A player can choose to fold (not play the hand), call (match a previous bet), or raise (bet more than a previous bet). The action starts with the player to the left of the dealer and moves clockwise. Each hand consists of five cards. A full house contains 3 matching cards of the same rank, a flush has 5 consecutive cards from the same suit, and a straight contains 5 cards in sequence but different ranks.
Poker is a game that involves incomplete information and a large element of luck, mirroring real life in its complexity. A player must invest resources before the entire set of facts is known and, even as additional cards are dealt, no one has complete command of all of the information.
Professional players use a wide range of skills to extract signal from noise and leverage the information their opponents provide them. This includes using behavioral dossiers, analyzing past hands and reading the behavior of other players. They have shifted the paradigm from an intuitive feel to detached quantitative analysis.
The most important skill in poker is reading your opponent. This enables you to put them on a range of hands and makes it possible to make the correct decision most of the time. This also allows you to keep your emotions in check, which is a prerequisite for success. This is the key difference between a recreational player who thinks nothing of losing money and a hard-core nit who holds onto every chip for dear life.