Poker is a card game in which each player places chips, or tokens that represent money, into a pot. Players may raise or call a bet made by another player. If a player calls a bet, he must place chips in the pot equal to or greater than the amount raised.
The adage that it takes a minute to learn poker and a lifetime to master it holds true in many respects, even when considering the game’s various variants: Texas hold’em, Omaha, seven-card stud; limit and no-limit games; tournaments and cash games. Each requires a different strategy, but the fundamentals remain the same.
Professional poker players are experts at extracting signal from noise across multiple channels and integrating that information to exploit their opponents as well as protect themselves. They know how to use behavioral dossiers on their opponents, how to glean information from their own hidden cards and how to make the most of the public information available.
During the early days of poker, amateurs would invest small chunks of their steady income in the game in order to test their mettle and occasionally secure a profit. These players would be the foundation of a poker economy that funneled upward to a smaller group of professionals who took the game far more seriously.
