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Teach your kids poker, not chess

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Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pokemon the video game, not the TCG. The video game requires no money aside from the cartridge, and the strategy is surprisingly deep: https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/ss-ou-metagame-discuss... Magic is the superior TCG in my opinion, thou Pokemon TCG is fun. In any case, don't play the 'pay to win' formats. Instead, play draft or sealed, which are much more fair.

Hmm, interesting, I went through the guides and I have no idea what this game is about. Is it just regular Pokemon game but somehow you play against others online?

You choose a team of 6 Pokemon out of 898, each Pokemon chooses 4 moved out of thousands. Each Pokemon has 2 or 3 abilities to choose from depending on how you breed them.

Both players take turns simultaneously choosing attacks until they KO all opponent pokemon

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#212
When I was a kid in the 90s my best friends dad was like this crazy asian gangster who let us shoot off his AK-47, drank blue powerade exclusively until he fucking died from diabetes, bought us piles of pirated playstation games and linked us with modchips... He also taught us how to play poker so when they banned pokémon cards at our school we just started CLEANING all the kids out playing poker instead.

Flash forward to this day and I can't even legally explain how much insane shit that trajectory in life has sent me. I have a photo on my phone of a narco boss's toilet that is an actual medieval style throne basically.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#213

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 grew up on Pokemon & MTG. Got competitive, made the Tour, etc. I am not sure I want to repeat this with my son. A friend is going through this with his child ( The upside is that a healthy exposure to "work doesn't equal outcome", risk calcs, and reading people are very helpful lessons to learn, so personally I'm a bit torn on this. I wonder if there isn't a happy middle ground these days that doesn't require a "bu…

MTG:Arena can be payed F2P and is much cheaper to buy a top tier deck due to having wildcards. I highly recommend it. (It’s a different experience to playing for fun with friends at the kitchen table, more focused on “the serious/meta game”).

Also you can do drafts really easily and cheaply, which gets you into the really layered EV/Sklansky-bucks territory.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe over multiple poker hands that advantage from luck would quickly diminish and then disappear. I would be very surprised if any normal chess player, a total novice at poker, would be able to beat the best poker player in the world if they sat down to play for a couple of hours straight.

Variance in poker evens out over months, not a single session. A competent but not great player can definitely beat a pro in a single session.

I think you're overstating the variance. If you watch high level poker play you will consistently see the same players at the final table of big tournaments. Sure, a few lucky random players will go pretty deep in the tournament, but they just don't do it nearly as frequently as the top few guys.

A competent but not great player has a chance of beating a pro in one session, but it's definitely pretty slim.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe over multiple poker hands that advantage from luck would quickly diminish and then disappear. I would be very surprised if any normal chess player, a total novice at poker, would be able to beat the best poker player in the world if they sat down to play for a couple of hours straight.

Variance in poker evens out over months, not a single session. A competent but not great player can definitely beat a pro in a single session.

Not clear how long your "sessions" are but they have poker tournaments where the same people regularly make it to the top.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#216
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…

> If you choose poker instead, you'll just breed a gambler. Huh? Chess is fun, but deals in perfect information at all times. Poker teaches a person how to make decisions with imperfect information, which is how most life decisions will be made.

That's why you switch them to the infinitely more interesting non-perfect information strategic board game of Stratego!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratego

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#217
I'd go for teaching them chess. Much more thing you can learn. The most obvious

- The reward is not always immediate, patience can help you to succeed

- Don't look only on your plans, check your opponents opportunities and threads as well

- When you are behind, there a quite often chances to turn a game around - don't give up

- When you lose, or make a mistake, you can't blame it to bad luck or anyone else

- Analyse your games afterwards - learn from your mistakes

Even for adults the is a awful lot you can learn in chess. Most basic thing, when you took a look on a game in middle play, amateurs mostly look for a small gain from an exchange. More skilled players look at the board and first look at the asymetries of the position and analyse how the can use them in their favor.

Magnus Carlsen really took the game to another level. You see games which look totally even, and 5 turns later where Magnus just reordered two or three pieces to slightly different positions and he manage to get into a winning position - without even exchange a single piece. That's another thing what you can learn from chess: Improve your position by changing small thnings.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s nowhere near perfect information because we’re limited. We have no idea what an early decision will mean later in the game. If anything it’s a game where the truth emerges slowly as options reduce to those that fit in our brain. However, it is a closed system and all participants are visible, whereas poker has hidden surprises. It still has known rules. In real life (eg business, investing) the game rules are va…

Chess is the classic example of what perfect information means > In game theory, a sequential game has perfect information if each player, when making any decision, is perfectly informed of all the events that have previously occurred, including the "initialization event" of the game (e.g. the starting hands of each player in a card game) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_information I don’t disagree with your…

Ah, thank you!

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Variance in poker evens out over months, not a single session. A competent but not great player can definitely beat a pro in a single session.

I think you're overstating the variance. If you watch high level poker play you will consistently see the same players at the final table of big tournaments. Sure, a few lucky random players will go pretty deep in the tournament, but they just don't do it nearly as frequently as the top few guys. A competent but not great player has a chance of beating a pro in one session, but it's definitely pretty slim.

When poker players measure variance, it's $$$ over time. And while some pros are indeed good are surviving the bubble in fishy tournaments, none make a perfectly consistent income. Even amongst crushers, the variance can be massive.

For every tournament you make a big score, you crash out of 5 and get min payout on a few more.

Many of the biggest names in poker have been the biggest losers in a given calendar period. For example, Gus Hansen and Daniel Negreanu are two of the biggest winners of all time yet also have some of the biggest documented losses...

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