I'm surprised at the general tone of response here towards the subject of poker overall (I didn't read the article yet so perhaps something more is in the context, but all the same); I understand there are many in the poker world even regarding the most successful of whom are regarded as living a degenerate lifestyle, but being that I was previously in that world myself and was not a degenerate type; I never gambled outside of "my game" that I had an edge in, I learned and implemented proper bankroll management and I studied the game on fundamental levels and on up, progressing into the meta-psyche game that is NL heads-up.
Which brings me to my point which is that while some forms of poker have proven "beatable" by ai, certain forms ie; short-handed tables of NL Holdem, increase in perpexlity to a point where, in heads-up, there are too many variables at play both "physically" (the cards and corresponding hand ranks) and metaphysically (the story being implied thru the route of actions taken at each street from preflop, flop, turn, to river) for there to exist some perfect approach against a skilled player.
NL Holdem poker is absolutely a game of skill with an element of variance aka luck/lack-there-of.
I agree with everything you've said, and I think we'd have better politics, economics, human relationships and fun, if more people got their heads out of their posteriors and actually understood poker more.
Also used to be in that world and identify similarly in terms of my lack of love for gambling.
I'd suggest that you're empirically incorrect in saying that there is no perfect approach against a skilled player (6handed games which often reduce to a single heads-up interactions by showdown):
1. we know that a Nash equilibrium exists for every two-player zero-sum game such that it’s mathematically unexploitable
2. Pluribus approximated the Nash well enough (didn’t have to search over 10^161 possibilities) to crush high stakes skilled player over a good run of hands
> NL Holdem poker is absolutely a game of skill with an element of variance aka luck/lack-there-of.
I’ve played a lot of Holdem, and I’m not sure I agree. A lot of what passes for skill is just an innate understanding of the odds.
John Scarne writes about gambling that a good bet isn’t one you are likely to win, but one where the payout is enough to be worth the risk. The best players know the odds of pulling a straight and can do math to figure out if it’s worth chasing one.
Also known as Expected Value (EV), as in, how much is in the pot right now compared to how much you’re betting/calling, usually compared to how likely you are to win a hand using the cards you’re holding.
That works well for limit games, where you can’t bet more than a set amount (in relation to the blinds or the current pot), especially when there are multiple people at the table, and you’re in an advantageous late position so others act before you do.
In high-stakes no-limit heads-up (1v1) play, the cards you’re holding matter less, especially before the flop. EV and pot odds are almost useless except for gauging when to bluff / if you’re being bluffed. Hands rarely end in a showdown as opposed to one of the players folding. The hands that do are essentially coin-flips, with both players holding what they believe are strong hands.
I think this is true and why programs like like Pluribus, Libratus and DeepStack have outperformed professionals in both heads-up and multiplayer no-limit Texas Hold'em. It's not reading social cues like traditional players, but just relying on probability. Even when giving perfect knowledge of the computer strategy to humans, they're still unable to exploit.
Humans are improving their game by using solvers and introducing randomness into their decisions. For instance, an optimal strategy given a hand might be "fold 80% of the time". One way to do that in live play is look at the second hand of a watch and fold unless it seconds (in this case) are about 48 (80% prob).
You're not wrong that knowing the odds is a component of the skill, but to suggest that skill in poker stops there is minimizing many of the advanced aspects that require playing at a higher level (information management, assessing a player's likely range, determining the equity of a player's range with cards to come, realizing when your or their range is capped, etc)
> I’ve played a lot of Holdem, and I’m not sure I agree. A lot of what passes for skill is just an innate understanding of the odds.
"The odds", however, are not simply a function of the cards in your hand and the unknown cards in the deck. There are also the cards in other people's hands, and getting a good read on what they may be based on the person's behavior is absolutely a skill.
It's always entertaining to play poker with 1 friend who is very skilled at a table full of novices. They often get frustrated and crash out due to their read on other people's behavior being miscalibrated to the situation.
> It's always entertaining to play poker with 1 friend who is very skilled at a table full of novices. They often get frustrated and crash out due to their read on other people's behavior being miscalibrated to the situation.
The most frustrating poker game I play is the monthly Saturday Night game with the bros where they're mostly drinking and watching sports, and none of them are very good or play regularly in casinos.
You can usually get a good read on people who are decent-to-good players, playing in a casino. Their bets will generally make sense and tell a believable story (whether or not they are bluffing). You can mostly tell when they are playing ABC poker vs. getting out of line or making moves. People's bet sizing, their approach to pot management, their ranges, their play style, tight vs. loose, passive vs. aggressive, tend to be identifiable. In other words, players tend to act in ways you'd expect from poker players who have played 10,000 hands.
The Saturday Night amateur gang don't play in ways that make sense or are classifiable. You can't tell what their range is, because they don't even know what a range is. Their betting lines don't make sense because they aren't poker players, and often aren't even paying attention to the current hand. You really have to play these kinds of games differently, and/or just relax and consider it a night of drinking and random bingo instead of poker.
Hey I've started playing poker occasionally again, wanna have a chat about poker? My email is in my profile.
I used to be a winning player at small stakes about 20 years ago, so nothing major but enough for me to show that it's a game of skill.
But yea, for anyone interested why poker is a game of skill, it's due to the law of large numbers. You can easily see the law kick into effect when you simulate a dice roll and you win from 1 to 4 and the other wins 5 to 6 and you both get $1 if you win. I recently had to explain this concept so I happen to have the JS still lying around in my Chrome console.
const rolls = 10_000;
let a = 0;
let b = 0;
for (let i = 0; i < rolls; i++) {
const die = Math.ceil(Math.random() * 6); // 1–6
if (die <= 4) a++;
else b++;
}
console.log(`Player A wins: $${a}`);
console.log(`Player B wins: $${b}`);
console.log(`Total paid out: $${a + b}`);
console.log(`A's edge per game: ${(a - b) / rolls}`);
console.log(`Difference: ${(a - b)}`);
Poker has much, much higher variance than dice though (or weighted coins, which is what you're actually modeling). It takes hundreds of thousands of hands to establish a statistically significant win rate.
At a common online pace of 1.5 hands per minute (live games are much slower) that's over a thousand hours of playing. I.e. even if playing for one hour every day, it takes years before a player knows whether they're profitable or not.
Seems disingenious to compare to dice when you presumably know poker belongs to that class of distributions to which the central limit theorem applies very slowly.
> I'm surprised at the general tone of response here towards the subject of poker overall [...] regarded as living a degenerate lifestyle
Maybe the people who are negative have read to the end of the article where we are let into the not-so-hidden agenda of the parent: Teach the kids to hustle their way through college so they can become a market speculator.
One of the best life lessons I learned was while perusing a poker strategy book in a bookstore as a teen. I’ve never been into poker, not even sure why I picked it up.
One thing it said was the most important thing to remember is that most of your hands will be crap. Don’t get attached to a bad hand and don’t convince yourself that an ok hand is a good hand. If you just fold the bad hands and play the good ones you’re already a better player than most.
I took that to heart and it has served me well in life.
That’s it. That’s the entire strategy. I pray that the Texas Hold ‘Em fad doesn’t come back. That was an insufferable decade of hearing how clever everyone was.
That for me was the greatest life lesson from that time.
Also how there was all these poker strategy books but I don't remember a single one trying to model the strategy of the rake and how to determine if the rake made a game unbeatable. Basically, assuming all games at all levels of rake are beatable.
Being a loose aggressive player is far more likely to lead to you losing a lot of money, than winning a lot of money.
Once you consider what the house earns, poker is a net negative for the players. In order for there to be some big winners, there have to be a lot of losers. And a shocking number of those losers will, thanks to our selective memories, consider themselves winning players.
Yes. The person you are responding to doesn't quite understand the comment they are responding to :) The rake can turn a breakeven or even winning player into a losing player. That's what we mean.
Sorry, that is fair enough, he is describing a casino. I never played in Vegas during the hold 'em boom, but went to plenty of houses where there wasn't really a rake.
I like this. Most people try to teach card games by listing every rule, but it's much easier to play a simpler version then add in new rules.
I play the Chinese card game Zhao Peng You (Finding Friends, part of the Sheng Ji family of games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheng_ji), which is a trick taking game with a trump suit that changes between games, a trump number that changes between games, and a team selection mechanic rather than fixed teams. It's insanely hard to learn everything at once, so we usually start new people with fixed teams and trumps just to get the feel of a team-based trick-taking game, before adding in the complications.
Every game is easier to learn when you start with simple rules and then add new ones as you go.
We teach people Liar's Dice. It's a very simple game, especially if you build it up like this. Everyone gets five Dice. You roll them and look at your own, and then take turns guessing how many of a given number are on the table. Guesses have to "go up" (either the number of dice stays the same and the number of pips goes up, or the number of dice goes up). Instead of guessing you can challenge the person before you. Whoever is wrong loses a die and game play repeats.
After a few rounds, dice showing a one are wild.
After a few more rounds, if anyone in a round bids 1's, then ones are not wild for that round.
After a few more rounds we start discussing the probabilities and strategies.
The challenge is not breaking the game fundamentally while you add rules.
We play Uno like this. Start with the basic (agreed upon house rules), then every time someone wins a hand they get to add or remove any rule they want, as long as it doesn't outright break the gameplay.
Blind Man's Bluff is a great variant: Give everyone a card face-down, they put it on their forehead without looking at it. Bet based on whether or not you think the card on your forehead is higher than other people's. More fun in my opinion.
Article footnote mentions this with the caveat that it requires some dexterity that young children may find challenging. That aside, I think the two games make a great complementary pair and switching between provides a nice contrast for kids.
You play normal one card poker until the kids realize the benefit of seeing other player’s cards - then you play blind man’s and learn that incomplete information can go the other way.
I’ve taught all five of my kids how to play poker, and if they ever sit down at a cash game consider their stack gone and play the cards (remove the dopamine chaos). Learn the math, betting strategies, and look for villain patterns.
These all directly relate to real life.
I believe in it so much that I have a tournament training app startup: https://mach9poker.com/.
There’s a company in Chicago that teaches women poker in relation to business: https://pokerpower.com/.
Bankroll management is a critical skill regardless of the use case.
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?
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.
The chips were to determine the winner of the game. Then when the game was over we put all the chips back. The winner walked away with nothing more than what they arrived with. The losers walked away with exactly what they arrived with.
If you think getting to say “I won” is gambling, then we have nothing to discuss.
Once kids get familiarity with odds and probability they will soon realise that casino games they have no edge and the house always wins. Also you cannot bluff a casino dealer which is half the fun
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.
For what it's worth, in both Denmark and the UK, my experience has been that children are indeed allowed it on occasion, often celebrations like Christmas where they will have something like bucks fizz or a little cider or something alongside the adults.
Huh this actually makes sense, it strikes directly at the reasons I’ve never wanted to try playing poker. I’m in my fifties and I have a vague idea that there is a hierarchy of hands and that something called a “flush” is probably the winning hand (which is pretty absurd given that the main way I use “flush” is as a verb for disposing of my body’s waste products via the city’s sewage system) but I have absolutely zero grasp of the mechanics of going from “people are dealt hands” to “someone won”, and not enough free cash to play a game people seem to generally insist is absolutely not worth playing if it’s not for money. The levels of analysis hardcore players constantly descend into at the faintest excuse is really unappealing too, filling my brain up with that sounds impossibly tedious.
(Please do not attempt to explain the rules of poker to me in replies unless you are being hilariously wrong.)
Flush also has a meaning of fullness/abundance, "he was flush wish cash", "his face was flush with embarrassment". It can also mean something level to a surface, as in "this should sit flush against the wall".
A lot of starcraft players transitioned to Poker. Because both games require decision making in a system with incomplete information(like real life). That's why parents should teach their kids how to play poker. Otherwise they risk going by in life without critical cognitive skills.
If you think "Starcraft" is a degenerate gambling pastime, you might want to consider that your standards do not align with 99% of the people you're hanging out with here.
Equally, if you consider weed a degenerate pleasure to begin with, then of course you're going to disagree with teenagers going "hehehe, look at my first bong!!"
This is so overly simplified. There are many things in life that require you to make decisions with incomplete information. E.g., Business decisions and investment decisions. Not learning how to properly make decisions with incomplete information keeps you relegated to simply being an employee without the opportunity to vastly change one's own circumstances in life.
If you listen to a person describe the way to play as a Tight Aggressive poker player, you will see that the message parallels what Warren Buffett says about Value Investing.
I taught our youngest Monopoly Deal with similar simplification: removed all but properties, birthday and debt collector/etc. Then added property stealing/swapping. Then rent. It was very effective in getting her quickly up to speed.
After my kids fell in love Uno (in all it's versions) - I got them Monopoly Deal and Monopoly Bid - and I have to say they are both brilliant and fun games in their own right and very different to each other.
We then got the Cludo card games and were equally impressed.
Yes, first step is teaching set collection. Then teach tactics that involve the other players’ sets. Then the full disaster. Easier than explaining rent to 4-5yo from the start.
Great stuff. Growing up, I played both chess an poker seriously. Chess mostly in person: in a club, at tournaments and league matches. Poker mostly online, for real money (age verification wasn't taken very seriously at the time). Though I've spent more time on chess in total, poker has had a bigger impact on my outlook on life. It constantly confronts you with your own cognitive biases and teaches you how to deal with uncertainty and variance, two very important things people by default kinda suck at.
There is a boardgame called [at least in France] “The Gang” where a team of 3-6 players play a noTalk noMoney cooperative variant of TexasHoldEm.
It is REALLY nice !
[note: from my description, it might seem unclear that this game is ALL about friendly communication and deciding altogether with a very limited set of informations. My nearest definition of a kid-compliant version of poker :)]
Richard Garfield has taught his daughter to lie with a simple game:
She has to hide a coin in one of her hands, and then declare where it is, which could be a lie. Richard's task was to find it.
Haha, I just taught my 5-year-old "high card" poker last week. He loves it. Planning on doing a similar progression. Not sure when to stop showing the hands at the end when people fold. He's still in the place where he really hates to lose, but it didn't take him long to get the idea of "minimize losses for bad hands, maximize gains for good hands", which is the main life lesson I'd like him to take from poker.
Poker is a great way to learn a lot of life lessons about human psychology, money management, strategy vs tactics, game theory, and so much more.
There is this weird protestant puritanism around so many aspects of life that confuse me. Every child is going to become an adult, but there is this attitude that they must be shielded from all adult knowledge until they're 21 as if that's helpful.
Your kid can - through game play - learn so much that will make them a more balanced, rounded, capable human than their peers. And done the right way, they're not going to end up degenerate gamblers, but quite the opposite.
It´s about normalizing something we think it could lead to problems.
I dont want to romanticize the game in his mind, so when he grows up people ask him to play poker and he sees it as "that nice game we played at home!".
It is a game with very strong connections with gambling. There are thousands of other games without that association which are as rewarding as poker.
park chess players gamble.
Going to a chess tournament with a prize pool and paying an entry fee is gambling.
In germany magic the gathering tournaments are banned since they are deemed as gambling.
Poker is a winner-take-all game, so it could be argued that it incentives kids to push their self interest first.
It's based on deception, so teaches kids to distrust others and deceive others for the sake of winning.
It gives crazy adrenaline rushes that even adults fail to control. That can't be good for the brain.
You don't seem to realize that 4-year-old is extremely young, and kids that age need security more than anything. They need to know adults have their backs and are not in it for themselves. They need to know people aren't lying to them.
Sure you need to prepare kids for the real life, but there is an age for everything, and my opinion is that 4-year-old is not a good age to learn poker, just as it's not great to put 6-year-old in front of horror movies, or give wine to 10-year-olds.
There is plenty of time to learn money management.
I learned watching my grandfather play with his buddies every week. Never bet real money on it, but I love sweeping house with friends and buying the pizza. :)
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.
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.
Your chess betting example would play slightly differently than standard chess. Since the goal becomes not just to win, but to win the most cash, you'd be trying to leverage your hidden information in order to improve your outcome, which in chess is just "things you've foreseen but your opponent hasn't", which, due to the nature of chess, you'd weaken by jacking up your bets to try and capitalize. The result would probably be a worse game of chess, since without the chance component the better player will win the chess game far more often than the worse player, and then the optimal move for the worse player would be to forfeit early constantly.
Yea, one of the main attributes that define poker is that the chips are worth something (either cash value, or as potential equity in a tournament cash-out).
It's hard to articulate how this happens, but when the chips have no value, the game plays totally different, and just isn't poker anymore. There's no point to bluffing, or aggressively raising, or agonizing over whether you should fold your two pair, if a 100 chip bet has the same zero value as a 1000 chip bet. It just ends up playing like a boring, no stakes "guess the number I'm thinking" game.
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.
This mostly gets avoided with maximum buyin limits on tables. Sure someone can accrue well over that amount, but that's part of cash poker too (dealing with players with large stacks).
Obviously players with much larger bankrolls can weather variance better, but that should even out at pretty much any table a player should reasonably be at (don't play stakes you can't afford where losing the money severely negatively impacts your life).
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.
> 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.
Playing for cash normalizes gameplay by eliminating some unwanted incentives (in cashless games, there isn't a huge difference in reward for getting second place while being up 30 chips or down 30, leading to unpredictable, over-aggressive play), and ensures people take it seriously.
It doesn't really take a very high buy-in to achieve those goals. When my buddies and I play, we typically go with a $20 buy in, denominated in dimes or quarters.
Like I said, I like MTTs, I agree that incentives is necessary for the game to be playable (i.e players don't play truly randomly), but rewards, at least in my opinion, break games.
If I need to be manipulated for me to appreciate playing, is it really worth? Because we know dopamine rushes have effect on your brain outside of the game, when it's over.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
It's a choice to play for money and how much. When I play with friends, there's only a $20 buy-in and no rebuys. Makes for a far cheaper night than going to a pub or movie.
> reasonable possibilities are too many to analyze, one is forced to pretty much guess and make gambles. It's an unpleasant experience.
It’s okay to not like popular things, not every game is for every person. The thing you describe as unpleasant, is what some people enjoy about the game.
> It seems like a game for people whose brains are wired in a manner incompatible with mine. If I discover that someone likes poker, I find them rather suspicious.
Well, that is a good chunk of the population. Which isn’t to say it’s wrong to be suspicious of most people, but I’m not sure poker is an reliable indicator.
I think your 2nd reason is actually why poker is so popular. A lot of the joy of poker (at least for me) is trying to learn to read the other players. I generally play with friends and I find it emotionally intimate in a strange sort of way. Probably not for people who don't enjoy bluffing games though.
Edit:
It's also a socially acceptable time to lie your ass off. Maybe it's a hit like how GTA is for some people as well.
> First - the fact that it's played for real money.
Don't play for real money then. I played a lot of poker with friends, but never for money - everybody gets the same amount of chips at the start and the winner is the last man standing (i.e. the winner of the random all in once most players are out, usually)
In my experience poker completely falls apart when it's not for real money. It just doesn't seem like a very good game in the sense that people don't try to win unless there's some external benefit to winning. It sucks to play with people who don't care.
I run home games with 5c/10c blinds (5$ 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
It's not about players not wanting to win, it's about wildly heterogeneous perspectives of winning. If we're not playing for cash, walking away in first place with $30 of the $100 bucks on the table isn't much different than walking away in first place with $80 of the $100 bucks. On the other hand, a second place win with $40 might be considered worse than a first place win with $30 dollars. With cash, those dollar amounts mean something intrinsically.
It leads to overly aggressive, low-information gameplay, because players will opt to "either win or lose by a lot" over "lose by a little".
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.
I've only played at home and everyone announces the tiles (so an interruption every 5 seconds) so maybe that's the problem. Maybe if you're good enough at it you can do the game on autopilot while chatting? I'm always slowest even to stack the tiles at the start and that's without distractions!
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
This was nice! I tried with my five year old using nuts and bolts as chips. They got it right away and we quickly upgraded to two cards. The three year old also wanted to join but they had no idea what they were doing. (Cargo culting the motions with no correlation to hand strength.)
Come to think of it, we also did not ante but used blinds instead. That way I could put him in the small blind and open up by asking "do you think your card is higher than mine? if so you need to call the current bet of 2."
> As a parent, I’m pleased that I’ve given her the tools to put herself through college hustling poker games, and then go work at a proprietary trading firm.
which is presumably written with the same sardonic intent as any other Matt Levine work.
When my kids were maybe 6 and 4 we started playing One Night Ultimate Werewolf as a family. It very quickly became clear this was a bad choice: the oldest went from being terrible at lying (and so ~never doing it) to actually being pretty good, surprisingly quickly. As soon as we noticed this we stopped, and while she didn't go back to how she had been there was definitely much less lying and she didn't remain good at it.
I think it's simpler than that: people get better at things with practice.
Werewolf isn't like poker where people typically try to conceal their emotions and leak nothing; instead you're trying to act like you're on the Villager team regardless of whether you actually are.
It's a common misconception that poker is about lying or that you need to lie to play poker.
You can bet with a bad hand, but you don't need to say you have a good hand, if asked you can say you either have a bad hand or a good hand, without any impact to your strategy.
Lying holds no advantage in poker, you can easily play poker without lying, no correlation is intrinsic to the game or its rules, it's just a common association people make
> How about "behaving in a way that increases the probability of your particular adversaries making incorrect inferences about your situation"?
I'd call that lying with extra steps.
(Which to be clear, im fine with in the context of a game (and in certain contexts even in real life). Plenty of sports can be traced back to ritualized ways of practising to murder people. Take all the field sports of track and field)
I would say that to "lie" means to present information as truth when it is in fact false, and you know it's false. By this definition, you can't "lie" with behavior, only with speech.
I don't think cryptography usually results in an increased probability of your adversary making incorrect inferences relative to the base case of the adversary having no information. So no, i wouldn't say so.
Maybe you can argue steganography is lying.
Regardless, i also find the idea that lying is morally wrong reductive. Morality depends on context. There are plenty of cases where being misleading is morally ok in my opinion.
Why would the base state be "No cryptography, no communication, no information" and not "No cryptography, communication, information?"
If we assume a default state of avoiding engagement, the average poker player is giving away more information that could lead to correct inferences by playing than bad information by bluffing. Exactly at which point does the lie happen?
> Why would the base state be "No cryptography, no communication, no information" and not "No cryptography, communication, information?"
Because you treated cryptography as a field in its entirety. I think in practise that is how cryptography as a field works normally. Most secret messages communicated with crypto simply wouldn't be communicated (or just communicated in person) without the availibility of cryptography.
Even if the alternative is communicating in a way open to evesdropping i think there is still an intent requirement.
> Exactly at which point does the lie happen?
When there is intentionality to mislead (including by omission).
If you want to be really nitpicky, the definition i would give would be:
Taking (or failing to take) some action for the purpose of causing an adversary to have incorrect or incomplete beliefs that benefit you.
Instead of thinking of a bet as saying "I have good cards" think of it instead as "I have an advantage in this pot", which is not a lie.
In poker advantages can come from cards, or from other objective measures such as position, stack size. And of course from subjective measures like being able to read your opponent.
I feel one of the most useful skills picked up by poker that people don't explicitly speak about is managing your information effectively.
Deceiving my opponent has the connotation of this happening in one instance. After you realize that you can't convincingly deceive your opponents in poker into perpetuity, it becomes a game of managing your image —revealing the right information while being conscious of information that you shared in the past (if you're playing someone skilled or perceptive, that is).
On the flip side, what an excellent game to help people pay attention to signals, figure out how to weigh them appropriately, and appropriately act on them when the situation calls for it.
My claim is a bit stronger, not only can you play without lying, but you don't sacrifice anything, you can play at top level without lying, and you gain no advantage by lying. In essence at optimal play you ignore whatever your opponent says, there is only the bets and game actions, which are independent from the cards held.
By posture do you mean act verbally and physically? Or bet as if you had a good hand?
The first is mostly inconsequential in poker, you should avoid having tells in your posture and speak, but the goal is to avoid conveying information about your hand, not conveying false information about it to deceive.
The second is just the game itself, acting as if you had strong cards has a cost, and is not lying, when you bet you are not saying "I have a hand". In a sense you may bet with a bad hand, but you are more forcing your opponent to pay for a chance to win the pot on account of your hand potentially containing a strong hand. You are truthful in your representation of a potential strong card.
In fact if you were to bluff on a situation were you could not ever have held a strong hand, it would be a mistake, and you would stand to lose expected value.
The original claim is that people misconceive "that poker is about lying or that you need to lie to play poker"
The claim is not that deception can be used as a strategy at all. That btw is actually an uninteresting claim. In almost all games, you can lie to your opponent and probably gain some advantage.
If I were coaching a beginner poker player, I would honestly tell them to play statistically sound poker. That's a good way to make a lot of money.
Yeah, it's basically the main thing I was taught to do to avoid any chance encounters with (animal) predators growing up: walk confidently and present as a fellow predator and not a prey animal.
It’s not tedious at all. Many games have structural information asymmetry, and part of the fun is navigating this. To add an extra verbal lie is categorically different from playing within the bounds of the game
It's an essential skill in life anyway, but you also teach the usual ethics and morals and come down hard on them when you catch them in a meaningful lie.
I think it's also considered a developmental milestone as lying requires a pretty sophisticated theory of mind, and an understanding of the perspective of another person
Bluffing and detecting bluffing is a useful skill as long as used morally. Sort of like learning martial arts - just because we teach kids karate doesn't mean we want them to go around beating people up.
Gambling however can very easily ruin lives and be very adicting.
I’d say bluffing in poker isn’t really lying. I mean you certainly can look at it that way, but another way to look at it is “I have good hands here more often than you do so here strategically you have to fold when I bet”
The difference between a lie and a surprise is that soon everyone will know what the surprise was. A lie has the intention of concealing the truth forever.
Correct, and a bluff is not intended to last forever. Bluffing is revealed eventually, because you can only have a pair of aces so often, statistically speaking.
At that point, the table awareness of the bluff is still profitable because it forces others to bet into your strong hands.
A bluff that is revealed is just as good as one kept secret. Many people seem to misunderstand this.
We tell plenty of lies that aren't intended to hold up forever — whether it's a lie to a stranger that you hope to be away from before the lie becomes apparent, or a lie to a acquaintance that you hope is small enough that the social friction of confronting you over it would be worse than the lie.
The world order is falling apart and being an intelligent person makes you a target of the "anti-elite". I think teaching kids strategy and deception has never been more important.
As someone else pointed out, bluffing is not lying. Bluffing is about applying some randomness to your betting patterns to force your opponents into overbetting slightly on average.
Lying would be trying to introduce a negative correlation between hand strength and bet size; bluffing is merely removing some of the positive correlation that exists.
Had some family come over and play Texas Hold’em with us and their kids. It was clear they were too stupid to be intimidated so there was no possibility of bluffing, instead I just folded over and over again until I had two really good cards and then would see me no matter what I bet and ai grew my bankroll that way.
GTO goes out the window when a drunk guy sits down with a few friends. Either you're gonna grab the pot a few times or bust because the dude went all in with dueces against your KA. he wins a flush on the river.
Drunk guys are the easisest to play against. You don't need GTO, you can just play exploitatively and adjust your range against his, so that you still have big range advantige preflop. And you can lower variance and decide to not go all-in with AK preflop, but this also depends on how deep the effective stack is in a given situation.
https://archive.ph/AjiWY
I'm surprised at the general tone of response here towards the subject of poker overall (I didn't read the article yet so perhaps something more is in the context, but all the same); I understand there are many in the poker world even regarding the most successful of whom are regarded as living a degenerate lifestyle, but being that I was previously in that world myself and was not a degenerate type; I never gambled outside of "my game" that I had an edge in, I learned and implemented proper bankroll management and I studied the game on fundamental levels and on up, progressing into the meta-psyche game that is NL heads-up.
Which brings me to my point which is that while some forms of poker have proven "beatable" by ai, certain forms ie; short-handed tables of NL Holdem, increase in perpexlity to a point where, in heads-up, there are too many variables at play both "physically" (the cards and corresponding hand ranks) and metaphysically (the story being implied thru the route of actions taken at each street from preflop, flop, turn, to river) for there to exist some perfect approach against a skilled player.
NL Holdem poker is absolutely a game of skill with an element of variance aka luck/lack-there-of.
The teachings from the games of gambling, probability etc is a valuable life skill that far too few people have.
I reccomend:
Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts Hardcover – 6 Feb. 2018 by Annie Duke
Or listen to any of the podcasts she did when promoting the book - Peter Attia or Masters of Business are the two I presonally consumed at that time.
I mention this in threads/replies below:
It's a warped puritanism.
I agree with everything you've said, and I think we'd have better politics, economics, human relationships and fun, if more people got their heads out of their posteriors and actually understood poker more.
It's kinda disgusting that people have such a visceral reaction.
Also used to be in that world and identify similarly in terms of my lack of love for gambling.
I'd suggest that you're empirically incorrect in saying that there is no perfect approach against a skilled player (6handed games which often reduce to a single heads-up interactions by showdown):
1. we know that a Nash equilibrium exists for every two-player zero-sum game such that it’s mathematically unexploitable
2. Pluribus approximated the Nash well enough (didn’t have to search over 10^161 possibilities) to crush high stakes skilled player over a good run of hands
> NL Holdem poker is absolutely a game of skill with an element of variance aka luck/lack-there-of.
I’ve played a lot of Holdem, and I’m not sure I agree. A lot of what passes for skill is just an innate understanding of the odds.
John Scarne writes about gambling that a good bet isn’t one you are likely to win, but one where the payout is enough to be worth the risk. The best players know the odds of pulling a straight and can do math to figure out if it’s worth chasing one.
Also known as Expected Value (EV), as in, how much is in the pot right now compared to how much you’re betting/calling, usually compared to how likely you are to win a hand using the cards you’re holding.
That works well for limit games, where you can’t bet more than a set amount (in relation to the blinds or the current pot), especially when there are multiple people at the table, and you’re in an advantageous late position so others act before you do.
In high-stakes no-limit heads-up (1v1) play, the cards you’re holding matter less, especially before the flop. EV and pot odds are almost useless except for gauging when to bluff / if you’re being bluffed. Hands rarely end in a showdown as opposed to one of the players folding. The hands that do are essentially coin-flips, with both players holding what they believe are strong hands.
I think this is true and why programs like like Pluribus, Libratus and DeepStack have outperformed professionals in both heads-up and multiplayer no-limit Texas Hold'em. It's not reading social cues like traditional players, but just relying on probability. Even when giving perfect knowledge of the computer strategy to humans, they're still unable to exploit.
Humans are improving their game by using solvers and introducing randomness into their decisions. For instance, an optimal strategy given a hand might be "fold 80% of the time". One way to do that in live play is look at the second hand of a watch and fold unless it seconds (in this case) are about 48 (80% prob).
You're not wrong that knowing the odds is a component of the skill, but to suggest that skill in poker stops there is minimizing many of the advanced aspects that require playing at a higher level (information management, assessing a player's likely range, determining the equity of a player's range with cards to come, realizing when your or their range is capped, etc)
> I’ve played a lot of Holdem, and I’m not sure I agree. A lot of what passes for skill is just an innate understanding of the odds.
"The odds", however, are not simply a function of the cards in your hand and the unknown cards in the deck. There are also the cards in other people's hands, and getting a good read on what they may be based on the person's behavior is absolutely a skill.
It's always entertaining to play poker with 1 friend who is very skilled at a table full of novices. They often get frustrated and crash out due to their read on other people's behavior being miscalibrated to the situation.
> It's always entertaining to play poker with 1 friend who is very skilled at a table full of novices. They often get frustrated and crash out due to their read on other people's behavior being miscalibrated to the situation.
The most frustrating poker game I play is the monthly Saturday Night game with the bros where they're mostly drinking and watching sports, and none of them are very good or play regularly in casinos.
You can usually get a good read on people who are decent-to-good players, playing in a casino. Their bets will generally make sense and tell a believable story (whether or not they are bluffing). You can mostly tell when they are playing ABC poker vs. getting out of line or making moves. People's bet sizing, their approach to pot management, their ranges, their play style, tight vs. loose, passive vs. aggressive, tend to be identifiable. In other words, players tend to act in ways you'd expect from poker players who have played 10,000 hands.
The Saturday Night amateur gang don't play in ways that make sense or are classifiable. You can't tell what their range is, because they don't even know what a range is. Their betting lines don't make sense because they aren't poker players, and often aren't even paying attention to the current hand. You really have to play these kinds of games differently, and/or just relax and consider it a night of drinking and random bingo instead of poker.
Hey I've started playing poker occasionally again, wanna have a chat about poker? My email is in my profile.
I used to be a winning player at small stakes about 20 years ago, so nothing major but enough for me to show that it's a game of skill.
But yea, for anyone interested why poker is a game of skill, it's due to the law of large numbers. You can easily see the law kick into effect when you simulate a dice roll and you win from 1 to 4 and the other wins 5 to 6 and you both get $1 if you win. I recently had to explain this concept so I happen to have the JS still lying around in my Chrome console.
Poker has much, much higher variance than dice though (or weighted coins, which is what you're actually modeling). It takes hundreds of thousands of hands to establish a statistically significant win rate.
At a common online pace of 1.5 hands per minute (live games are much slower) that's over a thousand hours of playing. I.e. even if playing for one hour every day, it takes years before a player knows whether they're profitable or not.
Seems disingenious to compare to dice when you presumably know poker belongs to that class of distributions to which the central limit theorem applies very slowly.
Your proof to poker being a game based on skill is a simulation of weighted dice?
> I'm surprised at the general tone of response here towards the subject of poker overall [...] regarded as living a degenerate lifestyle
Maybe the people who are negative have read to the end of the article where we are let into the not-so-hidden agenda of the parent: Teach the kids to hustle their way through college so they can become a market speculator.
Matt Levine is “known for his humorous, witty, deadpan writing style” - I’m pretty sure that’s a joke.
I think it was at least partially joke. The author writes a popular newsletter called "Money Stuff", which is about weird things in the finance world.
One of the best life lessons I learned was while perusing a poker strategy book in a bookstore as a teen. I’ve never been into poker, not even sure why I picked it up. One thing it said was the most important thing to remember is that most of your hands will be crap. Don’t get attached to a bad hand and don’t convince yourself that an ok hand is a good hand. If you just fold the bad hands and play the good ones you’re already a better player than most.
I took that to heart and it has served me well in life.
For me, it's "decisions, not results." Poker will teach you patience and acceptance of that which is out of your control.
That’s it. That’s the entire strategy. I pray that the Texas Hold ‘Em fad doesn’t come back. That was an insufferable decade of hearing how clever everyone was.
That's "the entire strategy" for becoming a non-beginner. Poker game theory gets much more complicated at higher levels of play.
Someday, I hope you share your billions of winnings with us mere peasants.
Nowhere did I suggest that I am at those higher levels of play. I just know that they exist.
How much did you lose?
I have never met a losing poker player.
That for me was the greatest life lesson from that time.
Also how there was all these poker strategy books but I don't remember a single one trying to model the strategy of the rake and how to determine if the rake made a game unbeatable. Basically, assuming all games at all levels of rake are beatable.
How convenient for the house.
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That just makes you a tight passive player which is not the worst kind of player to be but also not likely to win you a lot of money
Being a loose aggressive player is far more likely to lead to you losing a lot of money, than winning a lot of money.
Once you consider what the house earns, poker is a net negative for the players. In order for there to be some big winners, there have to be a lot of losers. And a shocking number of those losers will, thanks to our selective memories, consider themselves winning players.
In popular poker you are just playing against other players, not the house.
Doesn't the house take a percentage of the pot ("rake", isn't it called?).
Not a poker player, just thought that was a thing.
Depends on where you play. For some the house is a literal house not a casino, and thus no rake.
Yes. The person you are responding to doesn't quite understand the comment they are responding to :) The rake can turn a breakeven or even winning player into a losing player. That's what we mean.
Sorry, that is fair enough, he is describing a casino. I never played in Vegas during the hold 'em boom, but went to plenty of houses where there wasn't really a rake.
Sure, that’s considered the worst player type to be and generally tight aggressive is considered the best strategy.
Zero-sum nature of the game aside, Meta developed an AI that wins consistently at poker, so it is possible to be good at poker and win consistently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluribus_(poker_bot)
I like this. Most people try to teach card games by listing every rule, but it's much easier to play a simpler version then add in new rules.
I play the Chinese card game Zhao Peng You (Finding Friends, part of the Sheng Ji family of games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheng_ji), which is a trick taking game with a trump suit that changes between games, a trump number that changes between games, and a team selection mechanic rather than fixed teams. It's insanely hard to learn everything at once, so we usually start new people with fixed teams and trumps just to get the feel of a team-based trick-taking game, before adding in the complications.
Every game is easier to learn when you start with simple rules and then add new ones as you go.
We teach people Liar's Dice. It's a very simple game, especially if you build it up like this. Everyone gets five Dice. You roll them and look at your own, and then take turns guessing how many of a given number are on the table. Guesses have to "go up" (either the number of dice stays the same and the number of pips goes up, or the number of dice goes up). Instead of guessing you can challenge the person before you. Whoever is wrong loses a die and game play repeats.
After a few rounds, dice showing a one are wild.
After a few more rounds, if anyone in a round bids 1's, then ones are not wild for that round.
After a few more rounds we start discussing the probabilities and strategies.
The challenge is not breaking the game fundamentally while you add rules.
We play Uno like this. Start with the basic (agreed upon house rules), then every time someone wins a hand they get to add or remove any rule they want, as long as it doesn't outright break the gameplay.
Blind Man's Bluff is a great variant: Give everyone a card face-down, they put it on their forehead without looking at it. Bet based on whether or not you think the card on your forehead is higher than other people's. More fun in my opinion.
Article footnote mentions this with the caveat that it requires some dexterity that young children may find challenging. That aside, I think the two games make a great complementary pair and switching between provides a nice contrast for kids.
You play normal one card poker until the kids realize the benefit of seeing other player’s cards - then you play blind man’s and learn that incomplete information can go the other way.
I suppose you can simply hold your card in your hands with the back facing you. Or use some kind of vertical holder.
Like.. a headband?
I was thinking something on the table top.. but sure.
We need venture capitalists to fund the next game-changing vertical holder market disruptor.
I’ve taught all five of my kids how to play poker, and if they ever sit down at a cash game consider their stack gone and play the cards (remove the dopamine chaos). Learn the math, betting strategies, and look for villain patterns.
These all directly relate to real life.
I believe in it so much that I have a tournament training app startup: https://mach9poker.com/.
There’s a company in Chicago that teaches women poker in relation to business: https://pokerpower.com/.
Bankroll management is a critical skill regardless of the use case.
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.
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.
We weren’t gambling. Nobody won or lost anything.
What were the chips for, then? How did you determine a result to the session?
The chips were to determine the winner of the game. Then when the game was over we put all the chips back. The winner walked away with nothing more than what they arrived with. The losers walked away with exactly what they arrived with.
If you think getting to say “I won” is gambling, then we have nothing to discuss.
By that measure playing Monopoly is gambling.
Are they gambling then there is no win or lose?
Once kids get familiarity with odds and probability they will soon realise that casino games they have no edge and the house always wins. Also you cannot bluff a casino dealer which is half the fun
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.
For what it's worth, in both Denmark and the UK, my experience has been that children are indeed allowed it on occasion, often celebrations like Christmas where they will have something like bucks fizz or a little cider or something alongside the adults.
Right, and this leads to greater consumption in life. This has been studied. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03064...
France, Italy and Spain are all places I have routinely seen parents offer their children a small glass with dinner, generally from age 12 onward.
https://archive.nytimes.com/well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/04/2...
> greater consumption in life
with equivalent or lower alcoholism or alcohol dependency disorders - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/alcoholis...
> with equivalent or lower alcoholism or alcohol dependency disorders
Something something about correlation and causation. I will weigh studies that try to eliminate confounders above population data rife with them.
I didn't use a phrase like "this leads to" and cite a logistic regression.
A lot of the commenters here seem unable to separate poker from gambling. I assume this is how Balatro managed to get that 18+ PEGI rating.
Huh this actually makes sense, it strikes directly at the reasons I’ve never wanted to try playing poker. I’m in my fifties and I have a vague idea that there is a hierarchy of hands and that something called a “flush” is probably the winning hand (which is pretty absurd given that the main way I use “flush” is as a verb for disposing of my body’s waste products via the city’s sewage system) but I have absolutely zero grasp of the mechanics of going from “people are dealt hands” to “someone won”, and not enough free cash to play a game people seem to generally insist is absolutely not worth playing if it’s not for money. The levels of analysis hardcore players constantly descend into at the faintest excuse is really unappealing too, filling my brain up with that sounds impossibly tedious.
(Please do not attempt to explain the rules of poker to me in replies unless you are being hilariously wrong.)
Flush also has a meaning of fullness/abundance, "he was flush wish cash", "his face was flush with embarrassment". It can also mean something level to a surface, as in "this should sit flush against the wall".
A lot of starcraft players transitioned to Poker. Because both games require decision making in a system with incomplete information(like real life). That's why parents should teach their kids how to play poker. Otherwise they risk going by in life without critical cognitive skills.
Yeah, the only way to learn those skills is to engage in a degenerate gambling pastime, that is a gateway to many other degenerate gambling pastimes.
This entire thread is exactly like arguing with weed smokers on Reddit/r/trees.
If you think "Starcraft" is a degenerate gambling pastime, you might want to consider that your standards do not align with 99% of the people you're hanging out with here.
Equally, if you consider weed a degenerate pleasure to begin with, then of course you're going to disagree with teenagers going "hehehe, look at my first bong!!"
This is so overly simplified. There are many things in life that require you to make decisions with incomplete information. E.g., Business decisions and investment decisions. Not learning how to properly make decisions with incomplete information keeps you relegated to simply being an employee without the opportunity to vastly change one's own circumstances in life.
If you listen to a person describe the way to play as a Tight Aggressive poker player, you will see that the message parallels what Warren Buffett says about Value Investing.
Is "degenerate" the word that comes to your mind when reading about the Levine family's game night?
I taught our youngest Monopoly Deal with similar simplification: removed all but properties, birthday and debt collector/etc. Then added property stealing/swapping. Then rent. It was very effective in getting her quickly up to speed.
After my kids fell in love Uno (in all it's versions) - I got them Monopoly Deal and Monopoly Bid - and I have to say they are both brilliant and fun games in their own right and very different to each other.
We then got the Cludo card games and were equally impressed.
So hang on, you play with just properties and simple cards; so in this simplified version of the game, you're mainly just trying to collect sets?
Yes, first step is teaching set collection. Then teach tactics that involve the other players’ sets. Then the full disaster. Easier than explaining rent to 4-5yo from the start.
I mean, especially rent that occurs on random times and random properties that you have no way of avoiding. :-D
Great stuff. Growing up, I played both chess an poker seriously. Chess mostly in person: in a club, at tournaments and league matches. Poker mostly online, for real money (age verification wasn't taken very seriously at the time). Though I've spent more time on chess in total, poker has had a bigger impact on my outlook on life. It constantly confronts you with your own cognitive biases and teaches you how to deal with uncertainty and variance, two very important things people by default kinda suck at.
I have found Skull to be a superior form of poker for people who want the game without the chip evaluation, and it teaches the same skills.
The biggest advantage of Skull over poker is that it's fun even without money.
This, eliminates most of the probability math and distills it just down to the game theory and bluffing aspects. One of my favorite games.
There is a boardgame called [at least in France] “The Gang” where a team of 3-6 players play a noTalk noMoney cooperative variant of TexasHoldEm. It is REALLY nice !
https://www.tabletopfinder.eu/en/boardgame/61182/the-gang
[note: from my description, it might seem unclear that this game is ALL about friendly communication and deciding altogether with a very limited set of informations. My nearest definition of a kid-compliant version of poker :)]
Richard Garfield has taught his daughter to lie with a simple game: She has to hide a coin in one of her hands, and then declare where it is, which could be a lie. Richard's task was to find it.
I think he mentions it in several lectures, but here's one: https://youtu.be/av5Hf7uOu-o?t=697
Haha, I just taught my 5-year-old "high card" poker last week. He loves it. Planning on doing a similar progression. Not sure when to stop showing the hands at the end when people fold. He's still in the place where he really hates to lose, but it didn't take him long to get the idea of "minimize losses for bad hands, maximize gains for good hands", which is the main life lesson I'd like him to take from poker.
Not sure I want my 4-year-old to know how to play poker though.
Why?
Poker is a great way to learn a lot of life lessons about human psychology, money management, strategy vs tactics, game theory, and so much more.
There is this weird protestant puritanism around so many aspects of life that confuse me. Every child is going to become an adult, but there is this attitude that they must be shielded from all adult knowledge until they're 21 as if that's helpful.
Your kid can - through game play - learn so much that will make them a more balanced, rounded, capable human than their peers. And done the right way, they're not going to end up degenerate gamblers, but quite the opposite.
It´s about normalizing something we think it could lead to problems.
I dont want to romanticize the game in his mind, so when he grows up people ask him to play poker and he sees it as "that nice game we played at home!".
It is a game with very strong connections with gambling. There are thousands of other games without that association which are as rewarding as poker.
park chess players gamble. Going to a chess tournament with a prize pool and paying an entry fee is gambling. In germany magic the gathering tournaments are banned since they are deemed as gambling.
Don't let your kids enter a raffle, then.
Poker is a winner-take-all game, so it could be argued that it incentives kids to push their self interest first.
It's based on deception, so teaches kids to distrust others and deceive others for the sake of winning.
It gives crazy adrenaline rushes that even adults fail to control. That can't be good for the brain.
You don't seem to realize that 4-year-old is extremely young, and kids that age need security more than anything. They need to know adults have their backs and are not in it for themselves. They need to know people aren't lying to them.
Sure you need to prepare kids for the real life, but there is an age for everything, and my opinion is that 4-year-old is not a good age to learn poker, just as it's not great to put 6-year-old in front of horror movies, or give wine to 10-year-olds.
There is plenty of time to learn money management.
Math skills and social skills combined?
Teach them two and you've got a game of Hold 'Em.
I learned watching my grandfather play with his buddies every week. Never bet real money on it, but I love sweeping house with friends and buying the pizza. :)
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.
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.
Your chess betting example would play slightly differently than standard chess. Since the goal becomes not just to win, but to win the most cash, you'd be trying to leverage your hidden information in order to improve your outcome, which in chess is just "things you've foreseen but your opponent hasn't", which, due to the nature of chess, you'd weaken by jacking up your bets to try and capitalize. The result would probably be a worse game of chess, since without the chance component the better player will win the chess game far more often than the worse player, and then the optimal move for the worse player would be to forfeit early constantly.
> 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.
Yea, one of the main attributes that define poker is that the chips are worth something (either cash value, or as potential equity in a tournament cash-out).
It's hard to articulate how this happens, but when the chips have no value, the game plays totally different, and just isn't poker anymore. There's no point to bluffing, or aggressively raising, or agonizing over whether you should fold your two pair, if a 100 chip bet has the same zero value as a 1000 chip bet. It just ends up playing like a boring, no stakes "guess the number I'm thinking" game.
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.
This mostly gets avoided with maximum buyin limits on tables. Sure someone can accrue well over that amount, but that's part of cash poker too (dealing with players with large stacks).
Obviously players with much larger bankrolls can weather variance better, but that should even out at pretty much any table a player should reasonably be at (don't play stakes you can't afford where losing the money severely negatively impacts your life).
Richer players can keep losing for longer than you could, but that's fine: that means more money for you to win!
> 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.
> 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.
Playing for cash normalizes gameplay by eliminating some unwanted incentives (in cashless games, there isn't a huge difference in reward for getting second place while being up 30 chips or down 30, leading to unpredictable, over-aggressive play), and ensures people take it seriously.
It doesn't really take a very high buy-in to achieve those goals. When my buddies and I play, we typically go with a $20 buy in, denominated in dimes or quarters.
Like I said, I like MTTs, I agree that incentives is necessary for the game to be playable (i.e players don't play truly randomly), but rewards, at least in my opinion, break games.
If I need to be manipulated for me to appreciate playing, is it really worth? Because we know dopamine rushes have effect on your brain outside of the game, when it's over.
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.
Yes, agree, holdem is to me the most interesting variant of poker because the table and how players react to it carry information.
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.
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.
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.
at the top level, chess players do prep, and need to take guesses about what prep to do, vs what their opponent will do.
you dont know what lines your opponent has studied, and they dont know which lines youve studied
> 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.
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.
It's a choice to play for money and how much. When I play with friends, there's only a $20 buy-in and no rebuys. Makes for a far cheaper night than going to a pub or movie.
As a kid (~12 year old) I played for matchsticks.
> reasonable possibilities are too many to analyze, one is forced to pretty much guess and make gambles. It's an unpleasant experience.
It’s okay to not like popular things, not every game is for every person. The thing you describe as unpleasant, is what some people enjoy about the game.
> It seems like a game for people whose brains are wired in a manner incompatible with mine. If I discover that someone likes poker, I find them rather suspicious.
Well, that is a good chunk of the population. Which isn’t to say it’s wrong to be suspicious of most people, but I’m not sure poker is an reliable indicator.
I think your 2nd reason is actually why poker is so popular. A lot of the joy of poker (at least for me) is trying to learn to read the other players. I generally play with friends and I find it emotionally intimate in a strange sort of way. Probably not for people who don't enjoy bluffing games though.
Edit: It's also a socially acceptable time to lie your ass off. Maybe it's a hit like how GTA is for some people as well.
You might enjoy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheat_(game)
The whole point is to lie your ass off.
> First - the fact that it's played for real money.
Don't play for real money then. I played a lot of poker with friends, but never for money - everybody gets the same amount of chips at the start and the winner is the last man standing (i.e. the winner of the random all in once most players are out, usually)
In my experience poker completely falls apart when it's not for real money. It just doesn't seem like a very good game in the sense that people don't try to win unless there's some external benefit to winning. It sucks to play with people who don't care.
I run home games with 5c/10c blinds (5$ 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)
It's not about players not wanting to win, it's about wildly heterogeneous perspectives of winning. If we're not playing for cash, walking away in first place with $30 of the $100 bucks on the table isn't much different than walking away in first place with $80 of the $100 bucks. On the other hand, a second place win with $40 might be considered worse than a first place win with $30 dollars. With cash, those dollar amounts mean something intrinsically.
It leads to overly aggressive, low-information gameplay, because players will opt to "either win or lose by a lot" over "lose by a little".
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.
I've only played at home and everyone announces the tiles (so an interruption every 5 seconds) so maybe that's the problem. Maybe if you're good enough at it you can do the game on autopilot while chatting? I'm always slowest even to stack the tiles at the start and that's without distractions!
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..
...and unlike in poker, the 1600 Elo players will beat the real beginners in every game. That's what I mean.
Ah OK, yes you're right.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Poker is banned in my country. You can't even play with your friends.
Which country is that?
Not a country any of us would want to be in, that's for sure.
The game the author describes sounds simple and fun, but… what about ties?
I'd assume regular poker rules: The pot is split.
Okay, yeah—that makes sense.
This was nice! I tried with my five year old using nuts and bolts as chips. They got it right away and we quickly upgraded to two cards. The three year old also wanted to join but they had no idea what they were doing. (Cargo culting the motions with no correlation to hand strength.)
Come to think of it, we also did not ante but used blinds instead. That way I could put him in the small blind and open up by asking "do you think your card is higher than mine? if so you need to call the current bet of 2."
Training your kids how to lie convincingly to you -- what could go wrong?
The article ends
> As a parent, I’m pleased that I’ve given her the tools to put herself through college hustling poker games, and then go work at a proprietary trading firm.
which is presumably written with the same sardonic intent as any other Matt Levine work.
When my kids were maybe 6 and 4 we started playing One Night Ultimate Werewolf as a family. It very quickly became clear this was a bad choice: the oldest went from being terrible at lying (and so ~never doing it) to actually being pretty good, surprisingly quickly. As soon as we noticed this we stopped, and while she didn't go back to how she had been there was definitely much less lying and she didn't remain good at it.
Do you think she adopted her pokerface she learned it against you or was there another reason?
I think it's simpler than that: people get better at things with practice.
Werewolf isn't like poker where people typically try to conceal their emotions and leak nothing; instead you're trying to act like you're on the Villager team regardless of whether you actually are.
Remember, being a good liar means you can sniff out a lie too. It's not a terrible skill to teach if it can be wielded for good.
Maybe a mafia style game would be more suitable where both sides are played.
I think it's balanced by having him or her learn skepticism, game theory, information asymmetry, and adverse selection, among other useful skills.
It's a common misconception that poker is about lying or that you need to lie to play poker.
You can bet with a bad hand, but you don't need to say you have a good hand, if asked you can say you either have a bad hand or a good hand, without any impact to your strategy.
Lying holds no advantage in poker, you can easily play poker without lying, no correlation is intrinsic to the game or its rules, it's just a common association people make
If we replace the word "lying" with "deception" does that change anything?
Poker players very seldom outright lie, like saying out loud "hey everybody, my hand is great!", and it's usually not just simple "deception" either.
How about "behaving in a way that increases the probability of your particular adversaries making incorrect inferences about your situation"?
> How about "behaving in a way that increases the probability of your particular adversaries making incorrect inferences about your situation"?
I'd call that lying with extra steps.
(Which to be clear, im fine with in the context of a game (and in certain contexts even in real life). Plenty of sports can be traced back to ritualized ways of practising to murder people. Take all the field sports of track and field)
I would say that to "lie" means to present information as truth when it is in fact false, and you know it's false. By this definition, you can't "lie" with behavior, only with speech.
Your definition seems like it would include the entire field of cryptography as lies, would it not?
I don't think cryptography usually results in an increased probability of your adversary making incorrect inferences relative to the base case of the adversary having no information. So no, i wouldn't say so.
Maybe you can argue steganography is lying.
Regardless, i also find the idea that lying is morally wrong reductive. Morality depends on context. There are plenty of cases where being misleading is morally ok in my opinion.
Why would the base state be "No cryptography, no communication, no information" and not "No cryptography, communication, information?"
If we assume a default state of avoiding engagement, the average poker player is giving away more information that could lead to correct inferences by playing than bad information by bluffing. Exactly at which point does the lie happen?
> Why would the base state be "No cryptography, no communication, no information" and not "No cryptography, communication, information?"
Because you treated cryptography as a field in its entirety. I think in practise that is how cryptography as a field works normally. Most secret messages communicated with crypto simply wouldn't be communicated (or just communicated in person) without the availibility of cryptography.
Even if the alternative is communicating in a way open to evesdropping i think there is still an intent requirement.
> Exactly at which point does the lie happen?
When there is intentionality to mislead (including by omission).
If you want to be really nitpicky, the definition i would give would be:
Taking (or failing to take) some action for the purpose of causing an adversary to have incorrect or incomplete beliefs that benefit you.
So you're trying to manipulate people into believing false things about you?
Is that better or worse than calling it deception?
I wouldn’t consider the type of deception fully within the bounds of a game the type of deception I would want to avoided teaching my kids.
or "fraud" or "misrepresentation. No, these would be synonyms.
I’m not sure what meaningful distinction you think you're making between verbally lying and implicitly lying with your bet but it's quite tedious.
You inferred it, but it's not implied.
Instead of thinking of a bet as saying "I have good cards" think of it instead as "I have an advantage in this pot", which is not a lie.
In poker advantages can come from cards, or from other objective measures such as position, stack size. And of course from subjective measures like being able to read your opponent.
If reading your opponent is a strategy that confers advantage then it stands to reason that deceiving your opponent is as well.
I feel one of the most useful skills picked up by poker that people don't explicitly speak about is managing your information effectively.
Deceiving my opponent has the connotation of this happening in one instance. After you realize that you can't convincingly deceive your opponents in poker into perpetuity, it becomes a game of managing your image —revealing the right information while being conscious of information that you shared in the past (if you're playing someone skilled or perceptive, that is).
On the flip side, what an excellent game to help people pay attention to signals, figure out how to weigh them appropriately, and appropriately act on them when the situation calls for it.
The original claim is that people misconceive "that poker is about lying or that you need to lie to play poker"
Just because other people may try to lie to you, does not mean that you need to lie in order to succeed.
No one said "lying can't be used at all"
My claim is a bit stronger, not only can you play without lying, but you don't sacrifice anything, you can play at top level without lying, and you gain no advantage by lying. In essence at optimal play you ignore whatever your opponent says, there is only the bets and game actions, which are independent from the cards held.
Skilled players read their oppononts' hands (i.e. the cards they're holding), not the opponents themselves.
But one of the most common strategies is to posture as if you have a good hand even though in reality you don't. That is deception.
By posture do you mean act verbally and physically? Or bet as if you had a good hand?
The first is mostly inconsequential in poker, you should avoid having tells in your posture and speak, but the goal is to avoid conveying information about your hand, not conveying false information about it to deceive.
The second is just the game itself, acting as if you had strong cards has a cost, and is not lying, when you bet you are not saying "I have a hand". In a sense you may bet with a bad hand, but you are more forcing your opponent to pay for a chance to win the pot on account of your hand potentially containing a strong hand. You are truthful in your representation of a potential strong card.
In fact if you were to bluff on a situation were you could not ever have held a strong hand, it would be a mistake, and you would stand to lose expected value.
The original claim is that people misconceive "that poker is about lying or that you need to lie to play poker"
The claim is not that deception can be used as a strategy at all. That btw is actually an uninteresting claim. In almost all games, you can lie to your opponent and probably gain some advantage.
If I were coaching a beginner poker player, I would honestly tell them to play statistically sound poker. That's a good way to make a lot of money.
Sure its a spectrum, but i think poker is fundamentally much more about deception than say monopoly is.
Only in the sense that poker is more about anything than Monopoly is!
Sure—but when you say it like that, suddenly it’s not a bad skill at all to tach your children, and teach them to be wary of others using it.
Yeah, it's basically the main thing I was taught to do to avoid any chance encounters with (animal) predators growing up: walk confidently and present as a fellow predator and not a prey animal.
It’s not tedious at all. Many games have structural information asymmetry, and part of the fun is navigating this. To add an extra verbal lie is categorically different from playing within the bounds of the game
It's an essential skill in life anyway, but you also teach the usual ethics and morals and come down hard on them when you catch them in a meaningful lie.
You never got away with anything as a teenager?
I think it's also considered a developmental milestone as lying requires a pretty sophisticated theory of mind, and an understanding of the perspective of another person
I'd be more concerned about encouraging gambling.
Bluffing and detecting bluffing is a useful skill as long as used morally. Sort of like learning martial arts - just because we teach kids karate doesn't mean we want them to go around beating people up.
Gambling however can very easily ruin lives and be very adicting.
Ha. I got news for you. They are going to learn that playing poker or not.
I’d say bluffing in poker isn’t really lying. I mean you certainly can look at it that way, but another way to look at it is “I have good hands here more often than you do so here strategically you have to fold when I bet”
The difference between a lie and a surprise is that soon everyone will know what the surprise was. A lie has the intention of concealing the truth forever.
Correct, and a bluff is not intended to last forever. Bluffing is revealed eventually, because you can only have a pair of aces so often, statistically speaking.
At that point, the table awareness of the bluff is still profitable because it forces others to bet into your strong hands.
A bluff that is revealed is just as good as one kept secret. Many people seem to misunderstand this.
We tell plenty of lies that aren't intended to hold up forever — whether it's a lie to a stranger that you hope to be away from before the lie becomes apparent, or a lie to a acquaintance that you hope is small enough that the social friction of confronting you over it would be worse than the lie.
> A lie has the intention of concealing the truth forever.
Is that a thing... in English? Or in some specific part of the world?
Well I guess you better hope your kid kindly shows their hand after you fold to their shove.
The world order is falling apart and being an intelligent person makes you a target of the "anti-elite". I think teaching kids strategy and deception has never been more important.
As someone else pointed out, bluffing is not lying. Bluffing is about applying some randomness to your betting patterns to force your opponents into overbetting slightly on average.
Lying would be trying to introduce a negative correlation between hand strength and bet size; bluffing is merely removing some of the positive correlation that exists.
https://github.com/MostlyEmre/hn-anti-paywall
https://gitflic.ru/user/magnolia1234
Bypass Paywalls Clean
Extension allows you to read articles from (supported) sites that implement a paywall.
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PS GitFlic only has Russian interface (use like Google Translate).
Why limit yourself to paywall removal only in HN when you can make a stab at removing them everywhere?
[dead]
Had some family come over and play Texas Hold’em with us and their kids. It was clear they were too stupid to be intimidated so there was no possibility of bluffing, instead I just folded over and over again until I had two really good cards and then would see me no matter what I bet and ai grew my bankroll that way.
playing poker with the following truly undermines the entire experience:
people that dont understand rules 100%
wagers with no real value (time/money/snacks)
people who dont want to play outright
GTO goes out the window when a drunk guy sits down with a few friends. Either you're gonna grab the pot a few times or bust because the dude went all in with dueces against your KA. he wins a flush on the river.
Drunk guys are the easisest to play against. You don't need GTO, you can just play exploitatively and adjust your range against his, so that you still have big range advantige preflop. And you can lower variance and decide to not go all-in with AK preflop, but this also depends on how deep the effective stack is in a given situation.
Sorry but that's just you being blinded by Anna Kournikova - looks great, seldom wins ;)
(no offence to any tennis aficionados - it's a Poker thing)