Teach your kids poker, not chess • Hacker News Board

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#131

Post by orwin » Sat, May 21, 2022, 10:35 AM UTC

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?

Competitive is different. You can play an attrition team, where every opponent switch hurt him, or a clone+relay team (my favorite) where you stack attack buffs then use relay to transfer them to your hard hitter. You can play a mix of those, or just good pokemons with tight strategy (the equivalent of Jund zoo basically if you're a MTG player)

Unless you talk about pokemon TCG, and in this case, 8 don't know.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#132

Post by pawelmurias » Sat, May 21, 2022, 10:38 AM UTC

christkv wrote: post #88

spekcular wrote: post #85

My problem with this article: I did not see a concrete suggestion for where children should play poker. Clearly, they cannot play at casinos or for real money online. I suppose they could play for fake money online, but there the dynamics are much different. (Why not go all-in and risk it all if you can just create a fresh account if you lose?) Fake money tournaments, where the goal is to come out on top instead of m…

You can play for candy or video game time or any other non monetary value the kids value

This seems like teaching your kids gambling and greed.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#133

Post by orwin » Sat, May 21, 2022, 10:40 AM UTC

spekcular wrote: post #85

My problem with this article: I did not see a concrete suggestion for where children should play poker. Clearly, they cannot play at casinos or for real money online. I suppose they could play for fake money online, but there the dynamics are much different. (Why not go all-in and risk it all if you can just create a fresh account if you lose?) Fake money tournaments, where the goal is to come out on top instead of m…

And heads up is a different game than cash game or tournament. I don't think the author post really apply to HU games.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#134

Post by ja3k » Sat, May 21, 2022, 10:41 AM UTC

I played a lot of chess and a bit of poker as a kid and got a lot more out of the chess. Maybe I just didn't put enough into the poker but I think I sort of never really got what was going on with ranges and frequencies and sort of just 'played my hand'. Chess really stretched and "if this than that" muscle very deeply in a way I think actually benefited me. I dont think any amount of playing poker without a coach would have led me to any important understanding. Games of randomness are deeper than deterministic games, but I think it's also easy to play them for a long time without even noticing how you could improve.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#135

Post by kuboble » Sat, May 21, 2022, 10:47 AM UTC

ja3k wrote: post #134

I played a lot of chess and a bit of poker as a kid and got a lot more out of the chess. Maybe I just didn't put enough into the poker but I think I sort of never really got what was going on with ranges and frequencies and sort of just 'played my hand'. Chess really stretched and "if this than that" muscle very deeply in a way I think actually benefited me. I dont think any amount of playing poker without a coach wo…

So teach them poker, but have them play chess.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#136

Post by pawelmurias » Sat, May 21, 2022, 10:49 AM UTC

tompston wrote: post #62

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…

> But does Billy have gambling problems right now because he played poker with fake chips with his grandma for fun when he was 6?

Teaching a kids a gambling game in depth seems like it would increase their chance of getting interested in gambling unless you do this in an abusive way to gave them hate card games.

Just teaching the rules of poker doesn't teach them any of the lessons from the article.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#137

Post by da39a3ee » Sat, May 21, 2022, 10:50 AM UTC

I'm pretty ignorant about poker so maybe someone can put me right. It doesn't really seem like an appealing game: you can either analyze the cards you can see, but that doesn't tell you much, or you can analyze your memory of what has gone before, but that sounds really hard - i don't think i'm good at remembering things nor does it sound fun. Plus analyze the psychology of other players of course.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#138

Post by jzer0cool » Sat, May 21, 2022, 10:54 AM UTC

Agree or disagree? The author has pointed out that Chess is deterministic, so there is an optimal, solved move to win every time. It feels more a game of memory, rather than strategy. Stochastic games help to overcome this. But many games of chance are troubled with too much randomness defeating good strategy play intrinsic to the game or very narrow skill pigeon-holed to pick a particular strategy built into the game.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#139

Post by greenthrow » Sat, May 21, 2022, 10:58 AM UTC

A) False dichotomy.

B) Let your kids pick what they are interested in (either, both or neither.)

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#140

Post by hackernewds » Sat, May 21, 2022, 10:59 AM UTC

LewisVerstappen wrote: post #127

HPsquared wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chess is logic, poker is rhetoric.

This is not true in the slightest. Poker is far, far more mathematical than chess. The idea that poker pros are only going off "reads" is completely ludicrous. They have a set game-theory-optimal style of playing, and then use an opponents flaws/"tells" to deviate from the GTO style to exploit those tells. An example of a flaw could be if the opponent is playing shitty hole cards. If the opponent has played in every…

The strategy you suggest seems too simplistic and predictable to even trick a beginner to be honest