Poker is a card game that involves betting and high amounts of luck. The goal of the game is to win by either having the best hand or scaring your opponents into surrendering with a bluff. Life is much the same, and sometimes it is not just the one with the strongest starting hand that wins but the person with the most courage to hold on and not give up.
A player may bet during a betting interval in one of three ways: they can call the amount put into the pot by the previous active player; raise (raise) that amount and stay in the betting; or drop (fold). Players are only permitted to raise once per turn, but they can raise a minimum of the same amount as the preceding player.
When the dealer deals, each player antes a fixed number of chips. This is known as the ante. A player can also re-ante during a betting interval. The game is played with a standard 52-card pack, with the addition of two jokers for use as wild cards.
Professional poker players have honed their skills through detached quantitative analysis of the game. They learn about their opponents through software and other resources that enable them to extract signal from noise across many channels of information, leveraging it both to exploit their opponents and to protect themselves. This strategy is called MinMax, and it maximises winning hands while minimizing losses from losing ones.