Haha, 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.
How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card
101–110 of 218 posts
Re: How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card
#102I 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,…
I think your 2nd reason is actually why poker is so popular. A lot of the joy of poker (at least for me) is trying to learn to read the other players. I generally play with friends and I find it emotionally intimate in a strange sort of way. Probably not for people who don't enjoy bluffing games though. Edit: It's also a socially acceptable time to lie your ass off. Maybe it's a hit like how GTA is for some people as…
You might enjoy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheat_(game)
The whole point is to lie your ass off.
Re: How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card
#103I 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,…
> First - the fact that it's played for real money.
Don't play for real money then. I played a lot of poker with friends, but never for money - everybody gets the same amount of chips at the start and the winner is the last man standing (i.e. the winner of the random all in once most players are out, usually)
Re: How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Careful what you wish for! Mahjong is the opposite: you're always playing or setting up the next round, there's no down time, you can't stop paying attention even for a moment or you might miss an important tile, and you can't even skip a round for a comfort break. Also it seems to be complex enough there is no mental space or time left to talk about anything other than the tiles. Exhausting!
> Also it seems to be complex enough there is no mental space or time left to talk about anything other than the tiles. Exhausting! I have been lead to belive that community Mahjong is an excellent time for catching up, but then again, I've never gone and don't know how to play.
I've only played at home and everyone announces the tiles (so an interruption every 5 seconds) so maybe that's the problem. Maybe if you're good enough at it you can do the game on autopilot while chatting? I'm always slowest even to stack the tiles at the start and that's without distractions!
Re: How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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.
Not quite, in poker you know all cards except for other players' hole cards. Have you ever played variations like seven card stud which used to be popular at home until Texas hold'em became cool?
There's always some missing information but it's not quite as bad as you make out. In chess you don't know what the other player is thinking.
Re: How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card
#106Not sure I want my 4-year-old to know how to play poker though.
Math skills and social skills combined?
Re: How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card
#107I 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,…
> First - the fact that it's played for real money. Don't play for real money then. I played a lot of poker with friends, but never for money - everybody gets the same amount of chips at the start and the winner is the last man standing (i.e. the winner of the random all in once most players are out, usually)
In my experience poker completely falls apart when it's not for real money. It just doesn't seem like a very good game in the sense that people don't try to win unless there's some external benefit to winning. It sucks to play with people who don't care.
Re: How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card
#108Not sure I want my 4-year-old to know how to play poker though.
Why?
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.
Re: How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card
#109I 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,…
How is it swindling if you have all agreed to play a fair game?
You do have incomplete information, but to the extent you describe it only exists within a single hand. If you play for a couple of hours, you get more information. That's the point. You're not playing the cards, you're playing the people holding them.
And that's a great allegory for life, and you can learn a lot that will help you in life in general.
As such, I find people who don't teach poker to their own children - like yourself - are, to me, utterly incomprehensible.
Re: How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card
#110I'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…
I 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.