Comment by TZubiri
16 hours ago
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?
Poker players very seldom outright lie, like saying out loud "hey everybody, my hand is great!", and it's usually not just simple "deception" either.
How about "behaving in a way that increases the probability of your particular adversaries making incorrect inferences about your situation"?
> How about "behaving in a way that increases the probability of your particular adversaries making incorrect inferences about your situation"?
I'd call that lying with extra steps.
(Which to be clear, im fine with in the context of a game (and in certain contexts even in real life). Plenty of sports can be traced back to ritualized ways of practising to murder people. Take all the field sports of track and field)
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So you're trying to manipulate people into believing false things about you?
Is that better or worse than calling it deception?
I wouldn’t consider the type of deception fully within the bounds of a game the type of deception I would want to avoided teaching my kids.
or "fraud" or "misrepresentation. No, these would be synonyms.
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.
You inferred it, but it's not implied.
Instead of thinking of a bet as saying "I have good cards" think of it instead as "I have an advantage in this pot", which is not a lie.
In poker advantages can come from cards, or from other objective measures such as position, stack size. And of course from subjective measures like being able to read your opponent.
If reading your opponent is a strategy that confers advantage then it stands to reason that deceiving your opponent is as well.
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But one of the most common strategies is to posture as if you have a good hand even though in reality you don't. That is deception.
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It’s not tedious at all. Many games have structural information asymmetry, and part of the fun is navigating this. To add an extra verbal lie is categorically different from playing within the bounds of the game