Comment by p1necone
13 hours ago
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.
The cost/information function of moves exists in poker regardless of whether it's tied to actual money. You put your money in a hand if you believe that you have good ev, whether that ev is labeled in chips or dollars. I don't see how changing the rules of chess (therefore changing the ev - of course if you change the ev that changes players' behaviour. But that would be like changing the poker ruleset, not changing the money value of chips) makes a comparable case.
Let me give you a counter-comparison: if regardless of which chess piece was moved, after both players had made a play, they could bet on the game outcome (therefore not changing the ev of a move), I'm not sure players would want to play differently.
> 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.)
> (Same applies to playing for pennies. The amounts have to be at least somewhat meaningful.)
That's kind of an issue, though. Richer players are advantaged, as are seasoned players who are used to lose large amounts of money. That's not really related to game skills, since there is no way to ensure that players bet something equally valuable to them, which in your reasoning means that some players start with an advantage.
> 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.