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Teach your kids poker, not chess

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Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#61

Post by pessimizer »

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…

> just judging based on their previous actions.

That's reading.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#62

Post by tompston »

coastflow wrote: post #15

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 ado…

A very large part of being a good poker player means that you can control your emotions and look at things objectively in: - tricky situations - long losing streaks when the expected value (EV) of your actions is positive in the long run, but the short term outcome is negative.

Sounds like a skill that could be useful in other areas too.

Controlling tilt is such a big part of the game that there are books written on the subject and it is one of the factors that decides whether you can be a profitable player in the long run.

Saying that poker should be avoided because tilt is bad means that trading also should be avoided because tilt is bad and it can lose you a lot of money.

Yes, if you go into poker to gamble, you will lose money fast. Yes, people who don't know anything about the dynamics of the game will lose to better opponents in the long run. The same applies to chess and trading. Play against better opponents and you will lose, in any game.

Yes, people with addictive personalities or gambling inclinations should most probably avoid poker. But does Billy have gambling problems right now because he played poker with fake chips with his grandma for fun when he was 6? Or are there other bigger factors happening in the background? Is this a confusion between treating the symptoms instead of the disease?

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#63

Post by imustbeevil »

Teach your kids the basic social skills that society mistakenly believes other children will teach them, instead of teaching them the only competitive game so universally boring that people can only play it with money on the line.

If Poker was a good competitive game, there would be an ELO system and people would play because they care about their skill ranking more than they care about gambling. There's a reason you aren't required to wager real money for every League of Legends or Valorant match you play.

Poker is an economic scheme where the House and the Sharks work together to lure people with real jobs into unfair competition / gambling with bad odds.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#64

Post by bluefirebrand »

mirceal wrote: post #49
ohwellhere wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only net deck in both MtG and Pokémon. :sweat_smile:

Question: Is Pokemon like MTG? From 10000 feet away only by looking at a few cards and maybe hearing people chat about it, sounds like games are similar. Are they?

Similar enough, yeah.

Both are quite complex but in different ways.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#66

Post by dragontamer »

derivagral wrote: post #51
dragontamer wrote: post #20

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…

I grew up on Pokemon & MTG. Got competitive, made the Tour, etc. I am not sure I want to repeat this with my son. A friend is going through this with his child ( The upside is that a healthy exposure to "work doesn't equal outcome", risk calcs, and reading people are very helpful lessons to learn, so personally I'm a bit torn on this. I wonder if there isn't a happy middle ground these days that doesn't require a "bu…

Pokemon the video game, not the TCG. The video game requires no money aside from the cartridge, and the strategy is surprisingly deep: https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/ss-ou-metagame-discuss...

Magic is the superior TCG in my opinion, thou Pokemon TCG is fun. In any case, don't play the 'pay to win' formats.

Instead, play draft or sealed, which are much more fair.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#67

Post by dragontamer »

pessimizer wrote: post #52
dragontamer wrote: post #20

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…

> Its got all the reads, bluffs, random chance, meta-gaming, math and strategy, and none of the gambling. The gambling is the most important part, it's balancing between risk and concealing the signal you're sending. Bridge would be another option with a similar problem to be solved, but I don't think pokémon has any of that. edit: also, the last thing you want to do is get your kids addicted to a pay-to-win game. It…

Pokemon the video game is NOT a pay to win game or gambling game. Everyone is on fair grounds.

The strategy is surprisingly deep. See one discussion thread from Smogon: https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/ss-ou-metagame-discuss...

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#68

Post by dragontamer »

le-mark wrote: post #39
dragontamer wrote: post #20

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…

I’m a noob when it comes to Pokémon, I only learned to play with my kids. Seems like Pokémon alway devolves to who has the strongest (most hp, best attacks) characters. Sure there are all the special attacks, deck manipulation that can be done but it seems very shallow to me. What am I missing?

Pachirisu was the star of VGC a few years ago. https://pokevillebloggers.blogspot.com/2014/08/pachirisu-201...

A very weak Pokemon, but had the right moves and right team support.

The video game is far more about teamwork and team composition than just throwing the highest stat Pokemon at each other.

-----

Stats matter for your sweeper (attack and speed), pivot (attack and defense) and sponge (hp and defense).

But there are a whole slew of 'trickster' Pokemon, like Pachirisu, Ninjask, klefki, whimsicott and others who have rare moves and/or abilities that can beat raw stats in the right situation.

Some lower stat Pokemon, like Clefable, are used despite better stat Pokemon (ex Blissy for sponge purposes) because of teamwork, movesets, typing, or abilities.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#69

Post by danenania »

I believe it's Theory Of Poker by David Sklansky that has a great section in the beginning comparing poker to other games, and specifically to tennis, which I've never forgotten.

I read this like 15+ years ago, so I'm paraphrasing, but it explains the core of why poker and other games mixing skill with chance are so counter-intuitive to humans and difficult to learn compared to games that are primarily skill-based like tennis (or chess, I suppose).

So, in summary: in a skill-based game like tennis, the quality of your results will almost always correspond exactly to the quality of your technique. If you have perfect technique, you'll hit a perfect serve. If you hit the ball into the net, you know you did something wrong. This is what humans are used to and it's the way we evolved to learn. Try > observe results > adjust strategy/technique > try again.

Poker short circuits this system because the results of a single hand don't tell you anything. You can play a hand perfectly and lose your whole stack. Or you can play terribly and win a massive pot. Hell, you can play terribly for an entire tournament and still win a WSOP bracelet if you're lucky in all the right moments.

This means you can't learn poker just by playing a lot, because you aren't getting reliable feedback. Instead, you need to learn the underlying theory, and then how to apply it in the heat of the moment.

In my experience, it's extremely hard for people to really internalize this. They'll say they understand, but then when you ask them about their poker session, they spend all their time talking about the results. People who really get it don't do that: they instead tell you about tricky situations they ended up in and how they decided what to do. There's nothing less interesting to a seasoned poker player than the results of a specific hand... or session... or week's worth of sessions.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#70

Post by dragontamer »

jrockway wrote: post #37
mirceal wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mtg is poker on hard mode. You don't know what the opponent's deck has in it or what combos you need to defend against. The game meta + competitive play are wildly entertaining.

I've never played MTG, but do people "net deck" in that community? I've played other card games and I usually know their deck after seeing the first couple cards. Sure, maybe they added some special flare, but most people cut-n-paste from the Internet. (And those decks crush people that don't, unfortunately.)

You can't cut and paste in Draft or Sealed, which were my games of choice.

I found constructed to be far more pay to win and copy-based for my tastes. But draft forces you to make due with the cards you get at random.

------

Cards are uniformly random according to rarity, but picks are not. If you get passed a rare and 3x uncommons in the draft, you know the left-hand player picked a common card. After 8 passes, your original stack comes back and you can get a feel for everyone else's deck. When pack2 opens up, you start working towards the 'underrated' colors at the table and going for the meta strategy no one has picked yet.

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