I'm surprised at the general tone of response here towards the subject of poker overall (I didn't read the article yet so perhaps something more is in the context, but all the same); I understand there are many in the poker world even regarding the most successful of whom are regarded as living a degenerate lifestyle, but being that I was previously in that world myself and was not a degenerate type; I never gambled outside of "my game" that I had an edge in, I learned and implemented proper bankroll management and I studied the game on fundamental levels and on up, progressing into the meta-psyche game that is NL heads-up.
Which brings me to my point which is that while some forms of poker have proven "beatable" by ai, certain forms ie; short-handed tables of NL Holdem, increase in perpexlity to a point where, in heads-up, there are too many variables at play both "physically" (the cards and corresponding hand ranks) and metaphysically (the story being implied thru the route of actions taken at each street from preflop, flop, turn, to river) for there to exist some perfect approach against a skilled player.
NL Holdem poker is absolutely a game of skill with an element of variance aka luck/lack-there-of.
I agree with everything you've said, and I think we'd have better politics, economics, human relationships and fun, if more people got their heads out of their posteriors and actually understood poker more.
Hey I've started playing poker occasionally again, wanna have a chat about poker? My email is in my profile.
I used to be a winning player at small stakes about 20 years ago, so nothing major but enough for me to show that it's a game of skill.
But yea, for anyone interested why poker is a game of skill, it's due to the law of large numbers. You can easily see the law kick into effect when you simulate a dice roll and you win from 1 to 4 and the other wins 5 to 6 and you both get $1 if you win. I recently had to explain this concept so I happen to have the JS still lying around in my Chrome console.
const rolls = 10_000;
let a = 0;
let b = 0;
for (let i = 0; i < rolls; i++) {
const die = Math.ceil(Math.random() * 6); // 1–6
if (die <= 4) a++;
else b++;
}
console.log(`Player A wins: $${a}`);
console.log(`Player B wins: $${b}`);
console.log(`Total paid out: $${a + b}`);
console.log(`A's edge per game: ${(a - b) / rolls}`);
console.log(`Difference: ${(a - b)}`);
> I'm surprised at the general tone of response here towards the subject of poker overall [...] regarded as living a degenerate lifestyle
Maybe the people who are negative have read to the end of the article where we are let into the not-so-hidden agenda of the parent: Teach the kids to hustle their way through college so they can become a market speculator.
Life is full of uncertainty. Learning to take calculated risks, where most attempts fail but a few ones pay off big, is an important life skill. Reading other people's behavior to infer hidden information is another one -- Jane Street apparently used to have people learn poker to learn how to infer hidden information from the behavior of other people buying and selling stocks, but invented their own game (https://www.figgie.com/) to teach the same skills more efficiently.
ETA: I would say, when poker is taught correctly, it should discourage anyone from the sorts of gambling which are problematic:
Problem 1: Wasting your money in situations where the odds are "with the house". This would include playing slot machines or basically anything at a casino, the lottery, or even 50/50 raffles (although I can see an exception for the last one).
Poker should teach you to only take bets where the expected value (value of winning * prob winning) is greater than the cost, which is not true in the above examples.
Problem 2: Getting sucked into betting more and more to make up what you've already lost. One aspect of long-term poker should be teaching you is how to manage this effectively.
That’s funny. I’ve played poker but I’ve never gambled a cent in my life. How does that work? Oh yeah, we played poker with plastic chips not backed by any money. We just played for fun.
I like this. Most people try to teach card games by listing every rule, but it's much easier to play a simpler version then add in new rules.
I play the Chinese card game Zhao Peng You (Finding Friends, part of the Sheng Ji family of games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheng_ji), which is a trick taking game with a trump suit that changes between games, a trump number that changes between games, and a team selection mechanic rather than fixed teams. It's insanely hard to learn everything at once, so we usually start new people with fixed teams and trumps just to get the feel of a team-based trick-taking game, before adding in the complications.
Blind Man's Bluff is a great variant: Give everyone a card face-down, they put it on their forehead without looking at it. Bet based on whether or not you think the card on your forehead is higher than other people's. More fun in my opinion.
Article footnote mentions this with the caveat that it requires some dexterity that young children may find challenging. That aside, I think the two games make a great complementary pair and switching between provides a nice contrast for kids.
I taught our youngest Monopoly Deal with similar simplification: removed all but properties, birthday and debt collector/etc. Then added property stealing/swapping. Then rent. It was very effective in getting her quickly up to speed.
Yes, first step is teaching set collection. Then teach tactics that involve the other players’ sets. Then the full disaster. Easier than explaining rent to 4-5yo from the start.
After my kids fell in love Uno (in all it's versions) - I got them Monopoly Deal and Monopoly Bid - and I have to say they are both brilliant and fun games in their own right and very different to each other.
We then got the Cludo card games and were equally impressed.
A lot of starcraft players transitioned to Poker. Because both games require decision making in a system with incomplete information(like real life). That's why parents should teach their kids how to play poker. Otherwise they risk going by in life without critical cognitive skills.
If you think "Starcraft" is a degenerate gambling pastime, you might want to consider that your standards do not align with 99% of the people you're hanging out with here.
Equally, if you consider weed a degenerate pleasure to begin with, then of course you're going to disagree with teenagers going "hehehe, look at my first bong!!"
I have always been mystified by the popularity of poker. To me, it is an unpleasant game.
First - the fact that it's played for real money. If I win, I feel like a common swindler stealing money that someone could use to pay their bills or buy something nice for themselves. If I lose, I feel like a swindler's victim. And if the people around the table happen to be my friends - why would I ever wish to victimize them, or ruin their image in my mind by watching them victimize others?
Second - the lack of information. Many interesting games provide incomp9lete information of game state to the players, which one then needs to reconstruct. But with poker, the lack of information is so severe that one has no hope of reconstructing the game state - reasonable possibilities are too many to analyze, one is forced to pretty much guess and make gambles. It's an unpleasant experience.
It seems like a game for people whose brains are wired in a manner incompatible with mine. If I discover that someone likes poker, I find them rather suspicious. And people who teach poker to their own children - like the article'a author - are, to me, utterly incomprehensible.
> Second - the lack of information. … But with poker, the lack of information is so severe that one has no hope of reconstructing the game state.
To me, full-information games feel immensely boring, they all look like a harder version of Tic-Tac-Toe that require a bigger brain. Just don't make mistakes and you're guaranteed to win. Harder games like chess just make it so incredibly expensive and attention draining that only a special kind of people get really good.
The fun part of Poker for me is exactly the psychological game of reconstructing the hidden info. Tuning your intuition when you know you still lack it is also fun and revealing.
Regarding teaching children: bluff and lies are rampant in real life. Poker teaches to take it into account and to do it yourself in a no-consequence conditions. Even if you never resort to it you need to know what it feels like to understand others.
It's the first time I've been classified as suspicious, to my knowledge. Cool.
If you ignore the externalities of winning/losing money the thing that the betting brings to poker that is very hard to replace is the impact it has on the players decision making. People playing poker with "funny money" play the game fundamentally differently to the extent it's almost a different game (arguably worse, certainly less predictable) entirely.
If you take the money out of it you have to replace it with something that matters to the players outside of the game itself for it to work.
(On the lack of information - some versions of poker are different than others but imo Texas Holdem has enough shared information that, combined with the knowledge that people really care about winning or losing informing your ability to read them based on their actions enables very strategic gameplay - the existence of a pro scene with players that consistently do well at a high level of play is evidence of this)
As another aside - I see similar complaints about strategy games that include RNG for things like attack values, and I also disagree with that criticism. I would argue that risk management is an interesting skill that's very hard to include in a game with perfect information.
> If you take the money out of it you have to replace it with something that matters to the players outside of the game itself for it to work.
This claim is genuinely alien to me. I've seen people play lots of games very competitively without tying money in it.
No one would seriously claim that chess hustler games are the only serious chess games, yet that claim looks oddly similar to the one made in poker. Why would poker be an exception? Is the game not interesting enough to play without it? Does the game use money to lure in a population of players that would otherwise not play? If so, is i likely that this extra population is skilled enough at the game to compete fairly?
> Second - the lack of information. Many interesting games provide incomp9lete information of game state to the players, which one then needs to reconstruct. But with poker, the lack of information is so severe that one has no hope of reconstructing the game state - reasonable possibilities are too many to analyze, one is forced to pretty much guess and make gambles. It's an unpleasant experience.
Poker is basically the same type of game as "Among us". You might have some hints but you're not supposed to be able to entirely recreate the game state. If you can, the game is boring.
> reasonable possibilities are too many to analyze, one is forced to pretty much guess.
You could say the same thing about chess, but an experienced player wouldn't, because they know which candidate moves are reasonable and which lines to delve into through intuition shaped by experience.
Similarly, you might say the same about poker. The possible hands your opponent has are actually quite large, but an experienced player can have a reasonable idea of the possible hands and their probabilities, which may involve eg ignoring most hands as unrealistic and bucketing hands into classes.
No, chess is on the opposite side of the spectrum! In chess, at all times you have perfect knowledge of the entire state of the board; in poker, you know 2 cards.
"or buy something nice for themselves" like spending an evening playing a game with friends?
Of you are playing against strangers, it isn't on you what someone else did with their money. As for you, you works only play with money you are willing to lose.
Of course poker isn't for everyone.
You don’t have to play poker for money. Whenever I played poker as a kid, or with friends, we never played for money. We just divided up the chips and played until someone won them all.
It's a choice to play for money and how much. When I play with friends, there's only a $20 buy-in and no rebuys. Makes for a far cheaper night than going to a pub or movie.
> First - the fact that it's played for real money.
Don't play for real money then. I played a lot of poker with friends, but never for money - everybody gets the same amount of chips at the start and the winner is the last man standing (i.e. the winner of the random all in once most players are out, usually)
In my experience poker completely falls apart when it's not for real money. It just doesn't seem like a very good game in the sense that people don't try to win unless there's some external benefit to winning. It sucks to play with people who don't care.
> And if the people around the table happen to be my friends - why would I ever wish to victimize them, or ruin their image in my mind by watching them victimize others?
No one is being victimised. Everyone's signing up to potentially lose their money. It doesn't have to be very much money to make it work well, but it generally needs to be some money.
I think your 2nd reason is actually why poker is so popular. A lot of the joy of poker (at least for me) is trying to learn to read the other players. I generally play with friends and I find it emotionally intimate in a strange sort of way. Probably not for people who don't enjoy bluffing games though.
Edit:
It's also a socially acceptable time to lie your ass off. Maybe it's a hit like how GTA is for some people as well.
poker, without the money, isn't much different from any other card game. We used to play poker as a family game with a butter tub of pennies that all went back into the pot when we were done. It's very similar to rummy or bridge. Part skill part luck. Like pretty much any board game.
Add to the list that for most of the game, you're not actually playing! Even in more action packed variants like Omaha you spend a lot of time folded watching the others at the table play. (Although that does also have some of the enjoyment of playing, it's not the same.)
Careful what you wish for! Mahjong is the opposite: you're always playing or setting up the next round, there's no down time, you can't stop paying attention even for a moment or you might miss an important tile, and you can't even skip a round for a comfort break.
Also it seems to be complex enough there is no mental space or time left to talk about anything other than the tiles. Exhausting!
What about other games that people play for real money where the money for the winners comes from the losers?
For example in amateur chess tournaments it is common for the prize money to come out of the entry fees. Fairly typical might be a $15 dollar entry fee in advance or $20 at the door, and a prize fund of $350 ($200 first, $100 second, $50 third) based on 30 entries. It will be lower if they get fewer entries, but let's say they get exactly 30. Then 3 players are going home with more than they came with. The other 27 are going home $15 or $20 in the hole.
Would you feel bad if you played in such a tournament and finished in the top 3? Some of the 27 losers might have had a better use for their entry fee.
How is it swindling if you have all agreed to play a fair game?
You do have incomplete information, but to the extent you describe it only exists within a single hand. If you play for a couple of hours, you get more information. That's the point. You're not playing the cards, you're playing the people holding them.
And that's a great allegory for life, and you can learn a lot that will help you in life in general.
As such, I find people who don't teach poker to their own children - like yourself - are, to me, utterly incomprehensible.
Blackjack, while still a gambling game with a lot of randomness, would be a far better choice for children; particularly learning about calculating the probability of getting a card you want.
> reasonable possibilities are too many to analyze, one is forced to pretty much guess and make gambles. It's an unpleasant experience.
It’s okay to not like popular things, not every game is for every person. The thing you describe as unpleasant, is what some people enjoy about the game.
> It seems like a game for people whose brains are wired in a manner incompatible with mine. If I discover that someone likes poker, I find them rather suspicious.
Well, that is a good chunk of the population. Which isn’t to say it’s wrong to be suspicious of most people, but I’m not sure poker is an reliable indicator.
One of the best life lessons I learned was while perusing a poker strategy book in a bookstore as a teen. I’ve never been into poker, not even sure why I picked it up.
One thing it said was the most important thing to remember is that most of your hands will be crap. Don’t get attached to a bad hand and don’t convince yourself that an ok hand is a good hand. If you just fold the bad hands and play the good ones you’re already a better player than most.
I took that to heart and it has served me well in life.
That’s it. That’s the entire strategy. I pray that the Texas Hold ‘Em fad doesn’t come back. That was an insufferable decade of hearing how clever everyone was.
Being a loose aggressive player is far more likely to lead to you losing a lot of money, than winning a lot of money.
Once you consider what the house earns, poker is a net negative for the players. In order for there to be some big winners, there have to be a lot of losers. And a shocking number of those losers will, thanks to our selective memories, consider themselves winning players.
Poker is a great way to learn a lot of life lessons about human psychology, money management, strategy vs tactics, game theory, and so much more.
There is this weird protestant puritanism around so many aspects of life that confuse me. Every child is going to become an adult, but there is this attitude that they must be shielded from all adult knowledge until they're 21 as if that's helpful.
Your kid can - through game play - learn so much that will make them a more balanced, rounded, capable human than their peers. And done the right way, they're not going to end up degenerate gamblers, but quite the opposite.
It´s about normalizing something we think it could lead to problems.
I dont want to romanticize the game in his mind, so when he grows up people ask him to play poker and he sees it as "that nice game we played at home!".
It is a game with very strong connections with gambling. There are thousands of other games without that association which are as rewarding as poker.
Poker is a winner-take-all game, so it could be argued that it incentives kids to push their self interest first.
It's based on deception, so teaches kids to distrust others and deceive others for the sake of winning.
It gives crazy adrenaline rushes that even adults fail to control. That can't be good for the brain.
You don't seem to realize that 4-year-old is extremely young, and kids that age need security more than anything. They need to know adults have their backs and are not in it for themselves. They need to know people aren't lying to them.
Sure you need to prepare kids for the real life, but there is an age for everything, and my opinion is that 4-year-old is not a good age to learn poker, just as it's not great to put 6-year-old in front of horror movies, or give wine to 10-year-olds.
There is plenty of time to learn money management.
Haha, I just taught my 5-year-old "high card" poker last week. He loves it. Planning on doing a similar progression. Not sure when to stop showing the hands at the end when people fold. He's still in the place where he really hates to lose, but it didn't take him long to get the idea of "minimize losses for bad hands, maximize gains for good hands", which is the main life lesson I'd like him to take from poker.
> As a parent, I’m pleased that I’ve given her the tools to put herself through college hustling poker games, and then go work at a proprietary trading firm.
which is presumably written with the same sardonic intent as any other Matt Levine work.
When my kids were maybe 6 and 4 we started playing One Night Ultimate Werewolf as a family. It very quickly became clear this was a bad choice: the oldest went from being terrible at lying (and so ~never doing it) to actually being pretty good, surprisingly quickly. As soon as we noticed this we stopped, and while she didn't go back to how she had been there was definitely much less lying and she didn't remain good at it.
It's an essential skill in life anyway, but you also teach the usual ethics and morals and come down hard on them when you catch them in a meaningful lie.
I think it's also considered a developmental milestone as lying requires a pretty sophisticated theory of mind, and an understanding of the perspective of another person
I’d say bluffing in poker isn’t really lying. I mean you certainly can look at it that way, but another way to look at it is “I have good hands here more often than you do so here strategically you have to fold when I bet”
The difference between a lie and a surprise is that soon everyone will know what the surprise was. A lie has the intention of concealing the truth forever.
Bluffing and detecting bluffing is a useful skill as long as used morally. Sort of like learning martial arts - just because we teach kids karate doesn't mean we want them to go around beating people up.
Gambling however can very easily ruin lives and be very adicting.
As someone else pointed out, bluffing is not lying. Bluffing is about applying some randomness to your betting patterns to force your opponents into overbetting slightly on average.
Lying would be trying to introduce a negative correlation between hand strength and bet size; bluffing is merely removing some of the positive correlation that exists.
The world order is falling apart and being an intelligent person makes you a target of the "anti-elite". I think teaching kids strategy and deception has never been more important.
It's a common misconception that poker is about lying or that you need to lie to play poker.
You can bet with a bad hand, but you don't need to say you have a good hand, if asked you can say you either have a bad hand or a good hand, without any impact to your strategy.
Lying holds no advantage in poker, you can easily play poker without lying, no correlation is intrinsic to the game or its rules, it's just a common association people make
Had some family come over and play Texas Hold’em with us and their kids. It was clear they were too stupid to be intimidated so there was no possibility of bluffing, instead I just folded over and over again until I had two really good cards and then would see me no matter what I bet and ai grew my bankroll that way.
GTO goes out the window when a drunk guy sits down with a few friends. Either you're gonna grab the pot a few times or bust because the dude went all in with dueces against your KA. he wins a flush on the river.
https://archive.ph/AjiWY
I'm surprised at the general tone of response here towards the subject of poker overall (I didn't read the article yet so perhaps something more is in the context, but all the same); I understand there are many in the poker world even regarding the most successful of whom are regarded as living a degenerate lifestyle, but being that I was previously in that world myself and was not a degenerate type; I never gambled outside of "my game" that I had an edge in, I learned and implemented proper bankroll management and I studied the game on fundamental levels and on up, progressing into the meta-psyche game that is NL heads-up.
Which brings me to my point which is that while some forms of poker have proven "beatable" by ai, certain forms ie; short-handed tables of NL Holdem, increase in perpexlity to a point where, in heads-up, there are too many variables at play both "physically" (the cards and corresponding hand ranks) and metaphysically (the story being implied thru the route of actions taken at each street from preflop, flop, turn, to river) for there to exist some perfect approach against a skilled player.
NL Holdem poker is absolutely a game of skill with an element of variance aka luck/lack-there-of.
The teachings from the games of gambling, probability etc is a valuable life skill that far too few people have.
I reccomend:
Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts Hardcover – 6 Feb. 2018 by Annie Duke
Or listen to any of the podcasts she did when promoting the book - Peter Attia or Masters of Business are the two I presonally consumed at that time.
I mention this in threads/replies below:
It's a warped puritanism.
I agree with everything you've said, and I think we'd have better politics, economics, human relationships and fun, if more people got their heads out of their posteriors and actually understood poker more.
It's kinda disgusting that people have such a visceral reaction.
Hey I've started playing poker occasionally again, wanna have a chat about poker? My email is in my profile.
I used to be a winning player at small stakes about 20 years ago, so nothing major but enough for me to show that it's a game of skill.
But yea, for anyone interested why poker is a game of skill, it's due to the law of large numbers. You can easily see the law kick into effect when you simulate a dice roll and you win from 1 to 4 and the other wins 5 to 6 and you both get $1 if you win. I recently had to explain this concept so I happen to have the JS still lying around in my Chrome console.
> I'm surprised at the general tone of response here towards the subject of poker overall [...] regarded as living a degenerate lifestyle
Maybe the people who are negative have read to the end of the article where we are let into the not-so-hidden agenda of the parent: Teach the kids to hustle their way through college so they can become a market speculator.
Matt Levine is “known for his humorous, witty, deadpan writing style” - I’m pretty sure that’s a joke.
I think it was at least partially joke. The author writes a popular newsletter called "Money Stuff", which is about weird things in the finance world.
Start your kids onto the path of gambling? No thanks. Better to teach them chess, xiangqi, shogi or go/baduk.
Life is full of uncertainty. Learning to take calculated risks, where most attempts fail but a few ones pay off big, is an important life skill. Reading other people's behavior to infer hidden information is another one -- Jane Street apparently used to have people learn poker to learn how to infer hidden information from the behavior of other people buying and selling stocks, but invented their own game (https://www.figgie.com/) to teach the same skills more efficiently.
ETA: I would say, when poker is taught correctly, it should discourage anyone from the sorts of gambling which are problematic:
Problem 1: Wasting your money in situations where the odds are "with the house". This would include playing slot machines or basically anything at a casino, the lottery, or even 50/50 raffles (although I can see an exception for the last one).
Poker should teach you to only take bets where the expected value (value of winning * prob winning) is greater than the cost, which is not true in the above examples.
Problem 2: Getting sucked into betting more and more to make up what you've already lost. One aspect of long-term poker should be teaching you is how to manage this effectively.
That’s funny. I’ve played poker but I’ve never gambled a cent in my life. How does that work? Oh yeah, we played poker with plastic chips not backed by any money. We just played for fun.
Gambling is a huge addiction problem. Your comment is like saying someone that occasionally smokes cocaine isn't addicted so cocaine isn't addictive.
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You can also use it to teach about the risk of gambling and simple probabilities. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Europeans with their sip of wine for kids seems to have a very different outcome to the puritanical US attitude to alcohol and ban until old age.
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I like this. Most people try to teach card games by listing every rule, but it's much easier to play a simpler version then add in new rules.
I play the Chinese card game Zhao Peng You (Finding Friends, part of the Sheng Ji family of games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheng_ji), which is a trick taking game with a trump suit that changes between games, a trump number that changes between games, and a team selection mechanic rather than fixed teams. It's insanely hard to learn everything at once, so we usually start new people with fixed teams and trumps just to get the feel of a team-based trick-taking game, before adding in the complications.
I wonder if I can generate a video to help you! For example: https://pdftovideo.ai/
Blind Man's Bluff is a great variant: Give everyone a card face-down, they put it on their forehead without looking at it. Bet based on whether or not you think the card on your forehead is higher than other people's. More fun in my opinion.
Article footnote mentions this with the caveat that it requires some dexterity that young children may find challenging. That aside, I think the two games make a great complementary pair and switching between provides a nice contrast for kids.
I suppose you can simply hold your card in your hands with the back facing you. Or use some kind of vertical holder.
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I taught our youngest Monopoly Deal with similar simplification: removed all but properties, birthday and debt collector/etc. Then added property stealing/swapping. Then rent. It was very effective in getting her quickly up to speed.
So hang on, you play with just properties and simple cards; so in this simplified version of the game, you're mainly just trying to collect sets?
Yes, first step is teaching set collection. Then teach tactics that involve the other players’ sets. Then the full disaster. Easier than explaining rent to 4-5yo from the start.
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After my kids fell in love Uno (in all it's versions) - I got them Monopoly Deal and Monopoly Bid - and I have to say they are both brilliant and fun games in their own right and very different to each other.
We then got the Cludo card games and were equally impressed.
A lot of starcraft players transitioned to Poker. Because both games require decision making in a system with incomplete information(like real life). That's why parents should teach their kids how to play poker. Otherwise they risk going by in life without critical cognitive skills.
Yeah, the only way to learn those skills is to engage in a degenerate gambling pastime, that is a gateway to many other degenerate gambling pastimes.
This entire thread is exactly like arguing with weed smokers on Reddit/r/trees.
If you think "Starcraft" is a degenerate gambling pastime, you might want to consider that your standards do not align with 99% of the people you're hanging out with here.
Equally, if you consider weed a degenerate pleasure to begin with, then of course you're going to disagree with teenagers going "hehehe, look at my first bong!!"
I have always been mystified by the popularity of poker. To me, it is an unpleasant game.
First - the fact that it's played for real money. If I win, I feel like a common swindler stealing money that someone could use to pay their bills or buy something nice for themselves. If I lose, I feel like a swindler's victim. And if the people around the table happen to be my friends - why would I ever wish to victimize them, or ruin their image in my mind by watching them victimize others?
Second - the lack of information. Many interesting games provide incomp9lete information of game state to the players, which one then needs to reconstruct. But with poker, the lack of information is so severe that one has no hope of reconstructing the game state - reasonable possibilities are too many to analyze, one is forced to pretty much guess and make gambles. It's an unpleasant experience.
It seems like a game for people whose brains are wired in a manner incompatible with mine. If I discover that someone likes poker, I find them rather suspicious. And people who teach poker to their own children - like the article'a author - are, to me, utterly incomprehensible.
> Second - the lack of information. … But with poker, the lack of information is so severe that one has no hope of reconstructing the game state.
To me, full-information games feel immensely boring, they all look like a harder version of Tic-Tac-Toe that require a bigger brain. Just don't make mistakes and you're guaranteed to win. Harder games like chess just make it so incredibly expensive and attention draining that only a special kind of people get really good.
The fun part of Poker for me is exactly the psychological game of reconstructing the hidden info. Tuning your intuition when you know you still lack it is also fun and revealing.
Regarding teaching children: bluff and lies are rampant in real life. Poker teaches to take it into account and to do it yourself in a no-consequence conditions. Even if you never resort to it you need to know what it feels like to understand others.
It's the first time I've been classified as suspicious, to my knowledge. Cool.
If you ignore the externalities of winning/losing money the thing that the betting brings to poker that is very hard to replace is the impact it has on the players decision making. People playing poker with "funny money" play the game fundamentally differently to the extent it's almost a different game (arguably worse, certainly less predictable) entirely.
If you take the money out of it you have to replace it with something that matters to the players outside of the game itself for it to work.
(On the lack of information - some versions of poker are different than others but imo Texas Holdem has enough shared information that, combined with the knowledge that people really care about winning or losing informing your ability to read them based on their actions enables very strategic gameplay - the existence of a pro scene with players that consistently do well at a high level of play is evidence of this)
As another aside - I see similar complaints about strategy games that include RNG for things like attack values, and I also disagree with that criticism. I would argue that risk management is an interesting skill that's very hard to include in a game with perfect information.
> If you take the money out of it you have to replace it with something that matters to the players outside of the game itself for it to work.
This claim is genuinely alien to me. I've seen people play lots of games very competitively without tying money in it. No one would seriously claim that chess hustler games are the only serious chess games, yet that claim looks oddly similar to the one made in poker. Why would poker be an exception? Is the game not interesting enough to play without it? Does the game use money to lure in a population of players that would otherwise not play? If so, is i likely that this extra population is skilled enough at the game to compete fairly?
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> I would argue that risk management is an interesting skill that's very hard to include in a game with perfect information.
I agree with you here quite strongly.
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> Second - the lack of information. Many interesting games provide incomp9lete information of game state to the players, which one then needs to reconstruct. But with poker, the lack of information is so severe that one has no hope of reconstructing the game state - reasonable possibilities are too many to analyze, one is forced to pretty much guess and make gambles. It's an unpleasant experience.
Poker is basically the same type of game as "Among us". You might have some hints but you're not supposed to be able to entirely recreate the game state. If you can, the game is boring.
A quick take:
> reasonable possibilities are too many to analyze, one is forced to pretty much guess.
You could say the same thing about chess, but an experienced player wouldn't, because they know which candidate moves are reasonable and which lines to delve into through intuition shaped by experience.
Similarly, you might say the same about poker. The possible hands your opponent has are actually quite large, but an experienced player can have a reasonable idea of the possible hands and their probabilities, which may involve eg ignoring most hands as unrealistic and bucketing hands into classes.
> You could say the same thing about chess
No, chess is on the opposite side of the spectrum! In chess, at all times you have perfect knowledge of the entire state of the board; in poker, you know 2 cards.
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"or buy something nice for themselves" like spending an evening playing a game with friends? Of you are playing against strangers, it isn't on you what someone else did with their money. As for you, you works only play with money you are willing to lose. Of course poker isn't for everyone.
You don’t have to play poker for money. Whenever I played poker as a kid, or with friends, we never played for money. We just divided up the chips and played until someone won them all.
It's a choice to play for money and how much. When I play with friends, there's only a $20 buy-in and no rebuys. Makes for a far cheaper night than going to a pub or movie.
As a kid (~12 year old) I played for matchsticks.
> First - the fact that it's played for real money.
Don't play for real money then. I played a lot of poker with friends, but never for money - everybody gets the same amount of chips at the start and the winner is the last man standing (i.e. the winner of the random all in once most players are out, usually)
In my experience poker completely falls apart when it's not for real money. It just doesn't seem like a very good game in the sense that people don't try to win unless there's some external benefit to winning. It sucks to play with people who don't care.
> And if the people around the table happen to be my friends - why would I ever wish to victimize them, or ruin their image in my mind by watching them victimize others?
No one is being victimised. Everyone's signing up to potentially lose their money. It doesn't have to be very much money to make it work well, but it generally needs to be some money.
I think your 2nd reason is actually why poker is so popular. A lot of the joy of poker (at least for me) is trying to learn to read the other players. I generally play with friends and I find it emotionally intimate in a strange sort of way. Probably not for people who don't enjoy bluffing games though.
Edit: It's also a socially acceptable time to lie your ass off. Maybe it's a hit like how GTA is for some people as well.
You might enjoy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheat_(game)
The whole point is to lie your ass off.
poker, without the money, isn't much different from any other card game. We used to play poker as a family game with a butter tub of pennies that all went back into the pot when we were done. It's very similar to rummy or bridge. Part skill part luck. Like pretty much any board game.
Add to the list that for most of the game, you're not actually playing! Even in more action packed variants like Omaha you spend a lot of time folded watching the others at the table play. (Although that does also have some of the enjoyment of playing, it's not the same.)
Careful what you wish for! Mahjong is the opposite: you're always playing or setting up the next round, there's no down time, you can't stop paying attention even for a moment or you might miss an important tile, and you can't even skip a round for a comfort break.
Also it seems to be complex enough there is no mental space or time left to talk about anything other than the tiles. Exhausting!
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What about other games that people play for real money where the money for the winners comes from the losers?
For example in amateur chess tournaments it is common for the prize money to come out of the entry fees. Fairly typical might be a $15 dollar entry fee in advance or $20 at the door, and a prize fund of $350 ($200 first, $100 second, $50 third) based on 30 entries. It will be lower if they get fewer entries, but let's say they get exactly 30. Then 3 players are going home with more than they came with. The other 27 are going home $15 or $20 in the hole.
Would you feel bad if you played in such a tournament and finished in the top 3? Some of the 27 losers might have had a better use for their entry fee.
Surely the variance of amateur chess is far lower than that of poker.
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How is it swindling if you have all agreed to play a fair game?
You do have incomplete information, but to the extent you describe it only exists within a single hand. If you play for a couple of hours, you get more information. That's the point. You're not playing the cards, you're playing the people holding them.
And that's a great allegory for life, and you can learn a lot that will help you in life in general.
As such, I find people who don't teach poker to their own children - like yourself - are, to me, utterly incomprehensible.
Blackjack, while still a gambling game with a lot of randomness, would be a far better choice for children; particularly learning about calculating the probability of getting a card you want.
> reasonable possibilities are too many to analyze, one is forced to pretty much guess and make gambles. It's an unpleasant experience.
It’s okay to not like popular things, not every game is for every person. The thing you describe as unpleasant, is what some people enjoy about the game.
> It seems like a game for people whose brains are wired in a manner incompatible with mine. If I discover that someone likes poker, I find them rather suspicious.
Well, that is a good chunk of the population. Which isn’t to say it’s wrong to be suspicious of most people, but I’m not sure poker is an reliable indicator.
One of the best life lessons I learned was while perusing a poker strategy book in a bookstore as a teen. I’ve never been into poker, not even sure why I picked it up. One thing it said was the most important thing to remember is that most of your hands will be crap. Don’t get attached to a bad hand and don’t convince yourself that an ok hand is a good hand. If you just fold the bad hands and play the good ones you’re already a better player than most.
I took that to heart and it has served me well in life.
For me, it's "decisions, not results." Poker will teach you patience and acceptance of that which is out of your control.
That’s it. That’s the entire strategy. I pray that the Texas Hold ‘Em fad doesn’t come back. That was an insufferable decade of hearing how clever everyone was.
That's "the entire strategy" for becoming a non-beginner. Poker game theory gets much more complicated at higher levels of play.
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How much did you lose?
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That just makes you a tight passive player which is not the worst kind of player to be but also not likely to win you a lot of money
Being a loose aggressive player is far more likely to lead to you losing a lot of money, than winning a lot of money.
Once you consider what the house earns, poker is a net negative for the players. In order for there to be some big winners, there have to be a lot of losers. And a shocking number of those losers will, thanks to our selective memories, consider themselves winning players.
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Not sure I want my 4-year-old to know how to play poker though.
Why?
Poker is a great way to learn a lot of life lessons about human psychology, money management, strategy vs tactics, game theory, and so much more.
There is this weird protestant puritanism around so many aspects of life that confuse me. Every child is going to become an adult, but there is this attitude that they must be shielded from all adult knowledge until they're 21 as if that's helpful.
Your kid can - through game play - learn so much that will make them a more balanced, rounded, capable human than their peers. And done the right way, they're not going to end up degenerate gamblers, but quite the opposite.
It´s about normalizing something we think it could lead to problems.
I dont want to romanticize the game in his mind, so when he grows up people ask him to play poker and he sees it as "that nice game we played at home!".
It is a game with very strong connections with gambling. There are thousands of other games without that association which are as rewarding as poker.
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Poker is a winner-take-all game, so it could be argued that it incentives kids to push their self interest first.
It's based on deception, so teaches kids to distrust others and deceive others for the sake of winning.
It gives crazy adrenaline rushes that even adults fail to control. That can't be good for the brain.
You don't seem to realize that 4-year-old is extremely young, and kids that age need security more than anything. They need to know adults have their backs and are not in it for themselves. They need to know people aren't lying to them.
Sure you need to prepare kids for the real life, but there is an age for everything, and my opinion is that 4-year-old is not a good age to learn poker, just as it's not great to put 6-year-old in front of horror movies, or give wine to 10-year-olds.
There is plenty of time to learn money management.
Math skills and social skills combined?
Haha, I just taught my 5-year-old "high card" poker last week. He loves it. Planning on doing a similar progression. Not sure when to stop showing the hands at the end when people fold. He's still in the place where he really hates to lose, but it didn't take him long to get the idea of "minimize losses for bad hands, maximize gains for good hands", which is the main life lesson I'd like him to take from poker.
I have found Skull to be a superior form of poker for people who want the game without the chip evaluation, and it teaches the same skills.
The biggest advantage of Skull over poker is that it's fun even without money.
This, eliminates most of the probability math and distills it just down to the game theory and bluffing aspects. One of my favorite games.
The game the author describes sounds simple and fun, but… what about ties?
I'd assume regular poker rules: The pot is split.
Training your kids how to lie convincingly to you -- what could go wrong?
The article ends
> As a parent, I’m pleased that I’ve given her the tools to put herself through college hustling poker games, and then go work at a proprietary trading firm.
which is presumably written with the same sardonic intent as any other Matt Levine work.
I think it's balanced by having him or her learn skepticism, game theory, information asymmetry, and adverse selection, among other useful skills.
When my kids were maybe 6 and 4 we started playing One Night Ultimate Werewolf as a family. It very quickly became clear this was a bad choice: the oldest went from being terrible at lying (and so ~never doing it) to actually being pretty good, surprisingly quickly. As soon as we noticed this we stopped, and while she didn't go back to how she had been there was definitely much less lying and she didn't remain good at it.
Do you think she adopted her pokerface she learned it against you or was there another reason?
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It's an essential skill in life anyway, but you also teach the usual ethics and morals and come down hard on them when you catch them in a meaningful lie.
You never got away with anything as a teenager?
I think it's also considered a developmental milestone as lying requires a pretty sophisticated theory of mind, and an understanding of the perspective of another person
I’d say bluffing in poker isn’t really lying. I mean you certainly can look at it that way, but another way to look at it is “I have good hands here more often than you do so here strategically you have to fold when I bet”
The difference between a lie and a surprise is that soon everyone will know what the surprise was. A lie has the intention of concealing the truth forever.
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Ha. I got news for you. They are going to learn that playing poker or not.
I'd be more concerned about encouraging gambling.
Bluffing and detecting bluffing is a useful skill as long as used morally. Sort of like learning martial arts - just because we teach kids karate doesn't mean we want them to go around beating people up.
Gambling however can very easily ruin lives and be very adicting.
As someone else pointed out, bluffing is not lying. Bluffing is about applying some randomness to your betting patterns to force your opponents into overbetting slightly on average.
Lying would be trying to introduce a negative correlation between hand strength and bet size; bluffing is merely removing some of the positive correlation that exists.
The world order is falling apart and being an intelligent person makes you a target of the "anti-elite". I think teaching kids strategy and deception has never been more important.
It's a common misconception that poker is about lying or that you need to lie to play poker.
You can bet with a bad hand, but you don't need to say you have a good hand, if asked you can say you either have a bad hand or a good hand, without any impact to your strategy.
Lying holds no advantage in poker, you can easily play poker without lying, no correlation is intrinsic to the game or its rules, it's just a common association people make
If we replace the word "lying" with "deception" does that change anything?
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I’m not sure what meaningful distinction you think you're making between verbally lying and implicitly lying with your bet but it's quite tedious.
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Had some family come over and play Texas Hold’em with us and their kids. It was clear they were too stupid to be intimidated so there was no possibility of bluffing, instead I just folded over and over again until I had two really good cards and then would see me no matter what I bet and ai grew my bankroll that way.
playing poker with the following truly undermines the entire experience:
people that dont understand rules 100%
wagers with no real value (time/money/snacks)
people who dont want to play outright
GTO goes out the window when a drunk guy sits down with a few friends. Either you're gonna grab the pot a few times or bust because the dude went all in with dueces against your KA. he wins a flush on the river.
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