Nah, teach your kids chess, so that they can exercise their deductive/calculating muscles during that golden phase of childhood in which our brains are malleable enough to easily learn new languages: realize that artificial languages (i.e. deductive systems) are all functionally equivalent, and use chess as just another avenue into building deductive fluency; use multiple such avenues (e.g. music, Euclid).
Call this educational stage "deductive naivety": the child will become good at applying logic to their experiences. They will, shockingly quickly, outgrow this phase, and realize that the world does not lend itself to deduction in all cases. Now we can introduce nuance, distinguish between deductive/inductive/abductive reasoning, and start to introduce the child to the multivariate dimensions of the world.
In this way, the child becomes a curious and rigorous thinker. If you choose poker instead, you'll just breed a gambler.
> If you choose poker instead, you'll just breed a gambler.
Huh? Chess is fun, but deals in perfect information at all times. Poker teaches a person how to make decisions with imperfect information, which is how most life decisions will be made.
It’s nowhere near perfect information because we’re limited. We have no idea what an early decision will mean later in the game. If anything it’s a game where the truth emerges slowly as options reduce to those that fit in our brain.
However, it is a closed system and all participants are visible, whereas poker has hidden surprises. It still has known rules. In real life (eg business, investing) the game rules are vague guidelines and you have power laws and pandemics that resemble chaos far more than any game.
Chess is the classic example of what perfect information means
> In game theory, a sequential game has perfect information if each player, when making any decision, is perfectly informed of all the events that have previously occurred, including the "initialization event" of the game (e.g. the starting hands of each player in a card game)
I don’t disagree with your point about our capability to use that information, but that’s what the game is about. If you have perfect information and perfect capability to predict what a move will mean in the future, what’s the point of playing at all? Anyway just wanted to point out exactly what the comment you replied to means by perfect information.
Chess deals in perfect information which you cannot fully process in time to make a move, which is not functionally different from lacking perfect information, and similar to most life decisions. What it doesn't have is asymmetric information and chance. Both chess and poker have formal rules unlike most real life situations.
I appreciate what you and the article posting are getting at, but this is competitive, would it be better to teach your kids cooperation (teamwork) strategies first and competitive ones like chess/poker next.
Not just because it's pro-social and non-rivalrous, there's arguments for this in game theory itself, in the iterated prisoner's dilemma it's often the strategies that start by cooperating and then fall back on competition that come out ahead when competiting in even good/bad actor competitions.
It's interesting that the original article even says this "Playing games and sports throughout life teach us all sorts of lessons about teamwork, strategy, pressure, practice, emotional control… I could go on."
I don't see any teamwork in chess, I guess there might be in poker (temporarily) but I assume there's only one winner at the end?
Our current culture seems to place most of the emphasis on competition, e.g. Education is all about getting better grades than everyone else and then we put people in workplaces and wonder why it ends up toxic?
Obviously you could argue that people being cooperative first would just lead to them getting exploited more but given we already have vast differentials in wealth, I'd certainly be interested in trying it out or what research on this shows?
There's the notion that "playing a beautiful game" is a better outcome than "winning". This can be part of chess too. A child can start winning pretty fast by memorizing opening traps, but that gives small satisfaction. And when playing a beautiful game, you're actually cooperating with your opponent, even while competing; these aren't mutually exclusive.
Think of race car drivers who, of course, all want to win. But winning by forcing your opponent off the track is less satisfying and less admirable than racing "cleanly" (i.e. cooperating with your opponent to prevent crashes).
Competition, within a well defined set of boundaries, is cooperative.
Edit: I'm not sure whether the competitive impulse is a general feature of humans, or just a byproduct of our age, but it nevertheless is a factor currently, so it has to be accounted for in any vision of how we get from here to a more cooperative future. I'm specifically thinking of Cory Doctorow's Walkway, in which people (implicitly, and with some measure of shame) feel a competitive drive to do more for the greater good than others.
It's an opinion, not a research paper, so just consider whether it resonates with your experience or kicks up anything that feels worth considering. It did for me.
Poker is far, far more mathematical than chess. The idea that poker pros are only going off "reads" is completely ludicrous.
They have a set game-theory-optimal style of playing, and then use an opponents flaws/"tells" to deviate from the GTO style to exploit those tells.
An example of a flaw could be if the opponent is playing shitty hole cards.
If the opponent has played in every pot over the last 30 minutes (something you'll frequently see), then he's playing way too many hands preflop.
This is exploitable.
Just a super basic example, but you'd be surprised at how profitable this is. Beginners play way too many hands. If you want to make money, just fold every hand and let the beginner collect the blinds until you get AAs, KKs, QQs, etc. and then you should bet big. The beginner won't notice and he'll pay you off anyway. You'll be massively +EV.
A more advanced player will notice what you're doing and he'll immediately fold when you bet big. Therefore, you'll have to start incorporating "bluffs" into your strategy so his tactic of folding whenever you bet big becomes unprofitable.
Poker is about figuring out all of these things and then using these tools to make the most money.
Bill Chen wrote a great book called "The Mathematics of Poker" that goes through all the math involved.
The obvious issue with teaching your kids poker is that it'll be very difficult for your kid to find anyone else to play with. He/she can't go play poker in a casino obviously
If the bot is playing a Nash equilibrium then it doesn't need to devise the opponent's strategy. It's guaranteed to tie the opponent in the worst case (the opponent is also playing Nash equilibrium) or else win.
However, if the opponent is playing sub-optimally you can win _more_ by deviating from Nash equilibrium to take advantage of their specific strategic shortcomings. The risk in doing so is if you are wrong estimating their shortcomings.. you are no longer guaranteed a tie in the worst case scenario.
You can see this play out with a small toy game and a card calculator. Suppose a two player game of Texas Holdem where each player has 8x big blinds. The first player must choose to either go all in or fold. The second player must choose to either call the all in or fold. Players must pick a range of hands to perform either action prior to looking at their cards.
Suppose a silly strategy by the second player of folding any hand except pocket aces. You'd be wise as the first player to go all in with any hand and pick up a free big blind with 99.5% certainty. However going all in with every hand is also an easy strategy to take advantage of...
(You can actually go back and forth maximally exploiting the other player's strategy and you will eventually reach Nash equilibrium)
On its face that seems impossible to be true. Given any bet you could calculate the probability that the bot would fold given an all in raise if you had perfect knowledge of the bot and abuse it
At some point I want to write a long-form post with code proving my statements above. I walked through this scenario a long time ago using https://www.flopzilla.com/holdeq.html to find the equilibrium but it'd be neat to write open source code that does the number crunching and that way others could actually audit the proof.
The short of it though is there exists a perfect range of cards the bot can play where it neither folds enough for you to bluff to gain an edge, nor does it call enough that you can wait for better cards while bleeding chips to gain an edge.
The reason I think this isn’t theoretically possible is that the bets aren’t binary. You have to specify a number. So with knowledge of the bot you could probably set up some strong priors on what they have.
I say this despite also claiming the top DL bot does this anyway and does very well.
If you're talking about Libratus (the CMU AI that beat poker pros in heads up no limit), then that's not true I believe.
During the competition, Libratus used 4 million core hours on the Bridges supercomputer for analyzing it's prior gameplay and changing strategy.
> During the tournament, Libratus was competing against the players during the days. Overnight it was perfecting its strategy on its own by analysing the prior gameplay and results of the day, particularly its losses. Therefore, it was able to continuously straighten out the imperfections that the human team had discovered in their extensive analysis, resulting in a permanent arms race between the humans and Libratus.
I believe over multiple poker hands that advantage from luck would quickly diminish and then disappear. I would be very surprised if any normal chess player, a total novice at poker, would be able to beat the best poker player in the world if they sat down to play for a couple of hours straight.
Skill would win out, but "hours" is not even the right ballpark.
For comparison, 50K hands is a standard length for heads up matches between pros, with the understanding that even then the best player is not guaranteed to win. In live play, you'd be looking at 50-100 hands per hour.
It's true that with a greater skill gap you'd need less time, but you'd still be looking at thousands of hands if you wanted something like 95% confidence that the better player was up.
I think you're overstating the variance. If you watch high level poker play you will consistently see the same players at the final table of big tournaments. Sure, a few lucky random players will go pretty deep in the tournament, but they just don't do it nearly as frequently as the top few guys.
A competent but not great player has a chance of beating a pro in one session, but it's definitely pretty slim.
When poker players measure variance, it's $$$ over time. And while some pros are indeed good are surviving the bubble in fishy tournaments, none make a perfectly consistent income. Even amongst crushers, the variance can be massive.
For every tournament you make a big score, you crash out of 5 and get min payout on a few more.
Many of the biggest names in poker have been the biggest losers in a given calendar period. For example, Gus Hansen and Daniel Negreanu are two of the biggest winners of all time yet also have some of the biggest documented losses...
It might seem to be to simple, but don’t underestimate the power of boredom and curiosity. The new player won’t know what you’ve been folding the whole time and will have had nothing else to do but call a sudden change in behavior to see what you have, or fold and keep the pattern going.
One player (beginner) wants to have fun (maybe not overtly, but this is usually the case), the other wants to make money.
Yep, boredom is why I quit playing poker in casinos. I'm usually at a casino with friends to have a good time, but winning poker requires folding the large majority of hands [1], and it's just not fun. Craps with friends on the other hand, but I digress...
Also, very different than small poker games with friends where the point is hanging out and 'gambling' a bit.
[1] Tournament style is different from an open ended game.
No, total beginners have all their mental power focused on trying to find patterns between the cards on the table and the ones they have on their hands, while trying to remember all the combinations of poker hands. They also need to pay attention on which turn is next and how much they need to pay to keep playing and figure out if it’s worth it, they also need to learn the common poker language, a lot of things going on for a beginner. Once you have all that in memory it becomes easier, your processor power is free from those memory tasks and you can start reading people’s intentions.
I’ve used the strategy in some pretty big games. People get bored, drunk, lazy, etc. It’s pretty easy to consistently make money at poker if you aren’t playing anyone who takes it seriously.
It's a bit like how the Spartans (IIRC) taught their kids to lie, cheat, and steal as long as they didn't get caught, because that's how the world works. Unfortunately, this kind of society seems doomed to collapse.
This strategy only works if most people don't expect you to lie, cheat and steal. Once the majority does it, you end up with the massive overhead of a trustless society while not gaining anything.
Its got all the reads, bluffs, random chance, meta-gaming, math and strategy, and none of the gambling.
------
Don't get me wrong. Poker is a great game. But if we're talking about "reading" the opponent, relatively simple decisions that have deep mathematical backgrounds... a large variety of "simultaneous choice" video games (Pokemon, being a turnbased game with 60% to 100% accuracy on common attacks), leads to very rich gameplay, interaction and reads.
I personally see Poker as just one game in a large family of simultaneous-choice, random-chance, incomplete-information high-skill gaming.
Magic: The Gathering is another one. The cards your opponent plays necessarily reveals information (the colors of cards reveals what kind of strategies they are going for, and your opponent chooses to reveal that information only when necessary). I've won games by "holding onto lands" (worthless cards), bluffing that I had a response against my opponent's moves. Just delaying a turn or two (keeping them cautious) bought me the time to draw the cards I really needed to turn the game around.
And I've lost games by going all in (assuming my opponent was bluffing, so I did a high-risk move), and lo-and-behold, my opponent had the "combat trick" needed to break my attack.
I grew up on Pokemon & MTG. Got competitive, made the Tour, etc. I am not sure I want to repeat this with my son. A friend is going through this with his child (<10); can they afford the packs? The cards? What about his son asking everyone for free cards, since they didn't want to start down that path? There's gambling in these games, and a lot of it is in how exactly you get those cards.
The upside is that a healthy exposure to "work doesn't equal outcome", risk calcs, and reading people are very helpful lessons to learn, so personally I'm a bit torn on this. I wonder if there isn't a happy middle ground these days that doesn't require a "buy packs" element.
Pokémon gameplay can be deep but it’s pretty impenetrable for a kid just playing the game on his own. Most kids will just use the biggest attack moves, and that’s absolutely fine for the difficulty of the single player story made last I checked.
I wouldn’t really want kids getting deep into an online community meta personally.
Even if the kids are just using the highest-attack moves and switching pokemon, that's still a deep game. That's the basics of "Pivoting" and "damage sponging".
Many pokemon have self-recovery moves (slack off, recover, etc. etc.). Even when I was 10, I knew that if my sponge took a hit, and recovered the damage faster than my opponent could deal damage, I'd force them to switch.
Set-up sweepers, hazards, status effects and ability combos get complicated for sure. Taunt vs Substitute, Prankster vs Dark, there's too much to memorize here. But kids don't need to reach that level to still have the importance of bluffing, reading, and predicting.
Or use proxies. Cockatrice is a good client for MTG as well, it doesn't enforce the rules but provides everything you need to play online with friends.
You choose a team of 6 Pokemon out of 898, each Pokemon chooses 4 moved out of thousands. Each Pokemon has 2 or 3 abilities to choose from depending on how you breed them.
Both players take turns simultaneously choosing attacks until they KO all opponent pokemon
Star Realms is a simple game with everything needed included and is quick to pick up.
Dominion has more depth and variety.
Epic Card Game comes close to the complexity of Magic. The issue is most people willing to learn such a game will already be playing Magic or Pokemon...
There's more popular/newer alternatives, I haven't been following the scene.
One way to do this (at least in MtG) is to play “cheap” formats: only use so-called “common” cards (examples: https://www.mtggoldfish.com/metagame/pauper#paper). Only use a certain set or a number of sets. In DnD, there’s the concept of “session 0” where the players determine how they’re going to play the game - it helps for players in card games to have a similar rules for power level and expectation.
And it’s pretty well known in the card game community that if you’re looking for cards, you should NEVER buy packs. Buy your singles, and save your money.
If you have a local scene, ive really been enjoying keyforged. Each "pack" is a unique standalone deck. I dont have that crushing need to keep buying hundred doar cards like I did when I used to play yugioh
MTG:Arena can be payed F2P and is much cheaper to buy a top tier deck due to having wildcards. I highly recommend it. (It’s a different experience to playing for fun with friends at the kitchen table, more focused on “the serious/meta game”).
Also you can do drafts really easily and cheaply, which gets you into the really layered EV/Sklansky-bucks territory.
I've recently got back into Card games after growing up on mtg, and there is a whole bunch of games where you don't buy random boosters but whole expansions. Netrunner/nisei being an example. They seem to still work with fomo, but you don't have to invest past a certain point to get actually creative/expressive play and deckbuilding.
> Its got all the reads, bluffs, random chance, meta-gaming, math and strategy, and none of the gambling.
The gambling is the most important part, it's balancing between risk and concealing the signal you're sending. Bridge would be another option with a similar problem to be solved, but I don't think pokémon has any of that.
edit: also, the last thing you want to do is get your kids addicted to a pay-to-win game. It's child exploitation.
The strategy only gets deep towards the endgame - for the first 30 hours you can literally just keep pressing A at every single encounter and win majority of the time. There's zero reason to use any status effects against AI because it's so shallow and if you never switch Pokémon you will end up massively overleveled for everything the game throws at you before the elite four.
Yes I am aware that the latest games in the franchise attempt to address this somewhat - but pick any Pokémon game from the last 20 years and it will be true 99% of the time.
Pricing risk is something I assume Pokémon doesn’t have.
But I’m not going to encourage my kids to play poker. I will teach them the game if they want. But without the risk of actual material loss, the game loses a lot. Money is highly emotional. It’s gain or loss, the emotions that triggers, manipulating those emotions in others, predicting their behaviour based on their state, and even simulating “tilt” and presenting an emotional state are all things that is the makes poker what it. Without that it’s a below average game.
And I’m not going to allow children to gamble with money.
> And I’m not going to allow children to gamble with money.
Kids are likely to gamble either way, best to teach them how to handle the loss and emotions.
When I was kid a lot of us would gamble our lunch money (75 cents) playing quarters with each other. Some days I had to skip lunch, some days I got an extra milk, and some I was caught and given detention. A lot of lessons in those outcomes heh.
My memories of gambling as a child were cheating, sore losers, reneging, and fights.
As an adult there are people who I just won't gamble with because of the above reasons, but they are in the minority. As a kid they seemed to be in the majority.
I've never played MTG, but do people "net deck" in that community? I've played other card games and I usually know their deck after seeing the first couple cards. Sure, maybe they added some special flare, but most people cut-n-paste from the Internet. (And those decks crush people that don't, unfortunately.)
Yes. Yes, it's frustrating some times, but the cool thing is that if you play against an experienced played that deck is only gonna get you so far.
Also, there are many archetypes and to get a deck that can be competitive against all is pretty hard.
+ I also enjoy events where you build your deck on the fly from boosters. Those are definitely a lot of fun.
I played in a MtG draft tournament once, and it was great. It gives everyone a level playing field (barring chance) and adds another whole level to the game. I got my butt handed to me in the "real" tournament. I've since run little draft tournaments with friends on occasion, and it's been a lot of fun -- nobody has to invest any more money than the packs they buy for that day; and nobody has to invest time play-testing decks to have a decent shot.
I tend to spend my time on other things these days, but if I wanted to get back into it, going for draft tournaments would be the way to go.
The playing field is level only theoretically. Experience drafting and knowing really well the set you're drafting from are needed for anything more than just a friendly game.
I guess I meant, level the same way that chess is level, or Starcraft 2 is level: it depends only on individual skill, not on how much money you've spent on your deck. The fact that drafting is itself a skill that can be acquired is part of the attraction to me -- that's why I didn't mind having my butt kicked in the "real" tournament, because I knew it was a result of my inexperience, rather than my lack of monetary investment.
You can't cut and paste in Draft or Sealed, which were my games of choice.
I found constructed to be far more pay to win and copy-based for my tastes. But draft forces you to make due with the cards you get at random.
------
Cards are uniformly random according to rarity, but picks are not. If you get passed a rare and 3x uncommons in the draft, you know the left-hand player picked a common card. After 8 passes, your original stack comes back and you can get a feel for everyone else's deck. When pack2 opens up, you start working towards the 'underrated' colors at the table and going for the meta strategy no one has picked yet.
any card game that is competitive and popular is going to have net decking in their constructed formats. this doesn't just apply to card games though... non-card games have this as well. world of warcraft has a metagame of arena compositions, league of legends has compositions of teams and roles. in a game that allows you to explicitly construct the composition of your deck or team before each match there is no other way for it to play out.
there are game modes such as drafting that introduce randomness and dynamism to deck construction that avoid this and most card games have this type of game mode.
Those who enjoy the deck design challenge tend to play draft games (construct a deck by drafting one card at a time from three packs of 15,
and then play a tournament with it) rather than open “bring a deck” games.
Question: Is Pokemon like MTG? From 10000 feet away only by looking at a few cards and maybe hearing people chat about it, sounds like games are similar. Are they?
I’m a noob when it comes to Pokémon, I only learned to play with my kids. Seems like Pokémon alway devolves to who has the strongest (most hp, best attacks) characters. Sure there are all the special attacks, deck manipulation that can be done but it seems very shallow to me. What am I missing?
Just like in real life sports - high school basketball often devolves into who is tallest. That's a little different than professional basketball, where being tall is necessary, but not sufficient to compete.
There's lot available on the internet to learn about competitive pokemon. Something like this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBw6UXAiq0A) is a good entrypoint. But even better - go to a competition with your kids! If they're interested, of course.
A very weak Pokemon, but had the right moves and right team support.
The video game is far more about teamwork and team composition than just throwing the highest stat Pokemon at each other.
-----
Stats matter for your sweeper (attack and speed), pivot (attack and defense) and sponge (hp and defense).
But there are a whole slew of 'trickster' Pokemon, like Pachirisu, Ninjask, klefki, whimsicott and others who have rare moves and/or abilities that can beat raw stats in the right situation.
Some lower stat Pokemon, like Clefable, are used despite better stat Pokemon (ex Blissy for sponge purposes) because of teamwork, movesets, typing, or abilities.
Competitive is different. You can play an attrition team, where every opponent switch hurt him, or a clone+relay team (my favorite) where you stack attack buffs then use relay to transfer them to your hard hitter. You can play a mix of those, or just good pokemons with tight strategy (the equivalent of Jund zoo basically if you're a MTG player)
Unless you talk about pokemon TCG, and in this case, 8 don't know.
How about when we make statements like "poker, not chess", we stick to well known games that go back centuries?
Stating "There are other games that are even MORE complicated with even LESS information! That's the game we should be talking about!" adds nothing to the original point the author is making.
When you heard the original saying "we're playing chess, not checkers", are you the type of person to say: "ACTUALLY, Go is far more complicated than chess. The saying should reference Go, not chess!"
Poker may have good life lessons, but I would hesitate to wholeheartedly recommend poker to children because the worst-case scenario for the player is much worse than for a player of chess. From a research review paper [0]: "In the majority of situations, gambling in adolescence does not appear to have obvious serious negative consequences; however, in a number of cases it does. There are several risk factors for adolescent problem gambling, including parents with gambling problems, an earlier age of first gambling activity, and greater impulsivity. Children of problem gamblers tend to gamble earlier than their peers."
A worst-case scenario for a player can arise due to "tilt" in poker, aka a losing streak magnified by negative emotions. From another review paper [1]: "Tilting is defined as “a strong negative emotional state elicited by elements of the poker game (e.g., “bad beats” or a prolonged “losing streak”) that is characterised by losing control, and due to which the quality of decision-making in poker has decreased” [...] After a significant loss, tilt occurs in three phases: (1) a dissociative phase (disbelief, “unreality,” unwillingness to “accept” the events), (2) a phase of indignation and negative emotions (feelings of injustice and unfairness), (3) and the chasing phase."
Since real money can be at stake, especially if a young person starts to play poker online, the consequences can be far worse than for a person who develops an unhealthy relationship with chess. Though a research review paper suggests that these worst-case scenarios do not happen to the majority of young poker players, it can still happen to a significant number of them.
A very large part of being a good poker player means that you can control your emotions and look at things objectively in:
- tricky situations
- long losing streaks when the expected value (EV) of your actions is positive in the long run, but the short term outcome is negative.
Sounds like a skill that could be useful in other areas too.
Controlling tilt is such a big part of the game that there are books written on the subject and it is one of the factors that decides whether you can be a profitable player in the long run.
Saying that poker should be avoided because tilt is bad means that trading also should be avoided because tilt is bad and it can lose you a lot of money.
Yes, if you go into poker to gamble, you will lose money fast. Yes, people who don't know anything about the dynamics of the game will lose to better opponents in the long run. The same applies to chess and trading. Play against better opponents and you will lose, in any game.
Yes, people with addictive personalities or gambling inclinations should most probably avoid poker. But does Billy have gambling problems right now because he played poker with fake chips with his grandma for fun when he was 6? Or are there other bigger factors happening in the background? Is this a confusion between treating the symptoms instead of the disease?
> But does Billy have gambling problems right now because he played poker with fake chips with his grandma for fun when he was 6?
Teaching a kids a gambling game in depth seems like it would increase their chance of getting interested in gambling unless you do this in an abusive way to gave them hate card games.
Just teaching the rules of poker doesn't teach them any of the lessons from the article.
Keep in mind that poker is not generally considered gambling and is instead a game of skill. Top players over time have a +EV over less skilled players.
Another part of poker that people tend to gloss over is bankroll management - another critical life skill. A larger bankroll lets someone take a few more asymmetric bets, but first they have to build that bankroll. Sounds more and more like life...
For example, a kid deciding to go to college or not for CS is making the same calculations as they would in a poker game. They have imperfect information, there's a monetary component and an EV component.
The article says that the argument for teaching poker is not because of memorising the rules, but understanding the concept of risk and making decisions on incomplete information. There's a lot more to chess than the rules also.
Intentions in this situation matter. If you (the parent) want to teach someone to play a game (your children), then why exactly would your intention be to sabotage them to win some fake chips?
I do understand the concern that exposing gambling to kids does not sound like one of the best ideas out there. And i don't think that variance is a topic that will be easily understood by six year olds. But poker is in the gray zone between gambling / not gambling. Meaning that 95% of people who play will lose money. The same percentages can be seen in stock trading. So the question remains, why can some people win in the long, while most lose? (95% is a guesstimate, might be higher)
> Teaching a kids a gambling game in depth seems like it would increase their chance of getting interested in gambling
I'm assuming the same percentage of people with deeper interest in how things work will say the same thing about chess. Or any other game.
Intentions do matter. Explain the problems of gambling in terms of expected value to your kids, and you will increase the chance that they will understand why the vast majority of gambling is not good.
Teach your kids things you enjoy teaching them and they enjoy doing with you. Raising kids is not an optimisation problem.
At a kid level, both chess and poker will basically be the same anyway. It’s about fighting frustration and taking the time to think about what you are doing and a lot of memorisation. It’s going to be probability tables for poker and a tone of tactic puzzles for chess.
At this point and to play the optimisation game too, if you want to give your kids a way to work on their memorisation and dedication, you would probably be better served by having them learn to play an instrument. It’s also a creative outlet and is socially useful.
This comment is exceptional. Well put. I'm baffled by the lack of replies. It's probably because you made such a good case, that there's nothing to add.
I've played poker and Roulette and Monopoly a lot when I was a kid. Didn't learn that much because no one really knew how to play. Getting piano lessons has been life-changing and I still play to this day.
Let's see, how do we attract some comments here...
People who think that teaching kids serious poker are parents who don't understand the needs of their children, are not in touch with the reality in which their kids live and are more concerned about being great parents than nurturing a young life.
Bold statements? I sure hope so. If the above comment left you unfazed, then read this again: "Raising kids is not an optimisation problem." There's a lot more to life as a young/early parent. Stop obsessing over these silly things and go and spend an hour with your kids, ask them what do to and do it with them in a childish way. They know what they want much better than you do.
My problem with this article: I did not see a concrete suggestion for where children should play poker.
Clearly, they cannot play at casinos or for real money online. I suppose they could play for fake money online, but there the dynamics are much different. (Why not go all-in and risk it all if you can just create a fresh account if you lose?) Fake money tournaments, where the goal is to come out on top instead of maximize profit, are probably the best option. But the word "tournament" doesn't appear in the article (and even then, is it really good for kids to be hanging around with the people on online poker sites)?
I suppose implicitly the author is talking about playing heads-up against a parent at the dinner table, or with close family members, with fake money. But people who don't know anything about poker are going to play essentially randomly, and the game won't last long enough/will be too variable for the kid to see any reward from playing "correctly," so I'm not sure there's a point.
Also, the first thing to teach the kid is to fold most of their hands. But sitting out of hands is boring and the kid is going to get bored. It's called "grinding" for a reason...
Something like MTG that isn't pay-to-win would be a better choice.
This article seems to be more about what you can learn from playing poker rather than actually suggesting that you should teach it to kids or learn poker rather than chess. The kids and chess parts seem to be a theme meant to draw people into the article.
There are so many other games that (in my opinion) better embody the sorts of lessons TFA describes. I feel something less commonly associated with gambling would be even better than poker. I remember as a kid I went to a summer camp and brought a set of poker chips and some cards in my bag to play purely for fun with people during some free time. My parents asked me to not do that and later let me know that some other kids' parents had taken issue with their kids "gambling".
They could play online with micro stakes. The smallest I know is 1p/2p game. Has a lot of players, people take it pretty seriously as these are the stages you play when learning. And you need about 50 buy ins (100$ total budget) to have enough to learn. This is not super cheap but can easily last for a year or more assuming the person is actually learning to play rather than doing mad gambling.
50 buyins is pretty reasonable for an average (which means losing because of the rake) player for a year. You can plug in the numbers into one of the poker variance calculators. At 1 hour per day (60 hands), 10 BB/100 rake, NLHE 6-max cash games only, you get the 95% confidence interval of -5150 BB to 770 BB after 1 year.
Was talking to a young guy the other day about learning poker, he said, oh I'll just play in red dead redemption, apparently you can play poker in it :-)
> Trying to optimize your child is so backwards to me.
I agree. My daughter loves Catan: we'll play on sunday even though she's a bit young for Catan.
Recently she discovered hexagonal grids in which you have to find words placed randomly... She loved it. So I quickly wrote a little program generating hexagonal grids and placing words randomly (and then filling the remaining empty hexagons with random letters). Now she gets to pick the words (the name of the cat, the names of her plushies, etc.) and I generate a random grid and print it. She loves it even more because now the game is tailor made!
As a bonus I got to introduce her to some programming concepts: showing her first how the program can generate a little grid of only 2x2 hexagons, then 3x3, then a bigger but still empty grid. How I can then have the computer put a word randomly on the grid. Then another word. Then fill the remaining empty hexagons with random letters. She was sitting on my lap looking very interested... Then I told her she could now choose which word she wanted and from there she was totally hooked.
It made for a happy mom too: it's the first time I coded something for my daughter and it felt good!
This. Also, if I recall correctly, teaching kids games expecting that the skills will transfer to other areas is a futile exercise. Let kids tell you what they want to learn.
I believe it's Theory Of Poker by David Sklansky that has a great section in the beginning comparing poker to other games, and specifically to tennis, which I've never forgotten.
I read this like 15+ years ago, so I'm paraphrasing, but it explains the core of why poker and other games mixing skill with chance are so counter-intuitive to humans and difficult to learn compared to games that are primarily skill-based like tennis (or chess, I suppose).
So, in summary: in a skill-based game like tennis, the quality of your results will almost always correspond exactly to the quality of your technique. If you have perfect technique, you'll hit a perfect serve. If you hit the ball into the net, you know you did something wrong. This is what humans are used to and it's the way we evolved to learn. Try > observe results > adjust strategy/technique > try again.
Poker short circuits this system because the results of a single hand don't tell you anything. You can play a hand perfectly and lose your whole stack. Or you can play terribly and win a massive pot. Hell, you can play terribly for an entire tournament and still win a WSOP bracelet if you're lucky in all the right moments.
This means you can't learn poker just by playing a lot, because you aren't getting reliable feedback. Instead, you need to learn the underlying theory, and then how to apply it in the heat of the moment.
In my experience, it's extremely hard for people to really internalize this. They'll say they understand, but then when you ask them about their poker session, they spend all their time talking about the results. People who really get it don't do that: they instead tell you about tricky situations they ended up in and how they decided what to do. There's nothing less interesting to a seasoned poker player than the results of a specific hand... or session... or week's worth of sessions.
Mainly I agree, but after millions of hands, I can still be interested in how my sessions go. It's actually something I consider a leak of mine, I'm overly concerned with having profitable sessions. I do accomplish that, but I think at the cost of a lower hourly.
I never did read Sklansky, even though I read nearly every other author on the topic. I recently started collecting gambling books. I prefer "stories" books, but I like poker strat books, too. Some of them from the early 2000s are hilariously bad nowadays.
I think it is perceived to people differently by the stance they chose to take (voluntarily or involuntarily) about life. There are a set of people who see life as maximizing risk to stand our from the herd. It is mostly people who learned the world not by books, but by experience: Musicians, artists, entrepreneur, etc. The other set of people try minimizing the risk to make life predictable: engineers, lawyers, doctors are likely to fall in to this category. I don't think one is superior to the other. It is just matter of your innate genes, early life experience, or from your parents whether you are risk seeking or risk avoiding.
And in poker you can take two strategies, play tight win small many times, or play loose win few big ones. Poker teaches you which strategy fits to your emotion/personality, and where you feel the most happiness. What I learned in poker is that I am much more of a loose player even if I bet real money. I was once a full time employee of a big tech firm, and playing poker just revealed what has been missing in my life: risk and thrill. So I decided to start by own business to maximize thrill and risk which has been much more 'emotionally' rewarding so far.
I am also a decent chess player (lichess.org elo 1800), but I find poker much more challenging and resembles many aspects of life. The frustration of being rejected by girl is strikingly similar to losing 3-betted pot in poker. The agony of seeing your stock price fall feels the same as your opponent folding his hand while you have a nut. Going through these up and downs teaches you a profound wisdom, as also mentioned in the article, that you shouldn't be taking too much feedback from success and fail but you should optimize the the rate of success of your strategy.
Of course, life is short and we only have few hands. Even if we count a day as a hand, we only have 365 * 40 = 14600 hands. So I don't think either strategy is superior to the other. It is more about what strategy feels right to you. Poker teaches exactly that. You get to know more about yourself
Author here. I like your poetic take. I do think both games offer tremendous value. And I do think certain personality types may be attracted to one or the other, although there is a surprisingly big overlap (many people that play poker at a high level also play chess, and vice versa).
Personally, my favorite card game is contract bridge.
Imperfect information, randomness with room for skill, strongly asymmetric play and scoring, etc., but it also requires cooperation via rather narrow communication channels that your opponents get to observe.
(For those not familiar, four play at a time and you are partners with the person across the table from you. After dealing, there's an auction phase and your bids are the only form of communication you are allowed to use to signal to your partner. The bids are known to everyone, and if your opponents ask you must tell them the bidding convention that you are using. After the auction, the winner of the auction plays for both themselves and their partner -- whose cards are put face up after the opening -- against the other two. Hence the asymmetric play, and the scoring also works differently for the two pairs.)
I have long wanted to learn contract bridge, but there are two obstacles:
1. I don't have anyone to play with -- much less three people -- and I don't have much time to play myself either, with two very small children and work taking up most of my time.
2. As a consequence of the above, I don't even know how to start learning to play. I'm a person who learns by doing, but I can't take the time to find and meet up with other interested people.
If only I understood the game, I'm sure I could teach the in-laws and they might humour me and play with me every now and then, but that takes me understanding the game first...
I would suggest contract bridge or whist/preferans too. In my school years we played preferans a lot and bridge was the favorite game of our math teacher, so we could solve one or two bridge problems as a warming up on our math lessons.
It loses a lot of strategy without the gambling. The way to fix it isn't to nerf it, but just to give everyone the same amount of "funny money" to start. Raid that old copy of Monopoly.
> It's one of my favorite games to play with friends and money is never, ever involved.
I personally hate playing poker without real money. I feel like taking out money gets rid of one of the most interesting thing about poker.
I don’t really like fake money either as many people don’t play as seriously as when there is real money involved. I noticed that even when the amount is very small (so it might as well be fake money), people just play different when real money is involved.
Playing with money affects your strategy, because once you are out of money you are out of the game. Even if you play for pennies, you still need to think about how much can you put at stake in every single game in order to maximize profits. If you have 20c and your opponent has 70c then it will take you at least few games to come up ahead. Just counting number of times you won a hand removes a lot of complexity.
> I don’t really like fake money either as many people don’t play as seriously as when there is real money involved.
I've noticed this with some people too and it's really baffling to me. Do you not play any other games seriously? When you're playing a video game or a board game do you also just not bother trying to win because there's no money involved?
Why do people take exception to this for poker but not for any other games?
> Do you not play any other games seriously? When you're playing a video game or a board game do you also just not bother trying to win because there's no money involved?
I am competitive and will try to play seriously without money. I don’t know but the quality of game seems to be significantly higher (eg people play more seriously) when real money is involved online or offline. So I just don’t play poker without real money. I acknowledge that this can be a false heuristic.
> Why do people take exception to this for poker but not for any other games?
Maybe because risk management is such a core part of the game and having real money involved makes the risks seem more “real”.
It's not unnecessary; poker is inextricably linked with gambling. You can't play poker if you aren't gambling, not truly. You can only play a shell of the game.
Teach your kids the basic social skills that society mistakenly believes other children will teach them, instead of teaching them the only competitive game so universally boring that people can only play it with money on the line.
If Poker was a good competitive game, there would be an ELO system and people would play because they care about their skill ranking more than they care about gambling. There's a reason you aren't required to wager real money for every League of Legends or Valorant match you play.
Poker is an economic scheme where the House and the Sharks work together to lure people with real jobs into unfair competition / gambling with bad odds.
> If Poker was a good competitive game, there would be an ELO system and people would play because they care about their skill ranking more than they care about gambling.
There is an ELO system of sorts, it’s the size of your bankroll. If you are a skilled poker player, you should win more than you lose.
Tournament poker is different than cash games, there’s a limited pool of chips and the goal is to win them all.
> Poker is an economic scheme where the House and the Sharks work together to lure people with real jobs into unfair competition / gambling with bad odds.
Agreed, it’s Wall Street in the form of a table game.
Any game could incorporate wagers into its rounds. You could bet on plays in a football game. You could bet on matches in Chess. However, the competitive foundation isn't predicated on these wagers. This allows for more dimensions of skill variation because game participants can take risks that won't kill them.
In Poker, especially in tournaments but over time in cash games as well, there will necessarily be more losers than winners. That's a fine outcome for a competitive environment, and a terrible outcome for an economic one. And because placement is based on willingness to play at certain stakes instead of skill rating, the entire system is designed to mismatch the skill of the participants over the long term.
Betting on probabilities is an entertaining way to adjust levels of confidence to reality. I just don't really like the idea of promoting gambling to children.
Betting on matches of chess is much different. In poker you have a betting round after every move, the betting size matters and the betting is one of the main sources of information you get. In chess even if you bet after every move the amount wouldn't matter and you get little to no extra information from the bet.
Take all the pieces off the board and now the bets align with the information asymmetry. The only thing exclusive to poker is the hierarchy of the combinations of cards.
I'd go for teaching them chess. Much more thing you can learn. The most obvious
- The reward is not always immediate, patience can help you to succeed
- Don't look only on your plans, check your opponents opportunities and threads as well
- When you are behind, there a quite often chances to turn a game around - don't give up
- When you lose, or make a mistake, you can't blame it to bad luck or anyone else
- Analyse your games afterwards - learn from your mistakes
Even for adults the is a awful lot you can learn in chess. Most basic thing, when you took a look on a game in middle play, amateurs mostly look for a small gain from an exchange. More skilled players look at the board and first look at the asymetries of the position and analyse how the can use them in their favor.
Magnus Carlsen really took the game to another level. You see games which look totally even, and 5 turns later where Magnus just reordered two or three pieces to slightly different positions and he manage to get into a winning position - without even exchange a single piece. That's another thing what you can learn from chess: Improve your position by changing small thnings.
Wouldn't Bridge be a better option than poker? It has many of the same elements, except for the gambling aspect, but adds cooperation, communicating with your partner through a bidding system where you're trying to figure out if you have a fit and can play.
The main downside is of course that the bidding system can be quite complex. We were constantly asking my dad what a certain bid meant and what to bid in certain situations. We never really managed to get out of that phase before we switched to simpler card games. I still don't know how to bid properly.
In addition to what has already been highlighted, end-to-end planning, identification of best and worst cases, rudimentary probabilistic calculations, assessment of options and the associated risks, and the pursuit of the combination which provides the best chance of success while minimising the risk of failure. In fact a lot similar to investment and personal financial planning.
I played a lot of chess and a bit of poker as a kid and got a lot more out of the chess. Maybe I just didn't put enough into the poker but I think I sort of never really got what was going on with ranges and frequencies and sort of just 'played my hand'. Chess really stretched and "if this than that" muscle very deeply in a way I think actually benefited me. I dont think any amount of playing poker without a coach would have led me to any important understanding. Games of randomness are deeper than deterministic games, but I think it's also easy to play them for a long time without even noticing how you could improve.
Military-themed games helped him combine tactics into a strategic plan, while role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons and Runequest taught him problem solving. Playing against real people and not computers helped him keep his competitors’ motives in mind.
“A real strategy is based off of: what are your competitors doing? What is their mindset? What are their assets? What’s the way you can make that work?”
Chess is one of the few competitive games that hasn't been overtaken by an obsession with money. Sure, chess competitions have prizes, but the focus is on the skill of the player, not the prize amount. Chess also has an illustrious history going back thousands of years, which to me is almost more interesting than the game itself.
IMO chess is better for kids. And I say this as someone who played competitively as a kid, later who made a living playing poker for a year or so (then decided the lifestyle and stress wasn't for me).
Poker is 100% connected to the money part. It also punishes good play and rewards bad play way too often. A kid who grows up playing poker will just grow up cynical and probably become a gambler. There's other games with imperfect information and random elements that are more fun and less gamble-y.
And chess is great because it's a game of perfect information that rewards good play but has enough combinations to still be interesting, at least until you get to a level where everyone is simply drilling opening combinations and training with AI assistance...
Also, we're in an age where video games are mainstream: tons of them are in the educational but fun category and can teach kids stuff...
Sorry it's been a few days. But most turn based strategy games fall into this category. The whole Civ series for example. Card games like Pokemon or Hearthstone. RPG games, while slightly less 'strategic' still offer decision-making, imperfect information and random elements. Squad based shooters (the randomness being provided by the players themselves). MOBAs And so on. Games are games and you can find enlightening elements in most.
The element in poker that tends to be missing in chess is the side bet on the outcome of a game and the various ways the probabilities of winning/losing are calculated (with respect to winning the bet, not game outcome itself).
Ideally, if chess was 'solved' like checkers reportedly has been, then the superior chess engine would win the match and betting on the outcome would be a meaningless activity.
Poker remains interesting because the ability to guess the opponent's position hasn't been 'solved' by AI algorithms. If a poker player's position could be read by AI interpretation of facial expressions, body language, etc. I imagine casinos would be all over this.
The real Turing Test question is, can AI simulate players in D&D games well enough to fool human participants?
I have two kids and actually do what the article concludes with: teach them both types of games (in my case, replacing Poker with Hearthstone and the card game Coup). I’d also recommend Lichess as it is always easy for the kids to find a game and there are some variations to keep them interested in continued play.
Games are really fascinating. I see two elements: 1) making something easy into something hard (by limiting a person’s options), and 2) making something hard into something easy (by proportionally increasing difficulty to the near-max of a player’s current ability).
Example:
1) try to put a ball in a net, but you can only use your feet.
2) split into teams and compete against similar skill level
A good game narrows the scope of your options while having a built-in leveling-up system (self or other play is a great way to do that).
When I was a kid in the 90s my best friends dad was like this crazy asian gangster who let us shoot off his AK-47, drank blue powerade exclusively until he fucking died from diabetes, bought us piles of pirated playstation games and linked us with modchips... He also taught us how to play poker so when they banned pokémon cards at our school we just started CLEANING all the kids out playing poker instead.
Flash forward to this day and I can't even legally explain how much insane shit that trajectory in life has sent me. I have a photo on my phone of a narco boss's toilet that is an actual medieval style throne basically.
Teach them both. My son learned chess when he was around five, and we play every now an then, and he plays online as well with his mates.
Since he turned fourteen he's been invited to our poker games with friends as well. To be fair, he never gambles with his own money, as I provide his buy in, and he just keeps what he makes or loses it all.
There's more to casual games of poker than just gambling, strategy and luck though. There's chat, shit talking, socialising and bonding. I figure I'm just teaching him how to adult.
Man, just teach your kid everything. Chess, poker, bridge, driving, swiming, making fire, cooking, carpentery, whatever you can. Take care about them. Go ice creams often.
Agree or disagree? The author has pointed out that Chess is deterministic, so there is an optimal, solved move to win every time. It feels more a game of memory, rather than strategy. Stochastic games help to overcome this. But many games of chance are troubled with too much randomness defeating good strategy play intrinsic to the game or very narrow skill pigeon-holed to pick a particular strategy built into the game.
Agreed that Chess is mostly about memorization, even at a high level - opening theory has only gotten deeper with the invention of computer analysis. If you're looking for a game that fits that criteria (deterministic but strategic), Go is probably the answer. The possibility space expands so rapidly due to the size of the board that you just can't have deep memorization beyond a few moves.
I'm pretty ignorant about poker so maybe someone can put me right. It doesn't really seem like an appealing game: you can either analyze the cards you can see, but that doesn't tell you much, or you can analyze your memory of what has gone before, but that sounds really hard - i don't think i'm good at remembering things nor does it sound fun. Plus analyze the psychology of other players of course.
Yes, having played a bunch of both, chess is cool but poker is a better and funner bet. Only turn based game where you can make proper money if you are good enough (not to mention you can make solid and reliable money as a private game dealer). And the player pool is a much more diverse and amusing bunch of degens
Would also be happy to see my kid get into fighting games, CCGs, MOBAs, FPS games....they're all cool and fun and deep as hell
There is an element of chance in chess. Whether an opponent plays an opening you have recently studied and how many mistakes your opponent makes is out of your control. The author says poker teaches you to focus on the process rather than the outcome. A chess player who wants to improve will not assume that winning a game means he played well -- he will analyze the game later, perhaps with a chess engine.
My experience is that it doesn’t even mean you played better than your opponent overall, just that you “made the second to last mistake”.
I also think there’s a larger element to reading your opponent in chess than many people give it credit for — what are they planning? …can you “tilt” them to make them play worse? Etc.
It’s only at the very highest level you should expect people to play nearly perfect games… and even those players discuss the psychology (eg, Hikaru Nakamura is top 50ish and discusses the role of psychology in high level chess).
That's certainly a thought from a brain. I'll hazard that parent's chess knowledge extends to "how the pieces move", possibly Scholar's Mate and its basic refutation (kidding, parent just read about Scholar's Mate on Wikipedia).
I think this actually hits the nail on the head. Chess is very much a game of chance.
People have been saying "the players are nondeterministic not the game," but epistemically what is a game with no players?
I play chess seriously in a tournament setting. While it is true the board is revealed, the board is not the game. The board is the operating theater of a game which is entirely within both players minds. People have become overly dismissive with the idea that the game is deterministic because chess engines exist. But chess engines are not even necessarily deterministic because the result of the alpha beta search still vary based on depth and the evaluation heuristic.
Without an evaluation function you cannot even interpret a board position at all. This function is simply not deterministic (unless formalized and then it will be imperfect to situation), and any GM will tell you that some positions are impossible to evaluate.
Additionally there are many times where engines produce suboptimal results until the search space is collapsed by a player like Hikaru. It's not frequent but it definitely happens.
Chess is a game between two Turing machines sharing a tape. Sharing a tape does not allow you to see the state of the machine in each players head. And if you have no players you have no game. This makes chess highly probabilistic in so many senses that using the game theoretic construct of "prefect information game" causes game theorists to seemingly literally not understand it.
Chess is a deeply human game subject to human variance. This is nondeterministic. Poker is also human, in other ways. Anyone who sees chess as deterministic is probably a weak player (less than 2000 fide) and doesn't understand this fundamental aspect of the game. At the higher levels there is even forms of bluffing and swindling, which is fantastic simply because you CAN see the same board and you were still able to manipulate the other player with their own prejudices.
> A chess player who wants to improve will not assume that winning a game means he played well -- he will analyze the game later, perhaps with a chess engine.
You could say the same about poker. A player looking to improve their game will review their hand histories, and plug hands into PIO or HRC.
>There is an element of chance in chess. Whether an opponent plays an opening you have recently studied and how many mistakes your opponent makes is out of your control.
That's really not what's meant by chance. Chess is no more a game of chance than tennis or golf.
In poker, there's an element of randomness that's an explicit core part of the game (the deck).
Tennis (and other interactive sports, like boxing) have a form of built-in randomness similar to rock paper scissors. Obviously not to the same level of randomness, but you both execute an action at the same time not knowing what the other person is going to do (although if your reflexes and awareness are higher, you're playing that RPS game faster than the other player).
An example that makes this element really obvious is turn-based fighting video game Toribash.
On the contrary, with surveillance these days, games of poker are turning into games of chess. There is no private information these days. Every character I type can be seen as I type this, with "flight time" meaning time between keypresses, and press time I forget the term for that, there's a term.
The only thing surveillance can't do, is see what I'll think in the following time period. A second in the future. Can't predict that, no amount of cams and AI models can see into the future that far. Actually can't, meaning that they cannot, predict the future. Can't do it. Apart from that, buy this data point for 6¢, sell this data point for 3¢, nag the user over every channel for a conversion.
But it's the only form of arbitrage left. The only barrier that is still a real barrier between anything. All the other barriers, geographic or legal, have collapsed. You just have time. That's it.
Can you see the future? You get a quadrillion dollars! No joke. Quadrillion dollar problem, like a billion Millennium Prizes.
I don't get why the author felt that he needed to shit on chess to demonstrate the qualities of poker. They're incredibly different games, with entirely different goals. It's like comparing Bergman's Persona and Indiana Jones. Really, what's the point?
The analogy doesn’t work because the edges in chess are huge and the edges in poker are tiny. Many of the best situations in poker are 80-20 advantages. How good of a chess player do you have to be to have a 20% chance against Magnus?
As a parent, you are supposed to make the choices that increase the chances of better outcomes for the children, whatever the parent considers those better outcomes to be.
This kind of thing was huge in the Chinese community when I was growing up. Every child played chess, was taking violin or piano lessons, was a member of the debate club, was vying for a place on the student council, was in AP classes, was being driven to so many extracurricular activities (chosen by their parents of course), and was downright MISERABLE. One even committed suicide.
Meanwhile the rest of us would go out to wherever we wanted (by bike usually), do whatever we wanted, came home by dinner, and had a wonderful childhood.
This article underplays the psychological aspects of chess, of which there are many. When players are reasonably matched and the stakes are high, psychology plays a huge part.
MTG has elements from both chess and poker and it's surprisingly easy to learn but stupid hard to master. You also don't have to worry about sex ed :))
Poker would be nice for kids if it didn’t have an implicit link with money and gambling. Is there another imperfect information game around that is less toxic?
>However, it is important to distinguish poker from a pure game of chance, like roulette.
I feel like this is becoming an all too common trope on social media and for young people, where poker is portrayed as a risky but cool thing to do because you can convince people you’re skilled or better than others at it, and that means taking other peoples money with skill. Which is indeed something cool. Sure there’s reading people. But it’s a game of chance. Selling it as something more has literally no benefit.
That's a naive view of poker, which is absolutely a game of skill. You can't force a good hand, but you can use your understanding of probability and human behavior to estimate the value of the hand you are dealt. The bets you place can be more important than the hands themselves. In fact, the best hand can lose you a lot of money if you play it wrong.
Those two things, skill and chance, are not mutually exclusive characteristics. My point is more so that poker should not be treated as if all the skill in the world can account for all the bad luck in the world. I mean there’s a reason there’s no equivalent of the patriots in professional poker. No one is going to win every single game every single time. And I think that forgetting that in the games portrayal is moderately dangerous. Because it is a game played with money. Sure you can mitigate your risk of loss with skill, but it’s never 100% controllable, and that should be acknowledged with more weight in my opinion.
I think that is exactly the article’s point: even with perfect play, you can lose hands or even tournaments. But over time, it is a statistical inevitability that you will win on average.
That is an important life lesson! If you’re doing a startup, you might execute perfectly and just hit a run of bad luck and have to give up on that idea. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try again!
I would say there is no equivalent of the patriots as there are far fewer teams in the NFL, a more suitable comparison would be comparing the tournament-style WSOP to PGA(golf) majors, where in the past 3 years (11 majors) there have been 10 unique champions. Almost all sports games have some element of chance where the better team does not always win, the NCAA basketball tournament is another good example of this, No one is going to win every single game every single time.
> My point is more so that poker should not be treated as if all the skill in the world can account for all the bad luck in the world.
I don't think anyone is arguing that?
But regardless, in poker you can still win money even if you have bad luck and draw bad cards every single hand. Just as you can still lose money even if you have great luck and draw great cards every single hand.
I think the point is that yes, there is an element of chance, but there's an element of skill beyond just memorizing odds and probabilities. Most people probably do have a better chance of winning more money if they are lucky and end up with better cards more of the time, but that's not always a reliable predictor of success.
The reason there’s no equivalent to an NFL team in poker is that an NFL team plays 19 games a year and there are only a couple dozen competing at all.
If the world of professional poker only involved a couple dozen players and they only played 19 hands a year, you would absolutely see dynasties and near-perfect “seasons”.
I'm being flippant here for a reason. I don't care at all about football, and can't remember the last time I've even seen the Super Bowl (or even have notice who was playing). My eyes glaze over if I'm with friends and they start talking about football. But I've heard of the Patriots. Hell, I even know the name of their head coach.
I'm an on-and-off recreational home/casino poker player, but I've never heard of Daniel Negreanu. Professional poker just hasn't achieved popular culture penetration to the degree that football has.
It wouldn't take following poker much to learn who he is. Poker doesn't have regional teams or Superfans like football, but it definitely has stars. Just because you don't know who they are doesn't mean they aren't.
I couldn't name anyone on the Patriots, and I can definitely name more poker pros than I can football players. Doesn't mean anything.
Poker is nowhere near as deep as chess, but it's deeper than you're making it sound. It's not just about reading people, especially for Texas Hold'em. Knowing probabilities and how many outs for both your pocket and flop, turn and river, taking your betting order/big and small blinds/your remaining chip stack/whether someone raised for whether you should enter the hand or not, knowing when to fold, etc.
All of that can be done without reading people at all. In fact in online poker, there's not much reading of your opponent you can do usually, just judging based on their previous actions.
I wouldn’t really say that’s a fair assessment either. I don’t think it’s in any way clear that Chess is deeper than Poker, or even by what metric you would determine such a thing.
Certainly in both games there are no competitors, human or robot, that has solved the game.
I play poker and I used to play chess. Explaining the rules, tactics and strategies of poker is a lot easier than chess. It is also more exciting (subjective opinion rather than a statement of absolute truth).
The various strategies of poker (including playing ‘hail Mary’ hands, I’m sick of you bluffing hands and more) versus the play-book of chess (opening moves determine much).
A single mistake in chess can be irredeemable. In poker (unless you go all-in) a misstep can be rectified.
Chess has an elitist/bookish stigma. Poker is for beers, snacks and a game on the TV
I mean... no, it's not? Certainly there are elements of chance, but there are elements of chance in playing soccer or basketball, too, as well as Catan or Monopoly. But I wouldn't call those "games of chance".
I would define "a game of chance" as something where the outcomes solely depend on you betting on the result of a random process. Games like blackjack and craps are like that: even if you learn all the odds on everything and play "perfectly", your outcomes are still fully dependent on the randomness of the shuffle or the dice roll.
Poker is not like that at all. Yes, your outcomes are in part defined by the shuffle of the cards, but you are not playing against the deck or the dealer; you are playing against the rest of the players at the table. You can win with the worst hand if you make the other players believe your hand is better than it is. You can lose with the best hand if another player makes you believe their hand is better. That's just not possible with games like blackjack or poker. Either your cards are better than the dealer's, or vice versa; that's it. Either the dice roll matches with bets you've made, or not, or the shooter craps out. There's no ambiguity there, and you can learn the odds of winning or losing each particular bet that you can make.
(Just a note that you can also learn the odds of having the best or worst hand in poker based on your initial cards, and then update those odds as more cards appear. But in the case of poker, having the best or worst hand is not the same as winning or losing.)
This is fundamentally incorrect. Knowing when to fold is absolutely integral to being good at Poker (assuming tournament/competitive play). In some cases, you might be absolutely screwed by bad luck (like you can be in football if you tear your ACL), but Poker is not a game of luck. It's a game of probabilities and social engineering.
There's an easy way to distinguish "game of skill" from "game of chance" - just ask yourself: "Is there a World Championship for that game?"
Championships are organized only for games of skill, where you can have at least some chance of predicting the game outcome, make spectators care about this or that player. No one in their right mind would organize the championship in coin flip, or in MegaMillions lottery, because those game are pure chance, you can play them for decades and your chance of winning will be no better than that of a beginner. It would be hard to promote someone as "MegaMillions champion".
You can tell poker isn't a game of chance, because you consistently see the same handful of faces at/near the final table for the world series of poker out of a field of many thousands.
You don't see that happen on other games of chance, only games of skill. For example, there has never been a repeat winner at the Rock-Paper-Scissors world championship.
I can't help but mention that I play poker on commercial airline flights against the programmed computer opponent. I have crushed them three times in a row. I would've thought the programming would have been a wee bit tougher, but maybe they want us to feel good about ourselves and our card counting, pixel-reading acumen. It works.
Next time you're on a flight trying this out and you get an invite to join a table against a passenger in the cheap seats, that might be me. Watch your wallet.
I initially thought the author was being metaphorical. Teaching poker to a kid is a very risky proposition. If they have any propensity for addiction, the dopamine rush of gambling may take hold of their thought patterns before they have the wisdom and mental maturity to counteract such urges.
Teaching kids the probabilistic nature of life? Sure, if there is a way to teach a kid such things in a meaningful way. But I definitely veto teaching a child poker.
OTOH, chess is great. I didn't study any chess until my 20's. I've never had a problem with the sort of intelligence that is exercised in the school system, but chess exercised my brain in a novel way that might only be experienced in academia via pure math or theoretical physics. The visualization of moves, even a few moves in advance, can initially be surprisingly challenging, especially if there are many seemingly legitimate options. For those who have not seriously exercised this mental muscle before, I suspect it this kind of thinking will feel quite difficult.
After getting to the point where I could solve moderately difficult to difficult chess puzzles -- let's say approaching "master" level if you're familiar with the title hierarchy in chess -- the foresight required for programming, especially the kind that is done in most jobs nowadays, "felt" much easier. This is because getting to that level not only required the ability to visualize N steps in advance, but it also forces one to develop a very strong awareness of mental blind spots, which can be very humbling, and is an highly useful skill to have in this profession.
Not to mention that poker is a game that rewards you for not getting caught lying. Fine for a game, but a problem if you're trying to draw life lessons from it.
Call this educational stage "deductive naivety": the child will become good at applying logic to their experiences. They will, shockingly quickly, outgrow this phase, and realize that the world does not lend itself to deduction in all cases. Now we can introduce nuance, distinguish between deductive/inductive/abductive reasoning, and start to introduce the child to the multivariate dimensions of the world.
In this way, the child becomes a curious and rigorous thinker. If you choose poker instead, you'll just breed a gambler.