221–230 of 242 posts
Throw in traditional logic puzzles which are entirely about incomplete information.
Kids can learn in many ways. Leverage all of them.
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.
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>no equivalent of the patriots in professional poker Daniel Negreanu?
Who? I'm being flippant here for a reason. I don't care at all about football, and can't remember the last time I've even seen the Super Bowl (or even have notice who was playing). My eyes glaze over if I'm with friends and they start talking about football. But I've heard of the Patriots. Hell, I even know the name of their head coach. I'm an on-and-off recreational home/casino poker player, but I've never heard of…
I couldn't name anyone on the Patriots, and I can definitely name more poker pros than I can football players. Doesn't mean anything.
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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.
As for how long a session is? 8 hours. I made a living from poker for a few years.
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I played in a MtG draft tournament once, and it was great. It gives everyone a level playing field (barring chance) and adds another whole level to the game. I got my butt handed to me in the "real" tournament. I've since run little draft tournaments with friends on occasion, and it's been a lot of fun -- nobody has to invest any more money than the packs they buy for that day; and nobody has to invest time play-test…
The playing field is level only theoretically. Experience drafting and knowing really well the set you're drafting from are needed for anything more than just a friendly game.
I think it is perceived to people differently by the stance they chose to take (voluntarily or involuntarily) about life. There are a set of people who see life as maximizing risk to stand our from the herd. It is mostly people who learned the world not by books, but by experience: Musicians, artists, entrepreneur, etc. The other set of people try minimizing the risk to make life predictable: engineers, lawyers, doct…
Reading bluffs and calculating pot odds are unique skills to poker that translate well to real-world situations. Surprised this article mentions neither.
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…
I appreciate what you and the article posting are getting at, but this is competitive, would it be better to teach your kids cooperation (teamwork) strategies first and competitive ones like chess/poker next. Not just because it's pro-social and non-rivalrous, there's arguments for this in game theory itself, in the iterated prisoner's dilemma it's often the strategies that start by cooperating and then fall back on…
Think of race car drivers who, of course, all want to win. But winning by forcing your opponent off the track is less satisfying and less admirable than racing "cleanly" (i.e. cooperating with your opponent to prevent crashes).
Competition, within a well defined set of boundaries, is cooperative.
Edit: I'm not sure whether the competitive impulse is a general feature of humans, or just a byproduct of our age, but it nevertheless is a factor currently, so it has to be accounted for in any vision of how we get from here to a more cooperative future. I'm specifically thinking of Cory Doctorow's Walkway, in which people (implicitly, and with some measure of shame) feel a competitive drive to do more for the greater good than others.
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Any normal chess player can beat the best poker player in the world with a little luck. No poker player can beat the best chess player in the world unless they aren't at their level already.
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.
For comparison, 50K hands is a standard length for heads up matches between pros, with the understanding that even then the best player is not guaranteed to win. In live play, you'd be looking at 50-100 hands per hour.
It's true that with a greater skill gap you'd need less time, but you'd still be looking at thousands of hands if you wanted something like 95% confidence that the better player was up.
IMO chess is better for kids. And I say this as someone who played competitively as a kid, later who made a living playing poker for a year or so (then decided the lifestyle and stress wasn't for me). Poker is 100% connected to the money part. It also punishes good play and rewards bad play way too often. A kid who grows up playing poker will just grow up cynical and probably become a gambler. There's other games wit…
Any recommendations?