Comment by mna_
6 hours ago
Start your kids onto the path of gambling? No thanks. Better to teach them chess, xiangqi, shogi or go/baduk.
6 hours ago
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.
Likewise, never gambled once even when exposed to the possibility, but I love a good game of poker or blackjack, it's fun for the mind and it's sociable. Our maths teacher a few decades ago used roulette and other games to teach us about statistics, we all loved it and it engaged the entire class, a bonus for slower maths learners. Today I suppose it's not allowed in the classroom?
Gambling is a huge addiction problem. Your comment is like saying someone that occasionally smokes cocaine isn't addicted so cocaine isn't addictive.
We weren’t gambling. Nobody won or lost anything.
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I think a more apt comparison might be that it's like saying an actor who has played roles which involve them pretending to snort cocaine isn't addicted so acting in roles that involve the portrayal of drug use isn't addictive.
Are they gambling then there is no win or lose?
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.
Different in the sense that they consume more alcohol? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_c... That it is legal for children to drink under parental supervision also doesn't necessarily mean that parents will allow it, so the legal situation isn't necessarily the deciding factor.
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