It's an essential skill in life anyway, but you also teach the usual ethics and morals and come down hard on them when you catch them in a meaningful lie.
I think it's also considered a developmental milestone as lying requires a pretty sophisticated theory of mind, and an understanding of the perspective of another person
It's a common misconception that poker is about lying or that you need to lie to play poker.
You can bet with a bad hand, but you don't need to say you have a good hand, if asked you can say you either have a bad hand or a good hand, without any impact to your strategy.
Lying holds no advantage in poker, you can easily play poker without lying, no correlation is intrinsic to the game or its rules, it's just a common association people make
> As a parent, I’m pleased that I’ve given her the tools to put herself through college hustling poker games, and then go work at a proprietary trading firm.
which is presumably written with the same sardonic intent as any other Matt Levine work.
The world order is falling apart and being an intelligent person makes you a target of the "anti-elite". I think teaching kids strategy and deception has never been more important.
When my kids were maybe 6 and 4 we started playing One Night Ultimate Werewolf as a family. It very quickly became clear this was a bad choice: the oldest went from being terrible at lying (and so ~never doing it) to actually being pretty good, surprisingly quickly. As soon as we noticed this we stopped, and while she didn't go back to how she had been there was definitely much less lying and she didn't remain good at it.
I’d say bluffing in poker isn’t really lying. I mean you certainly can look at it that way, but another way to look at it is “I have good hands here more often than you do so here strategically you have to fold when I bet”
Bluffing and detecting bluffing is a useful skill as long as used morally. Sort of like learning martial arts - just because we teach kids karate doesn't mean we want them to go around beating people up.
Gambling however can very easily ruin lives and be very adicting.
As someone else pointed out, bluffing is not lying. Bluffing is about applying some randomness to your betting patterns to force your opponents into overbetting slightly on average.
Lying would be trying to introduce a negative correlation between hand strength and bet size; bluffing is merely removing some of the positive correlation that exists.
One of the best life lessons I learned was while perusing a poker strategy book in a bookstore as a teen. I’ve never been into poker, not even sure why I picked it up.
One thing it said was the most important thing to remember is that most of your hands will be crap. Don’t get attached to a bad hand and don’t convince yourself that an ok hand is a good hand. If you just fold the bad hands and play the good ones you’re already a better player than most.
I took that to heart and it has served me well in life.
Had some family come over and play Texas Hold’em with us and their kids. It was clear they were too stupid to be intimidated so there was no possibility of bluffing, instead I just folded over and over again until I had two really good cards and then would see me no matter what I bet and ai grew my bankroll that way.
I like this. Most people try to teach card games by listing every rule, but it's much easier to play a simpler version then add in new rules.
I play the Chinese card game Zhao Peng You (Finding Friends, part of the Sheng Ji family of games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheng_ji), which is a trick taking game with a trump suit that changes between games, a trump number that changes between games, and a team selection mechanic rather than fixed teams. It's insanely hard to learn everything at once, so we usually start new people with fixed teams and trumps just to get the feel of a team-based trick-taking game, before adding in the complications.
We play Uno like this. Start with the basic (agreed upon house rules), then every time someone wins a hand they get to add or remove any rule they want, as long as it doesn't outright break the gameplay.
Blind Man's Bluff is a great variant: Give everyone a card face-down, they put it on their forehead without looking at it. Bet based on whether or not you think the card on your forehead is higher than other people's. More fun in my opinion.
I have always been mystified by the popularity of poker. To me, it is an unpleasant game.
First - the fact that it's played for real money. If I win, I feel like a common swindler stealing money that someone could use to pay their bills or buy something nice for themselves. If I lose, I feel like a swindler's victim. And if the people around the table happen to be my friends - why would I ever wish to victimize them, or ruin their image in my mind by watching them victimize others?
Second - the lack of information. Many interesting games provide incomp9lete information of game state to the players, which one then needs to reconstruct. But with poker, the lack of information is so severe that one has no hope of reconstructing the game state - reasonable possibilities are too many to analyze, one is forced to pretty much guess and make gambles. It's an unpleasant experience.
It seems like a game for people whose brains are wired in a manner incompatible with mine. If I discover that someone likes poker, I find them rather suspicious. And people who teach poker to their own children - like the article'a author - are, to me, utterly incomprehensible.
I taught our youngest Monopoly Deal with similar simplification: removed all but properties, birthday and debt collector/etc. Then added property stealing/swapping. Then rent. It was very effective in getting her quickly up to speed.
I'm surprised at the general tone of response here towards the subject of poker overall (I didn't read the article yet so perhaps something more is in the context, but all the same); I understand there are many in the poker world even regarding the most successful of whom are regarded as living a degenerate lifestyle, but being that I was previously in that world myself and was not a degenerate type; I never gambled outside of "my game" that I had an edge in, I learned and implemented proper bankroll management and I studied the game on fundamental levels and on up, progressing into the meta-psyche game that is NL heads-up.
Which brings me to my point which is that while some forms of poker have proven "beatable" by ai, certain forms ie; short-handed tables of NL Holdem, increase in perpexlity to a point where, in heads-up, there are too many variables at play both "physically" (the cards and corresponding hand ranks) and metaphysically (the story being implied thru the route of actions taken at each street from preflop, flop, turn, to river) for there to exist some perfect approach against a skilled player.
NL Holdem poker is absolutely a game of skill with an element of variance aka luck/lack-there-of.
Haha, I just taught my 5-year-old "high card" poker last week. He loves it. Planning on doing a similar progression. Not sure when to stop showing the hands at the end when people fold. He's still in the place where he really hates to lose, but it didn't take him long to get the idea of "minimize losses for bad hands, maximize gains for good hands", which is the main life lesson I'd like him to take from poker.
Once kids get familiarity with odds and probability they will soon realise that casino games they have no edge and the house always wins. Also you cannot bluff a casino dealer which is half the fun
A lot of starcraft players transitioned to Poker. Because both games require decision making in a system with incomplete information(like real life). That's why parents should teach their kids how to play poker. Otherwise they risk going by in life without critical cognitive skills.
I learned watching my grandfather play with his buddies every week. Never bet real money on it, but I love sweeping house with friends and buying the pizza. :)
I’ve taught all five of my kids how to play poker, and if they ever sit down at a cash game consider their stack gone and play the cards (remove the dopamine chaos). Learn the math, betting strategies, and look for villain patterns.
These all directly relate to real life.
I believe in it so much that I have a tournament training app startup: https://mach9poker.com/.
There’s a company in Chicago that teaches women poker in relation to business: https://pokerpower.com/.
Bankroll management is a critical skill regardless of the use case.
Great stuff. Growing up, I played both chess an poker seriously. Chess mostly in person: in a club, at tournaments and league matches. Poker mostly online, for real money (age verification wasn't taken very seriously at the time). Though I've spent more time on chess in total, poker has had a bigger impact on my outlook on life. It constantly confronts you with your own cognitive biases and teaches you how to deal with uncertainty and variance, two very important things people by default kinda suck at.
This was nice! I tried with my five year old using nuts and bolts as chips. They got it right away and we quickly upgraded to two cards. The three year old also wanted to join but they had no idea what they were doing. (Cargo culting the motions with no correlation to hand strength.)
Come to think of it, we also did not ante but used blinds instead. That way I could put him in the small blind and open up by asking "do you think your card is higher than mine? if so you need to call the current bet of 2."
Huh this actually makes sense, it strikes directly at the reasons I’ve never wanted to try playing poker. I’m in my fifties and I have a vague idea that there is a hierarchy of hands and that something called a “flush” is probably the winning hand (which is pretty absurd given that the main way I use “flush” is as a verb for disposing of my body’s waste products via the city’s sewage system) but I have absolutely zero grasp of the mechanics of going from “people are dealt hands” to “someone won”, and not enough free cash to play a game people seem to generally insist is absolutely not worth playing if it’s not for money. The levels of analysis hardcore players constantly descend into at the faintest excuse is really unappealing too, filling my brain up with that sounds impossibly tedious.
(Please do not attempt to explain the rules of poker to me in replies unless you are being hilariously wrong.)
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 71.8 ms ] threadYou never got away with anything as a teenager?
You can bet with a bad hand, but you don't need to say you have a good hand, if asked you can say you either have a bad hand or a good hand, without any impact to your strategy.
Lying holds no advantage in poker, you can easily play poker without lying, no correlation is intrinsic to the game or its rules, it's just a common association people make
> As a parent, I’m pleased that I’ve given her the tools to put herself through college hustling poker games, and then go work at a proprietary trading firm.
which is presumably written with the same sardonic intent as any other Matt Levine work.
Bluffing and detecting bluffing is a useful skill as long as used morally. Sort of like learning martial arts - just because we teach kids karate doesn't mean we want them to go around beating people up.
Gambling however can very easily ruin lives and be very adicting.
Lying would be trying to introduce a negative correlation between hand strength and bet size; bluffing is merely removing some of the positive correlation that exists.
I took that to heart and it has served me well in life.
I play the Chinese card game Zhao Peng You (Finding Friends, part of the Sheng Ji family of games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheng_ji), which is a trick taking game with a trump suit that changes between games, a trump number that changes between games, and a team selection mechanic rather than fixed teams. It's insanely hard to learn everything at once, so we usually start new people with fixed teams and trumps just to get the feel of a team-based trick-taking game, before adding in the complications.
First - the fact that it's played for real money. If I win, I feel like a common swindler stealing money that someone could use to pay their bills or buy something nice for themselves. If I lose, I feel like a swindler's victim. And if the people around the table happen to be my friends - why would I ever wish to victimize them, or ruin their image in my mind by watching them victimize others?
Second - the lack of information. Many interesting games provide incomp9lete information of game state to the players, which one then needs to reconstruct. But with poker, the lack of information is so severe that one has no hope of reconstructing the game state - reasonable possibilities are too many to analyze, one is forced to pretty much guess and make gambles. It's an unpleasant experience.
It seems like a game for people whose brains are wired in a manner incompatible with mine. If I discover that someone likes poker, I find them rather suspicious. And people who teach poker to their own children - like the article'a author - are, to me, utterly incomprehensible.
Which brings me to my point which is that while some forms of poker have proven "beatable" by ai, certain forms ie; short-handed tables of NL Holdem, increase in perpexlity to a point where, in heads-up, there are too many variables at play both "physically" (the cards and corresponding hand ranks) and metaphysically (the story being implied thru the route of actions taken at each street from preflop, flop, turn, to river) for there to exist some perfect approach against a skilled player.
NL Holdem poker is absolutely a game of skill with an element of variance aka luck/lack-there-of.
I learned watching my grandfather play with his buddies every week. Never bet real money on it, but I love sweeping house with friends and buying the pizza. :)
These all directly relate to real life.
I believe in it so much that I have a tournament training app startup: https://mach9poker.com/.
There’s a company in Chicago that teaches women poker in relation to business: https://pokerpower.com/.
Bankroll management is a critical skill regardless of the use case.
Come to think of it, we also did not ante but used blinds instead. That way I could put him in the small blind and open up by asking "do you think your card is higher than mine? if so you need to call the current bet of 2."
(Please do not attempt to explain the rules of poker to me in replies unless you are being hilariously wrong.)