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Comment by remflight | Hacker News Reader

Poker with real money. Playing poker with fake money is utterly worthless. There needs to be real money behind your decision making but I promise it is eye opening.

Learning how to play poker is one of the most important skills you can learn in life. It teaches you so many things about life: how to make decisions based on incomplete information and being okay with unfavorable outcomes; knowing how to control your risk and knowing when to push more when the odds are in your favor; learning how to take a bunch of small losses vs less frequent but much larger wins, etc.

Poker really changed my perspective on life and risk management. Being able to fold your hand 80% of the time and seeing those hands going on to win a huge pot, but telling yourself you did the right move because there’s no way you would have known beforehand, is an extremely valuable life skill.

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"being okay with unfavorable outcomes; knowing how to control your risk"

Isn't the winning move not playing, then? I've never seen the appeal. If I lose, I feel the loss of money; but if I win, that's not enjoyable in the same way losing that equivalent would be displeasing.

And either I'm playing with friends, in which case there's no joy in depriving someone else (if I win); or I'm playing with strangers, in which case why would I care about what's going on at the table?

I've always paid poker with fake money and it does the trick too. I've had friends cry over losing lots of Zynga poker money. Losing 10 hours worth of gains in one game hurts.

Sounds like they didn't learn bankroll management.

+1 Online poker was very popular in the late 00's/early 10's (Omaha hasn't had AI dominated play - yet.) where people would self-publish and distribute their tips & tricks to new players if you bought their DVD & PDF set. Decisions made at every stage impact how other players interpret and play the game, and forces you to quickly learn situational awareness in order to best adapt in a changing environment. You could start out with memorizing the starting hand probabilities, read what the strongest 5-card combo on the board could be, and then aspire towards playing GTO to maximize the number of hands won. Even though you'd only be playing with a few dollars, the human element of stubbornness kicks in when having to top up your chips after losing a big hand, and that reward mechanism "spins the same gears" in your brain as the endgame in an RTS video game does. Not to mention the boost it gives to real-life skills of dealing with imperfect information events.

In a similar vein, I'm scared of losing the game, my rating, and my ego (how could I possibly lose?) every time I queue up a chess game.

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