41–50 of 218 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 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,…
> 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.
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,…
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
(no offence to any tennis aficionados - it's a Poker thing)
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,…
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 a…
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.
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.