A game in which players bet against one another by placing chips into a central pot. A player with a good hand can win the pot, or the player with the best bluff can force the others to fold. Poker has some skill, but is mostly a game of chance and psychology.
To play, each player buys in for a certain number of chips (the amount varies). Players then “ante” a small amount (usually a nickel) to be dealt cards. After a short time, the first of several betting intervals begins. During this time, each player can raise or call bets, and some players may discard their cards in favor of new ones. At the end of the betting interval, the players show their hands and the player with the highest winning hand takes the pot.
In a traditional game of poker, the cards are drawn from a standard pack of 52 (or sometimes more, as with games with wild jokers). There are four suits, and aces have high value. The highest poker hand is five of a kind, consisting of any combination of Aces, Kings, Queens, Jacks, and Tens.
Unlike chess, poker involves imperfect information – each player knows their own cards but not their opponents’. This makes it harder to model computationally and probably explains why it took so long for a superhuman AI to beat humans at the game. However, with recent improvements in computer power, poker has become one of the easiest games to program a superhuman algorithm for.