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Teach your kids poker, not chess

momentofdeep.substack.com

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Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#11

Post by na85 »

Bostonian wrote: post #2

There is an element of chance in chess. Whether an opponent plays an opening you have recently studied and how many mistakes your opponent makes is out of your control. The author says poker teaches you to focus on the process rather than the outcome. A chess player who wants to improve will not assume that winning a game means he played well -- he will analyze the game later, perhaps with a chess engine.

>There is an element of chance in chess. Whether an opponent plays an opening you have recently studied and how many mistakes your opponent makes is out of your control.

That's really not what's meant by chance. Chess is no more a game of chance than tennis or golf.

In poker, there's an element of randomness that's an explicit core part of the game (the deck).

No such mechanic exists in chess.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#12

Post by kvonhorn »

Bostonian wrote: post #2

There is an element of chance in chess. Whether an opponent plays an opening you have recently studied and how many mistakes your opponent makes is out of your control. The author says poker teaches you to focus on the process rather than the outcome. A chess player who wants to improve will not assume that winning a game means he played well -- he will analyze the game later, perhaps with a chess engine.

> A chess player who wants to improve will not assume that winning a game means he played well -- he will analyze the game later, perhaps with a chess engine.

You could say the same about poker. A player looking to improve their game will review their hand histories, and plug hands into PIO or HRC.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#13

Post by cableshaft »

bush-bby wrote: post #3

>However, it is important to distinguish poker from a pure game of chance, like roulette. I feel like this is becoming an all too common trope on social media and for young people, where poker is portrayed as a risky but cool thing to do because you can convince people you’re skilled or better than others at it, and that means taking other peoples money with skill. Which is indeed something cool. Sure there’s reading…

Poker is nowhere near as deep as chess, but it's deeper than you're making it sound. It's not just about reading people, especially for Texas Hold'em. Knowing probabilities and how many outs for both your pocket and flop, turn and river, taking your betting order/big and small blinds/your remaining chip stack/whether someone raised for whether you should enter the hand or not, knowing when to fold, etc.

All of that can be done without reading people at all. In fact in online poker, there's not much reading of your opponent you can do usually, just judging based on their previous actions.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#14

Post by philwelch »

bush-bby wrote: post #5
schwartzworld wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a naive view of poker, which is absolutely a game of skill. You can't force a good hand, but you can use your understanding of probability and human behavior to estimate the value of the hand you are dealt. The bets you place can be more important than the hands themselves. In fact, the best hand can lose you a lot of money if you play it wrong.

Those two things, skill and chance, are not mutually exclusive characteristics. My point is more so that poker should not be treated as if all the skill in the world can account for all the bad luck in the world. I mean there’s a reason there’s no equivalent of the patriots in professional poker. No one is going to win every single game every single time. And I think that forgetting that in the games portrayal is mod…

Most of the human condition has an element of chance to it. Games like chess are extremely unusual in that respect.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#15

Post by coastflow »

Poker may have good life lessons, but I would hesitate to wholeheartedly recommend poker to children because the worst-case scenario for the player is much worse than for a player of chess. From a research review paper [0]: "In the majority of situations, gambling in adolescence does not appear to have obvious serious negative consequences; however, in a number of cases it does. There are several risk factors for adolescent problem gambling, including parents with gambling problems, an earlier age of first gambling activity, and greater impulsivity. Children of problem gamblers tend to gamble earlier than their peers."

A worst-case scenario for a player can arise due to "tilt" in poker, aka a losing streak magnified by negative emotions. From another review paper [1]: "Tilting is defined as “a strong negative emotional state elicited by elements of the poker game (e.g., “bad beats” or a prolonged “losing streak”) that is characterised by losing control, and due to which the quality of decision-making in poker has decreased” [...] After a significant loss, tilt occurs in three phases: (1) a dissociative phase (disbelief, “unreality,” unwillingness to “accept” the events), (2) a phase of indignation and negative emotions (feelings of injustice and unfairness), (3) and the chasing phase."

Since real money can be at stake, especially if a young person starts to play poker online, the consequences can be far worse than for a person who develops an unhealthy relationship with chess. Though a research review paper suggests that these worst-case scenarios do not happen to the majority of young poker players, it can still happen to a significant number of them.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2945873/

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5387767/

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#16

Post by zmgsabst »

karpierz wrote: post #10
Bostonian wrote: post #2

There is an element of chance in chess. Whether an opponent plays an opening you have recently studied and how many mistakes your opponent makes is out of your control. The author says poker teaches you to focus on the process rather than the outcome. A chess player who wants to improve will not assume that winning a game means he played well -- he will analyze the game later, perhaps with a chess engine.

Sure, but in the same sense that there's a chance in Chess because you could be sick the day of your game and play worse as a result. The game itself doesn't have intrinsic chance, but as with everything in life, the players do. I do agree with your last point though, winning doesn't mean you played well, it just means you played better than your opponent.

My experience is that it doesn’t even mean you played better than your opponent overall, just that you “made the second to last mistake”.

I also think there’s a larger element to reading your opponent in chess than many people give it credit for — what are they planning? …can you “tilt” them to make them play worse? Etc.

It’s only at the very highest level you should expect people to play nearly perfect games… and even those players discuss the psychology (eg, Hikaru Nakamura is top 50ish and discusses the role of psychology in high level chess).

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#17

Post by JALTU »

I can't help but mention that I play poker on commercial airline flights against the programmed computer opponent. I have crushed them three times in a row. I would've thought the programming would have been a wee bit tougher, but maybe they want us to feel good about ourselves and our card counting, pixel-reading acumen. It works.

Next time you're on a flight trying this out and you get an invite to join a table against a passenger in the cheap seats, that might be me. Watch your wallet.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#18

Post by stu2b50 »

cableshaft wrote: post #13
bush-bby wrote: post #3

>However, it is important to distinguish poker from a pure game of chance, like roulette. I feel like this is becoming an all too common trope on social media and for young people, where poker is portrayed as a risky but cool thing to do because you can convince people you’re skilled or better than others at it, and that means taking other peoples money with skill. Which is indeed something cool. Sure there’s reading…

Poker is nowhere near as deep as chess, but it's deeper than you're making it sound. It's not just about reading people, especially for Texas Hold'em. Knowing probabilities and how many outs for both your pocket and flop, turn and river, taking your betting order/big and small blinds/your remaining chip stack/whether someone raised for whether you should enter the hand or not, knowing when to fold, etc. All of that c…

I wouldn’t really say that’s a fair assessment either. I don’t think it’s in any way clear that Chess is deeper than Poker, or even by what metric you would determine such a thing.

Certainly in both games there are no competitors, human or robot, that has solved the game.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#19

Post by quequeque »

bush-bby wrote: post #5
schwartzworld wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a naive view of poker, which is absolutely a game of skill. You can't force a good hand, but you can use your understanding of probability and human behavior to estimate the value of the hand you are dealt. The bets you place can be more important than the hands themselves. In fact, the best hand can lose you a lot of money if you play it wrong.

Those two things, skill and chance, are not mutually exclusive characteristics. My point is more so that poker should not be treated as if all the skill in the world can account for all the bad luck in the world. I mean there’s a reason there’s no equivalent of the patriots in professional poker. No one is going to win every single game every single time. And I think that forgetting that in the games portrayal is mod…

I would say there is no equivalent of the patriots as there are far fewer teams in the NFL, a more suitable comparison would be comparing the tournament-style WSOP to PGA(golf) majors, where in the past 3 years (11 majors) there have been 10 unique champions. Almost all sports games have some element of chance where the better team does not always win, the NCAA basketball tournament is another good example of this, No one is going to win every single game every single time.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#20

Post by dragontamer »

How about we play competitive Pokemon instead?

Its got all the reads, bluffs, random chance, meta-gaming, math and strategy, and none of the gambling.

------

Don't get me wrong. Poker is a great game. But if we're talking about "reading" the opponent, relatively simple decisions that have deep mathematical backgrounds... a large variety of "simultaneous choice" video games (Pokemon, being a turnbased game with 60% to 100% accuracy on common attacks), leads to very rich gameplay, interaction and reads.

I personally see Poker as just one game in a large family of simultaneous-choice, random-chance, incomplete-information high-skill gaming.

Magic: The Gathering is another one. The cards your opponent plays necessarily reveals information (the colors of cards reveals what kind of strategies they are going for, and your opponent chooses to reveal that information only when necessary). I've won games by "holding onto lands" (worthless cards), bluffing that I had a response against my opponent's moves. Just delaying a turn or two (keeping them cautious) bought me the time to draw the cards I really needed to turn the game around.

And I've lost games by going all in (assuming my opponent was bluffing, so I did a high-risk move), and lo-and-behold, my opponent had the "combat trick" needed to break my attack.

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