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How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card

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Re: How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card

#11
post #8
post #3

Training your kids how to lie convincingly to you -- what could go wrong?

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…

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.

Re: How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card

#12
post #3

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.

Re: How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card

#13

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’r…

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.

Re: How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card

#14
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card

#15
post #8
post #3

Training your kids how to lie convincingly to you -- what could go wrong?

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…

If we replace the word "lying" with "deception" does that change anything?

Re: How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card

#16
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card

#17
post #3

Training your kids how to lie convincingly to you -- what could go wrong?

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.

Re: How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card

#18

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’r…

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

Re: How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card

#20
post #3

Training your kids how to lie convincingly to you -- what could go wrong?

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.
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