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How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card
- ioblomov 1y agohttps://archive.ph/AjiWY https://archive.ph/AjiWY
- robocat 1y agoTraining your kids how to lie convincingly to you -- what could go wrong?
- quantified 1y agoIt'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?
- anitil 1y agoI 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
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- TZubiri 1y agoIt'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
- ghostly_s 1y agoI’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.
- gretch 1y agoYou 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.
- c22 1y agoIf reading your opponent is a strategy that confers advantage then it stands to reason that deceiving your opponent is as well.
- gretch 1y agoThe 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"
- TZubiri 1y agoMy 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.
- kqr 1y agoSkilled players read their oppononts' hands (i.e. the cards they're holding), not the opponents themselves.
- thinkingtoilet 1y agoHa. I got news for you. They are going to learn that playing poker or not.
- striking 1y agoThe 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.
- bamboozled 1y agoThe 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.
- jefftk 1y agoWhen 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.
- DrewRWx 1y agoDo you think she adopted her pokerface she learned it against you or was there another reason?
- jefftk 1y agoI 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.
- behringer 1y agoRemember, 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.
- bko 1y agoI think it's balanced by having him or her learn skepticism, game theory, information asymmetry, and adverse selection, among other useful skills.
- blitztime 1y agoI’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”
- jayknight 1y agoThe 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.
- cman1444 1y agoWell I guess you better hope your kid kindly shows their hand after you fold to their shove.
- kqr 1y agoCorrect, 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.
- Talanes 1y agoWe 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.
- tasuki 1y ago> A lie has the intention of concealing the truth forever. Is that a thing... in English? Or in some specific part of the world?
- bawolff 1y agoI'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.
- kqr 1y agoAs 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.
- jenders 1y agohttps://github.com/MostlyEmre/hn-anti-paywall https://github.com/MostlyEmre/hn-anti-paywall
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- more_corn 1y agoOne 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.
- wileydragonfly 1y agoThat’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.
- albedoa 1y ago[flagged]
- wileydragonfly 1y ago[flagged]
- oinfoalgo 1y agoI 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.
- cman1444 1y agoThat's "the entire strategy" for becoming a non-beginner. Poker game theory gets much more complicated at higher levels of play.
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- citizenkeen 1y agoI 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.
- mattnewton 1y agoThis, eliminates most of the probability math and distills it just down to the game theory and bluffing aspects. One of my favorite games.
- tasuki 1y agoThe biggest advantage of Skull over poker is that it's fun even without money.
- PaulHoule 1y agoHad 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.
- sitzkrieg 1y agoplaying 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
- calvinmorrison 1y agoGTO 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.
- tharkun__ 1y agoSorry 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)
- smnplk 1y agoDrunk 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.
- bobbiechen 1y agoI 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 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.
- shaftway 1y agoEvery 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.
- animal531 1y agoWe 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.
- coderintherye 1y agoBlind 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.
- mrexroad 1y agoArticle 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.
- bombcar 1y agoYou 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.
- nielsbot 1y agoI suppose you can simply hold your card in your hands with the back facing you. Or use some kind of vertical holder.
- entropic88 1y agoLike.. a headband?
- tetromino_ 1y agoI 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.
- kevinwang 1y agoA 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.
- tetromino_ 1y ago> 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.
- cman1444 1y ago
- mcphage 1y agoThe game the author describes sounds simple and fun, but… what about ties?
- d--b 1y agoNot sure I want my 4-year-old to know how to play poker though.
- jedberg 1y agoMath skills and social skills combined?
- PaulRobinson 1y agoWhy? 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.
- tamat 1y agoIt´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.
- Muvasa 1y agopark 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.
- philipallstar 1y agoDon't let your kids enter a raffle, then.
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- prawn 1y agoI 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.
- ljf 1y agoAfter 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.
- gwd 1y agoSo 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?
- prawn 1y agoYes, 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.
- gwd 1y agoI mean, especially rent that occurs on random times and random properties that you have no way of avoiding. :-D
- sans_souse 1y agoI'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.
- PaulRobinson 1y agoI 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.
- Muvasa 1y agoIt's kinda disgusting that people have such a visceral reaction.
- mettamage 1y agoHey 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)}`);
- gwd 1y agoHaha, 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.
- mna_ 1y agoStart your kids onto the path of gambling? No thanks. Better to teach them chess, xiangqi, shogi or go/baduk.
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- _diyar 1y agoYou can also use it to teach about the risk of gambling and simple probabilities. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- blitzar 1y agoEuropeans 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.
- yorwba 1y agoDifferent in the sense that they consume more alcohol? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_consumption_per_capita 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.
- RugnirViking 1y agoFor 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.
- kqr 1y agoRight, and this leads to greater consumption in life. This has been studied. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306460317302848 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03064...
- Muvasa 1y agoA 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.
- AtlasBarfed 1y agoYeah, 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.
- handoflixue 1y agoIf 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!!"
- Nemi 1y agoThis 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.
- spongebobism 1y agoIs "degenerate" the word that comes to your mind when reading about the Levine family's game night?
- caohongyuan 1y ago[dead]
- ZunarJ5 1y agoTeach 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. :)
- ChicagoDave 1y agoI’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/ https://mach9poker.com/. There’s a company in Chicago that teaches women poker in relation to business: https://pokerpower.com/ https://pokerpower.com/. Bankroll management is a critical skill regardless of the use case.
- spongebobism 1y agoGreat 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.
- kqr 1y agoThis 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."
- egypturnash 1y agoHuh 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.)
- vel0city 1y agoFlush 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".
- mmmlinux 1y agoA 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.
- Western0 1y agoPoker is banned in my country. You can't even play with your friends.
- LinuxAmbulance 1y agoWhich country is that?
- booleandilemma 1y agoNot a country any of us would want to be in, that's for sure.
- lolive 1y agoThere 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 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 :)]
- salty-horse 1y agoRichard 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 https://youtu.be/av5Hf7uOu-o?t=697