The game the author describes sounds simple and fun, but… what about ties?
I'd assume regular poker rules: The pot is split.
Okay, yeah—that makes sense.
How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card
191–200 of 218 posts
Re: How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card
#192I'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…
> NL Holdem poker is absolutely a game of skill with an element of variance aka luck/lack-there-of. I’ve played a lot of Holdem, and I’m not sure I agree. A lot of what passes for skill is just an innate understanding of the odds. John Scarne writes about gambling that a good bet isn’t one you are likely to win, but one where the payout is enough to be worth the risk. The best players know the odds of pulling a strai…
> I’ve played a lot of Holdem, and I’m not sure I agree. A lot of what passes for skill is just an innate understanding of the odds.
"The odds", however, are not simply a function of the cards in your hand and the unknown cards in the deck. There are also the cards in other people's hands, and getting a good read on what they may be based on the person's behavior is absolutely a skill.
It's always entertaining to play poker with 1 friend who is very skilled at a table full of novices. They often get frustrated and crash out due to their read on other people's behavior being miscalibrated to the situation.
Re: How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card
#193Huh this actually makes sense, it strikes directly at the reasons I’ve never wanted to try playing poker. I’m in my fifties and I have a vague idea that there is a hierarchy of hands and that something called a “flush” is probably the winning hand (which is pretty absurd given that the main way I use “flush” is as a verb for disposing of my body’s waste products via the city’s sewage system) but I have absolutely zero grasp of the mechanics of going from “people are dealt hands” to “someone won”, and not enough free cash to play a game people seem to generally insist is absolutely not worth playing if it’s not for money. The levels of analysis hardcore players constantly descend into at the faintest excuse is really unappealing too, filling my brain up with that sounds impossibly tedious.
(Please do not attempt to explain the rules of poker to me in replies unless you are being hilariously wrong.)
Re: How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card
#194A lot of the commenters here seem unable to separate poker from gambling. I assume this is how Balatro managed to get that 18+ PEGI rating.
Re: How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card
#195Huh this actually makes sense, it strikes directly at the reasons I’ve never wanted to try playing poker. I’m in my fifties and I have a vague idea that there is a hierarchy of hands and that something called a “flush” is probably the winning hand (which is pretty absurd given that the main way I use “flush” is as a verb for disposing of my body’s waste products via the city’s sewage system) but I have absolutely zer…
Flush also has a meaning of fullness/abundance, "he was flush wish cash", "his face was flush with embarrassment". It can also mean something level to a surface, as in "this should sit flush against the wall".
Re: How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card
#196I like this. Most people try to teach card games by listing every rule, but it's much easier to play a simpler version then add in new rules. I play the Chinese card game Zhao Peng You (Finding Friends, part of the Sheng Ji family of games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheng_ji ), which is a trick taking game with a trump suit that changes between games, a trump number that changes between games, and a team selection…
Every game is easier to learn when you start with simple rules and then add new ones as you go.
We teach people Liar's Dice. It's a very simple game, especially if you build it up like this. Everyone gets five Dice. You roll them and look at your own, and then take turns guessing how many of a given number are on the table. Guesses have to "go up" (either the number of dice stays the same and the number of pips goes up, or the number of dice goes up). Instead of guessing you can challenge the person before you. Whoever is wrong loses a die and game play repeats.
After a few rounds, dice showing a one are wild.
After a few more rounds, if anyone in a round bids 1's, then ones are not wild for that round.
After a few more rounds we start discussing the probabilities and strategies.
The challenge is not breaking the game fundamentally while you add rules.
Re: How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
> NL Holdem poker is absolutely a game of skill with an element of variance aka luck/lack-there-of. I’ve played a lot of Holdem, and I’m not sure I agree. A lot of what passes for skill is just an innate understanding of the odds. John Scarne writes about gambling that a good bet isn’t one you are likely to win, but one where the payout is enough to be worth the risk. The best players know the odds of pulling a strai…
> I’ve played a lot of Holdem, and I’m not sure I agree. A lot of what passes for skill is just an innate understanding of the odds. "The odds", however, are not simply a function of the cards in your hand and the unknown cards in the deck. There are also the cards in other people's hands, and getting a good read on what they may be based on the person's behavior is absolutely a skill. It's always entertaining to pla…
> It's always entertaining to play poker with 1 friend who is very skilled at a table full of novices. They often get frustrated and crash out due to their read on other people's behavior being miscalibrated to the situation.
The most frustrating poker game I play is the monthly Saturday Night game with the bros where they're mostly drinking and watching sports, and none of them are very good or play regularly in casinos.
You can usually get a good read on people who are decent-to-good players, playing in a casino. Their bets will generally make sense and tell a believable story (whether or not they are bluffing). You can mostly tell when they are playing ABC poker vs. getting out of line or making moves. People's bet sizing, their approach to pot management, their ranges, their play style, tight vs. loose, passive vs. aggressive, tend to be identifiable. In other words, players tend to act in ways you'd expect from poker players who have played 10,000 hands.
The Saturday Night amateur gang don't play in ways that make sense or are classifiable. You can't tell what their range is, because they don't even know what a range is. Their betting lines don't make sense because they aren't poker players, and often aren't even paying attention to the current hand. You really have to play these kinds of games differently, and/or just relax and consider it a night of drinking and random bingo instead of poker.
Re: How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think cryptography usually results in an increased probability of your adversary making incorrect inferences relative to the base case of the adversary having no information. So no, i wouldn't say so. Maybe you can argue steganography is lying. Regardless, i also find the idea that lying is morally wrong reductive. Morality depends on context. There are plenty of cases where being misleading is morally ok in…
Why would the base state be "No cryptography, no communication, no information" and not "No cryptography, communication, information?" If we assume a default state of avoiding engagement, the average poker player is giving away more information that could lead to correct inferences by playing than bad information by bluffing. Exactly at which point does the lie happen?
> Why would the base state be "No cryptography, no communication, no information" and not "No cryptography, communication, information?"
Because you treated cryptography as a field in its entirety. I think in practise that is how cryptography as a field works normally. Most secret messages communicated with crypto simply wouldn't be communicated (or just communicated in person) without the availibility of cryptography.
Even if the alternative is communicating in a way open to evesdropping i think there is still an intent requirement.
> Exactly at which point does the lie happen?
When there is intentionality to mislead (including by omission).
If you want to be really nitpicky, the definition i would give would be:
Taking (or failing to take) some action for the purpose of causing an adversary to have incorrect or incomplete beliefs that benefit you.
Re: How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. This claim is genuinely alien to me. I've seen people play lots of games very competitively without tying money in it. No one would seriously claim that chess hustler games are the only serious chess games, yet that claim looks oddly similar to the one made in poker. Why would…
> Is the game not interesting enough to play without it? Yes. Poker ceases to be interesting when not played for something . Chess and most other games are certainly different in this aspect.
Yea, one of the main attributes that define poker is that the chips are worth something (either cash value, or as potential equity in a tournament cash-out).
It's hard to articulate how this happens, but when the chips have no value, the game plays totally different, and just isn't poker anymore. There's no point to bluffing, or aggressively raising, or agonizing over whether you should fold your two pair, if a 100 chip bet has the same zero value as a 1000 chip bet. It just ends up playing like a boring, no stakes "guess the number I'm thinking" game.
Re: How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card
#200Earlier 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.
at the top level, chess players do prep, and need to take guesses about what prep to do, vs what their opponent will do.
you dont know what lines your opponent has studied, and they dont know which lines youve studied