer science and decision making, and it has served as a model for other games. In fact, the foundational 1944 book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by mathematician John von Neumann and economist Oskar Morgenstern analyzed a simplified version of poker to illustrate the fundamental dynamics.