Comment by tetromino_
13 hours ago
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.
I think you have a middle point between no-information and full-information, and poker isn't that.
My issue with poker is the money component, especially in cash games (I don't mind it in MTT): I think it's manipulative, basically using dopamine highs to make the game seem more interesting.
It might depend a little on the poker variant. Holdem (the most popular variant) uses shared cards, which gives you a fair amount of information.
I totally agree with your first point.
Money cheapens social interactions. It reduces them to competitive advantage, exploiter or exploited. I do not want to interact with anyone that way, ever. Certainly not friends.
But I acknowledge that this is oversimplified. It is possible for mature people to find an appropriate level of heightened excitement/tension due to the elevated consequences of money. Most people have the self-control to handle/compartmentalize it, or to avoid levels where the consequences become meaningful to them (this gets harder if alcohol is involved, which it seems to always be).
This appropriate level will vary by group, but there seems to be a persistent conflict between "excitingly meaningful" and "respectfully modest" amounts of money. And of course everyone's monetary circumstances are different. And there's a social pressure to participate which may exceed your circumstances. And there's an issue where the strong (experienced) players have no choice but to prey upon the weak (new or less smart) players. These issues are the inescapable ugliness that I just can't get over.
So I will never play any game for money, and I sometimes wonder whether people who enjoy such predatory thinking patterns are deserving of a standard level of trust.
I know it's not that simple, but sometimes it is.
The other arguments, about teaching strategy vs tactics, human psychology (under stress), working with imperfect information, calculated risks, etc, are all valid and important too. And I believe that playing for money elevates these lessons. Some people (for pleasure or necessity) choose to be hard-nosed in life. My enduring privilege is that I do not need to be, and I am very grateful for that.
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?
Bit of a tortured example, but imagine if in chess every time you moved your queen you had to put $1 in escrow that you only got back if you won the game - do you think you'd still make exactly the same moves, or would you maybe play a sub optimal game to avoid moving your queen as much?
And if you saw your opponent move their queen would you be more confident that they probably saw a path to victory than you would be otherwise, and would you maybe spend more time analyzing moves that required that queen move instead of what you might have analyzed instead otherwise? (analogous to bluffing in poker).
Basically the fact that there's some external factor you can use to communicate what your move might mean to other players makes the mind games/bluffing/analysis work better than if you were just playing to win. The money isn't just linked to whether you win or lose - it's actually tied to the individual mechanics in a way that affects how each round plays out.
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> Is the game not interesting enough to play without it?
Yes. Poker ceases to be interesting when not played for something. Chess and most other games are certainly different in this aspect.
The money is a countable resource that players are motivated to win and not to lose. The game can be played with a substitute, but it doesn't pan out the same way, because the players don't have the same relationship to other kinds of token. (Same applies to playing for pennies. The amounts have to be at least somewhat meaningful.)
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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.
It's a different kind of skill that is more about predicting what your opponent will do based on the same information at which you are both looking.
Chess and go even more so are perfect information games, but there is substantial risk in strategies than can be derailed by the opponent noticing them too early or even by not noticing and ignoring bait.
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.
If you consume any chess media, you would know there's a fair amount of crossover in chess players who enjoy playing poker.
That is because although chess appears to be a game of perfect information, it is impossible to calculate anything but a small fraction of possible future game states in a limited time. So skilled chess players must make educated guesses as to which lines are worth calculating, whether their opponent has already studied the current line, and what moves to play to get them out of their memorization.
This is effectively a game of limited information where solid Bayesian reasoning wins, just like poker.
The point being made was that a chess player is not able to foresee all possible future combinations on a chess board (at least until close to the very end), so they must make "educated guesses" as to the best move to make.
The person you're replying to was reacting to your "reasonable possibilities are too many to analyze, one is forced to pretty much guess" statement. Not about perfect/imperfect knowledge.
Not quite, in poker you know all cards except for other players' hole cards. Have you ever played variations like seven card stud which used to be popular at home until Texas hold'em became cool?
There's always some missing information but it's not quite as bad as you make out. In chess you don't know what the other player is thinking.
> 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.
"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.
It's a choice to play for money and how much. When I play with friends, there's only a $20 buy-in and no rebuys. Makes for a far cheaper night than going to a pub or movie.
As a kid (~12 year old) I played for matchsticks.
> First - the fact that it's played for real money.
Don't play for real money then. I played a lot of poker with friends, but never for money - everybody gets the same amount of chips at the start and the winner is the last man standing (i.e. the winner of the random all in once most players are out, usually)
In my experience poker completely falls apart when it's not for real money. It just doesn't seem like a very good game in the sense that people don't try to win unless there's some external benefit to winning. It sucks to play with people who don't care.
I run home games with 5c/10c blinds (5$ buy in). Keeps element of real money, keeps things very casual, winning players usually leaves with ~20$. Have food etc, costs losing players less than it'd cost to go out for a sandwich
Maybe I and my friends are overly competitive at board games, but not tying to win was not a problem for us.
Though poker and similar games were only tiny part of our games.
(except some cases where player was utterly doomed and checked out)
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!
I didn't get that impression playing ai for 2 years. At first it was overwhelming like that but casual play after awhile seemed to leave plenty of room for conversation at even an accelerated pace. If it was like a super serious tournament I could see people trying to account for every visible tile and what it could mean though and not really talking so much.
> Also it seems to be complex enough there is no mental space or time left to talk about anything other than the tiles. Exhausting!
I have been lead to belive that community Mahjong is an excellent time for catching up, but then again, I've never gone and don't know how to play.
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> 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.
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.
Depends on which level of 'amateur chess', for kids there are real beginners who barely know the rules and ~1600-elo players in the same competition..
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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.
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.
It’s a card game that does not have to be played for money. It’s a game of risk using tokens. It’s pretty great considering you just need a deck of cards. How can people like yourself be so comfortable to openly judge others for a card game?
Poker is not your thing, we got it.
> 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.