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Teach your kids poker, not chess

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Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#71

Post by quickthrowman »

imustbeevil wrote: post #63

Teach your kids the basic social skills that society mistakenly believes other children will teach them, instead of teaching them the only competitive game so universally boring that people can only play it with money on the line. If Poker was a good competitive game, there would be an ELO system and people would play because they care about their skill ranking more than they care about gambling. There's a reason you…

> If Poker was a good competitive game, there would be an ELO system and people would play because they care about their skill ranking more than they care about gambling.

There is an ELO system of sorts, it’s the size of your bankroll. If you are a skilled poker player, you should win more than you lose.

Tournament poker is different than cash games, there’s a limited pool of chips and the goal is to win them all.

> Poker is an economic scheme where the House and the Sharks work together to lure people with real jobs into unfair competition / gambling with bad odds.

Agreed, it’s Wall Street in the form of a table game.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#72

Post by imustbeevil »

quickthrowman wrote: post #71
imustbeevil wrote: post #63

Teach your kids the basic social skills that society mistakenly believes other children will teach them, instead of teaching them the only competitive game so universally boring that people can only play it with money on the line. If Poker was a good competitive game, there would be an ELO system and people would play because they care about their skill ranking more than they care about gambling. There's a reason you…

> If Poker was a good competitive game, there would be an ELO system and people would play because they care about their skill ranking more than they care about gambling. There is an ELO system of sorts, it’s the size of your bankroll. If you are a skilled poker player, you should win more than you lose. Tournament poker is different than cash games, there’s a limited pool of chips and the goal is to win them all. >…

Any game could incorporate wagers into its rounds. You could bet on plays in a football game. You could bet on matches in Chess. However, the competitive foundation isn't predicated on these wagers. This allows for more dimensions of skill variation because game participants can take risks that won't kill them.

In Poker, especially in tournaments but over time in cash games as well, there will necessarily be more losers than winners. That's a fine outcome for a competitive environment, and a terrible outcome for an economic one. And because placement is based on willingness to play at certain stakes instead of skill rating, the entire system is designed to mismatch the skill of the participants over the long term.

Betting on probabilities is an entertaining way to adjust levels of confidence to reality. I just don't really like the idea of promoting gambling to children.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#73

Post by totorovirus »

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, doctors are likely to fall in to this category. I don't think one is superior to the other. It is just matter of your innate genes, early life experience, or from your parents whether you are risk seeking or risk avoiding.

And in poker you can take two strategies, play tight win small many times, or play loose win few big ones. Poker teaches you which strategy fits to your emotion/personality, and where you feel the most happiness. What I learned in poker is that I am much more of a loose player even if I bet real money. I was once a full time employee of a big tech firm, and playing poker just revealed what has been missing in my life: risk and thrill. So I decided to start by own business to maximize thrill and risk which has been much more 'emotionally' rewarding so far.

I am also a decent chess player (lichess.org elo 1800), but I find poker much more challenging and resembles many aspects of life. The frustration of being rejected by girl is strikingly similar to losing 3-betted pot in poker. The agony of seeing your stock price fall feels the same as your opponent folding his hand while you have a nut. Going through these up and downs teaches you a profound wisdom, as also mentioned in the article, that you shouldn't be taking too much feedback from success and fail but you should optimize the the rate of success of your strategy.

Of course, life is short and we only have few hands. Even if we count a day as a hand, we only have 365 * 40 = 14600 hands. So I don't think either strategy is superior to the other. It is more about what strategy feels right to you. Poker teaches exactly that. You get to know more about yourself

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#75

Post by aaron695 »

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…

No post body was provided.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#76

Post by lazyant »

quickthrowman wrote: post #71
imustbeevil wrote: post #63

Teach your kids the basic social skills that society mistakenly believes other children will teach them, instead of teaching them the only competitive game so universally boring that people can only play it with money on the line. If Poker was a good competitive game, there would be an ELO system and people would play because they care about their skill ranking more than they care about gambling. There's a reason you…

> If Poker was a good competitive game, there would be an ELO system and people would play because they care about their skill ranking more than they care about gambling. There is an ELO system of sorts, it’s the size of your bankroll. If you are a skilled poker player, you should win more than you lose. Tournament poker is different than cash games, there’s a limited pool of chips and the goal is to win them all. >…

(nitpick: it's "Elo", not "ELO", it's a name not an acronym)

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#77

Post by lazyant »

bush-bby wrote: post #3

>However, it is important to distinguish poker from a pure game of chance, like roulette. I feel like this is becoming an all too common trope on social media and for young people, where poker is portrayed as a risky but cool thing to do because you can convince people you’re skilled or better than others at it, and that means taking other peoples money with skill. Which is indeed something cool. Sure there’s reading…

There are no roulette professionals but there are poker professionals (some making millions).

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#78

Post by bananamerica »

I don't get why the author felt that he needed to shit on chess to demonstrate the qualities of poker. They're incredibly different games, with entirely different goals. It's like comparing Bergman's Persona and Indiana Jones. Really, what's the point?

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#79

Post by zmgsabst »

dougmsmith wrote: post #33
zmgsabst wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is that it doesn’t even mean you played better than your opponent overall, just that you “made the second to last mistake”. I also think there’s a larger element to reading your opponent in chess than many people give it credit for — what are they planning? …can you “tilt” them to make them play worse? Etc. It’s only at the very highest level you should expect people to play nearly perfect games… and ev…

That's certainly a thought from a brain. I'll hazard that parent's chess knowledge extends to "how the pieces move", possibly Scholar's Mate and its basic refutation (kidding, parent just read about Scholar's Mate on Wikipedia).

I think the reason you commented on a throwaway is that you know personal insults don’t belong on HN.

:)

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#80

Post by jpe90 »

dragontamer wrote: post #66
derivagral wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

It can be a good way to spark interest in programming as well! :)

https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/569688211158511616?...

(definitely stealing this technique, we'll see if it pays off in... nine years or so?)

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