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Teach your kids poker, not chess

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Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You’d be surprised how boring it gets at a poker table when you don’t get good cards for a hour. Folks get bored and play suboptimally.

Part of what poker teaches is patience.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#152
post #95

Nah, teach your kids chess, so that they can exercise their deductive/calculating muscles during that golden phase of childhood in which our brains are malleable enough to easily learn new languages: realize that artificial languages (i.e. deductive systems) are all functionally equivalent, and use chess as just another avenue into building deductive fluency; use multiple such avenues (e.g. music, Euclid). Call this…

Nah, let your kids decide what they want to learn.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#153

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 gam…

Agreed that Chess is mostly about memorization, even at a high level - opening theory has only gotten deeper with the invention of computer analysis. If you're looking for a game that fits that criteria (deterministic but strategic), Go is probably the answer. The possibility space expands so rapidly due to the size of the board that you just can't have deep memorization beyond a few moves.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#154

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…

> the worst-case scenario for the player is much worse than for a player of chess

The worst-case scenario for any high level games player is pretty awful. No social life or social skills, obsession, poor job prospects, etc.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#155

There is an element of chance in chess. Whether an opponent plays an opening you have recently studied and how many mistakes your opponent makes is out of your control. The author says poker teaches you to focus on the process rather than the outcome. A chess player who wants to improve will not assume that winning a game means he played well -- he will analyze the game later, perhaps with a chess engine.

I think this actually hits the nail on the head. Chess is very much a game of chance.

People have been saying "the players are nondeterministic not the game," but epistemically what is a game with no players?

I play chess seriously in a tournament setting. While it is true the board is revealed, the board is not the game. The board is the operating theater of a game which is entirely within both players minds. People have become overly dismissive with the idea that the game is deterministic because chess engines exist. But chess engines are not even necessarily deterministic because the result of the alpha beta search still vary based on depth and the evaluation heuristic.

Without an evaluation function you cannot even interpret a board position at all. This function is simply not deterministic (unless formalized and then it will be imperfect to situation), and any GM will tell you that some positions are impossible to evaluate.

Additionally there are many times where engines produce suboptimal results until the search space is collapsed by a player like Hikaru. It's not frequent but it definitely happens.

Chess is a game between two Turing machines sharing a tape. Sharing a tape does not allow you to see the state of the machine in each players head. And if you have no players you have no game. This makes chess highly probabilistic in so many senses that using the game theoretic construct of "prefect information game" causes game theorists to seemingly literally not understand it.

Chess is a deeply human game subject to human variance. This is nondeterministic. Poker is also human, in other ways. Anyone who sees chess as deterministic is probably a weak player (less than 2000 fide) and doesn't understand this fundamental aspect of the game. At the higher levels there is even forms of bluffing and swindling, which is fantastic simply because you CAN see the same board and you were still able to manipulate the other player with their own prejudices.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#156
post #95

Nah, teach your kids chess, so that they can exercise their deductive/calculating muscles during that golden phase of childhood in which our brains are malleable enough to easily learn new languages: realize that artificial languages (i.e. deductive systems) are all functionally equivalent, and use chess as just another avenue into building deductive fluency; use multiple such avenues (e.g. music, Euclid). Call this…

Nah, let your kids decide what they want to learn.

Then they will learn GTA Online.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#160

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…

Maybe they could play with their parents, at home? Is that too bizarre to consider these days?

Was talking to a young guy the other day about learning poker, he said, oh I'll just play in red dead redemption, apparently you can play poker in it :-)
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