Poker is a card game, played with a deck of 52 cards. Players compete for the highest hand using two of their own cards and five community cards.

It’s a great game for developing social skills and learning how to read people. It also teaches you to understand the motivation of your opponents and to assess their reasoning.

There are many ways to improve your poker game, and one way is to review your gameplay regularly. You can do this by going over your hands and identifying the mistakes that you made during each session. This can include stack-size monitoring, bet-sizing, three-bets and four-bets, and whether you should have called or raised a particular hand.

A good way to avoid making these common errors is to play tight and aggressively. This means that you should fast-play most of your strong hands, including those with a little speculative value, like 7-6 or 5 5.

The best players play a tight range of hands that they know are good and play them aggressively, which makes them hard to beat. This strategy allows them to win the pot preflop without risking a lot of chips, which in turn builds the pot.

A big mistake that many players make is to limp into a hand when they have a bad starting hand, which is the most common strategy at home games. The problem with this is that it often doesn’t give you the best chance of winning a pot. You’ll usually get folded, and even if you win the pot on the flop, you’ll have to deal with the other five players who checked/limped into it.