A poker game is a card game in which players make wagers over the value of their individual cards and a combination of those cards with the community cards. The objective of the game is to create a winning poker hand through a series of betting intervals in which a player may raise or reraise, depending on their cards and the rules of the particular game they play.
A standard poker game is played with a set number of poker chips, with one player acting as the banker and keeping track of how many chips each player has in his possession. The banker also establishes a system of denominations for the chips, such as a white chip is worth whatever the minimum ante or bet is, and a red chip is equal to five whites. Typically, players may not exchange or trade chips among themselves, and a player who desires additional chips must obtain them from the banker. The banker is responsible for maintaining an accurate stock of chips and making records of how many a player has in his possession or how much cash he paid to receive them.
The term poker is generally used to refer to any of a large number of card games that are based on a similar general game principle, but differ from each other in a variety of ways including the number of cards dealt and the type of community cards. Most of these variants use the official poker hand rankings as part of their game rules, but others do not. For example, strip poker uses the basic mechanics of Poker but does not include the showdown that determines the winner, and only has a single betting interval.