Poker is a card game that involves betting. The object of the game is to win the pot, which is the sum total of all bets placed during a hand. This can be accomplished by having the highest-ranked hand or by making a bet that no one else calls.
The rules of poker vary slightly depending on the game variant, but most games require a forced bet at the beginning of each betting interval (the “ante”) and an additional bet before each player sees their cards (“the blind”). Players place chips, which represent money, into the pot when they want to bet. A player can also check, in which case they put no chips into the pot at all, or raise, in which case they must put a number of chips into the pot equal to or greater than the amount raised by the person before them.
If you have a good hand, like pocket kings or pocket queens, you may decide to play aggressively on the flop to make your opponents think that you have a strong hand even though they know that you do not. This is a strategy called bluffing.
A high-level understanding of poker includes knowing the order of hands, recognizing what beats what and how to calculate EV. This type of knowledge requires a level of math beyond what most beginners are comfortable with, but over time, these numbers will become ingrained in your mind and you will develop an intuition for frequency and balance.