Poker is a game in which players place bets against one another to win a pot of money. It’s a fast-paced card game in which players can fold, call, or raise each other’s bets to stay in the hand and try to make a winning hand. The game originated in the sixteenth century, and it’s now played in nearly every country around the world.

When it’s your turn to act in a hand, you can check (pass the chance to place a bet), call (match the last player’s bet amount), or raise (bet more than the previous player). In poker, the longer you take to make an action, the stronger your hand is likely to be.

Position has a huge impact on your starting hand range and strategy. Players in early positions risk more than those in later positions because they have less information about the other players’ actions. The later your position is, the more information you’ll have before acting.

Bluffing is a big part of the game, and it allows you to mislead your opponents about the strength of your hand. This is an essential skill in any form of poker. In fact, it was a central concept in the 1944 book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, written by mathematician John von Neumann and economist Oskar Morgenstern. In a simplified variant of the game, they proved that optimal strategy exists and that bluffing is an important component of it.