In poker, as in life, if you have a good starting hand, you can make it big. However, there is also a lot of luck involved in winning a game and sometimes you have to weigh your chances to maximise your rewards. This is what separates the professional players from the amateurs – they are willing to take a reasonable amount of risk and can therefore win more often than others.

There are many different versions of the game but they all revolve around the same principle – that you try to win the pot by having a better poker hand than your opponents. The best way to learn how to play is to observe the behaviour of experienced players and copy it. This will improve your instincts for the game, and make it easier to decide what to do with your cards.

It is important to be able to read your opponents and pick up on their betting patterns. This can help you decide whether or not to call their bets. It is also helpful to distinguish conservative players from aggressive ones – the former usually fold their hands quickly and tend to stay in a hand only when their cards are strong, while the latter bet high early in a hand before seeing how their opponents react.

There are a number of earlier vying games with similar principles, but the likeliest immediate ancestor of Poker is the 17th-century French game poque (or pochen), from which English speakers later derived the word ‘poker’.