How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card
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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 reccomend:
Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts Hardcover – 6 Feb. 2018 by Annie Duke
Or listen to any of the podcasts she did when promoting the book - Peter Attia or Masters of Business are the two I presonally consumed at that time.
It's a warped puritanism.
I agree with everything you've said, and I think we'd have better politics, economics, human relationships and fun, if more people got their heads out of their posteriors and actually understood poker more.
I'd suggest that you're empirically incorrect in saying that there is no perfect approach against a skilled player (6handed games which often reduce to a single heads-up interactions by showdown):
1. we know that a Nash equilibrium exists for every two-player zero-sum game such that it’s mathematically unexploitable
2. Pluribus approximated the Nash well enough (didn’t have to search over 10^161 possibilities) to crush high stakes skilled player over a good run of hands
I’ve played a lot of Holdem, and I’m not sure I agree. A lot of what passes for skill is just an innate understanding of the odds.
John Scarne writes about gambling that a good bet isn’t one you are likely to win, but one where the payout is enough to be worth the risk. The best players know the odds of pulling a straight and can do math to figure out if it’s worth chasing one.
That works well for limit games, where you can’t bet more than a set amount (in relation to the blinds or the current pot), especially when there are multiple people at the table, and you’re in an advantageous late position so others act before you do.
In high-stakes no-limit heads-up (1v1) play, the cards you’re holding matter less, especially before the flop. EV and pot odds are almost useless except for gauging when to bluff / if you’re being bluffed. Hands rarely end in a showdown as opposed to one of the players folding. The hands that do are essentially coin-flips, with both players holding what they believe are strong hands.
Humans are improving their game by using solvers and introducing randomness into their decisions. For instance, an optimal strategy given a hand might be "fold 80% of the time". One way to do that in live play is look at the second hand of a watch and fold unless it seconds (in this case) are about 48 (80% prob).
"The odds", however, are not simply a function of the cards in your hand and the unknown cards in the deck. There are also the cards in other people's hands, and getting a good read on what they may be based on the person's behavior is absolutely a skill.
It's always entertaining to play poker with 1 friend who is very skilled at a table full of novices. They often get frustrated and crash out due to their read on other people's behavior being miscalibrated to the situation.
The most frustrating poker game I play is the monthly Saturday Night game with the bros where they're mostly drinking and watching sports, and none of them are very good or play regularly in casinos.
You can usually get a good read on people who are decent-to-good players, playing in a casino. Their bets will generally make sense and tell a believable story (whether or not they are bluffing). You can mostly tell when they are playing ABC poker vs. getting out of line or making moves. People's bet sizing, their approach to pot management, their ranges, their play style, tight vs. loose, passive vs. aggressive, tend to be identifiable. In other words, players tend to act in ways you'd expect from poker players who have played 10,000 hands.
The Saturday Night amateur gang don't play in ways that make sense or are classifiable. You can't tell what their range is, because they don't even know what a range is. Their betting lines don't make sense because they aren't poker players, and often aren't even paying attention to the current hand. You really have to play these kinds of games differently, and/or just relax and consider it a night of drinking and random bingo instead of poker.
I used to be a winning player at small stakes about 20 years ago, so nothing major but enough for me to show that it's a game of skill.
But yea, for anyone interested why poker is a game of skill, it's due to the law of large numbers. You can easily see the law kick into effect when you simulate a dice roll and you win from 1 to 4 and the other wins 5 to 6 and you both get $1 if you win. I recently had to explain this concept so I happen to have the JS still lying around in my Chrome console.
const rolls = 10_000;
let a = 0;
let b = 0;
for (let i = 0; i < rolls; i++) {
const die = Math.ceil(Math.random() * 6); // 1–6
if (die <= 4) a++;
else b++;
}
console.log(`Player A wins: $${a}`);
console.log(`Player B wins: $${b}`);
console.log(`Total paid out: $${a + b}`);
console.log(`A's edge per game: ${(a - b) / rolls}`);
console.log(`Difference: ${(a - b)}`);At a common online pace of 1.5 hands per minute (live games are much slower) that's over a thousand hours of playing. I.e. even if playing for one hour every day, it takes years before a player knows whether they're profitable or not.
Seems disingenious to compare to dice when you presumably know poker belongs to that class of distributions to which the central limit theorem applies very slowly.
Maybe the people who are negative have read to the end of the article where we are let into the not-so-hidden agenda of the parent: Teach the kids to hustle their way through college so they can become a market speculator.
I took that to heart and it has served me well in life.
That for me was the greatest life lesson from that time.
Also how there was all these poker strategy books but I don't remember a single one trying to model the strategy of the rake and how to determine if the rake made a game unbeatable. Basically, assuming all games at all levels of rake are beatable.
How convenient for the house.
Once you consider what the house earns, poker is a net negative for the players. In order for there to be some big winners, there have to be a lot of losers. And a shocking number of those losers will, thanks to our selective memories, consider themselves winning players.
Not a poker player, just thought that was a thing.
Zero-sum nature of the game aside, Meta developed an AI that wins consistently at poker, so it is possible to be good at poker and win consistently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluribus_(poker_bot)
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 teach people Liar's Dice. It's a very simple game, especially if you build it up like this. Everyone gets five Dice. You roll them and look at your own, and then take turns guessing how many of a given number are on the table. Guesses have to "go up" (either the number of dice stays the same and the number of pips goes up, or the number of dice goes up). Instead of guessing you can challenge the person before you. Whoever is wrong loses a die and game play repeats.
After a few rounds, dice showing a one are wild.
After a few more rounds, if anyone in a round bids 1's, then ones are not wild for that round.
After a few more rounds we start discussing the probabilities and strategies.
The challenge is not breaking the game fundamentally while you add rules.
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.
ETA: I would say, when poker is taught correctly, it should discourage anyone from the sorts of gambling which are problematic:
Problem 1: Wasting your money in situations where the odds are "with the house". This would include playing slot machines or basically anything at a casino, the lottery, or even 50/50 raffles (although I can see an exception for the last one).
Poker should teach you to only take bets where the expected value (value of winning * prob winning) is greater than the cost, which is not true in the above examples.
Problem 2: Getting sucked into betting more and more to make up what you've already lost. One aspect of long-term poker should be teaching you is how to manage this effectively.
If you think getting to say “I won” is gambling, then we have nothing to discuss.
https://archive.nytimes.com/well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/04/2...
> greater consumption in life
with equivalent or lower alcoholism or alcohol dependency disorders - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/alcoholis...
Something something about correlation and causation. I will weigh studies that try to eliminate confounders above population data rife with them.
(Please do not attempt to explain the rules of poker to me in replies unless you are being hilariously wrong.)
This entire thread is exactly like arguing with weed smokers on Reddit/r/trees.
Equally, if you consider weed a degenerate pleasure to begin with, then of course you're going to disagree with teenagers going "hehehe, look at my first bong!!"
If you listen to a person describe the way to play as a Tight Aggressive poker player, you will see that the message parallels what Warren Buffett says about Value Investing.
We then got the Cludo card games and were equally impressed.
https://www.tabletopfinder.eu/en/boardgame/61182/the-gang
[note: from my description, it might seem unclear that this game is ALL about friendly communication and deciding altogether with a very limited set of informations. My nearest definition of a kid-compliant version of poker :)]
Poker is a great way to learn a lot of life lessons about human psychology, money management, strategy vs tactics, game theory, and so much more.
There is this weird protestant puritanism around so many aspects of life that confuse me. Every child is going to become an adult, but there is this attitude that they must be shielded from all adult knowledge until they're 21 as if that's helpful.
Your kid can - through game play - learn so much that will make them a more balanced, rounded, capable human than their peers. And done the right way, they're not going to end up degenerate gamblers, but quite the opposite.
I dont want to romanticize the game in his mind, so when he grows up people ask him to play poker and he sees it as "that nice game we played at home!".
It is a game with very strong connections with gambling. There are thousands of other games without that association which are as rewarding as poker.
It's based on deception, so teaches kids to distrust others and deceive others for the sake of winning.
It gives crazy adrenaline rushes that even adults fail to control. That can't be good for the brain.
You don't seem to realize that 4-year-old is extremely young, and kids that age need security more than anything. They need to know adults have their backs and are not in it for themselves. They need to know people aren't lying to them.
Sure you need to prepare kids for the real life, but there is an age for everything, and my opinion is that 4-year-old is not a good age to learn poker, just as it's not great to put 6-year-old in front of horror movies, or give wine to 10-year-olds.
There is plenty of time to learn money management.
I think he mentions it in several lectures, but here's one: https://youtu.be/av5Hf7uOu-o?t=697
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. :)
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.
If you take the money out of it you have to replace it with something that matters to the players outside of the game itself for it to work.
(On the lack of information - some versions of poker are different than others but imo Texas Holdem has enough shared information that, combined with the knowledge that people really care about winning or losing informing your ability to read them based on their actions enables very strategic gameplay - the existence of a pro scene with players that consistently do well at a high level of play is evidence of this)
As another aside - I see similar complaints about strategy games that include RNG for things like attack values, and I also disagree with that criticism. I would argue that risk management is an interesting skill that's very hard to include in a game with perfect information.
This claim is genuinely alien to me. I've seen people play lots of games very competitively without tying money in it. No one would seriously claim that chess hustler games are the only serious chess games, yet that claim looks oddly similar to the one made in poker. Why would poker be an exception? Is the game not interesting enough to play without it? Does the game use money to lure in a population of players that would otherwise not play? If so, is i likely that this extra population is skilled enough at the game to compete fairly?
And if you saw your opponent move their queen would you be more confident that they probably saw a path to victory than you would be otherwise, and would you maybe spend more time analyzing moves that required that queen move instead of what you might have analyzed instead otherwise? (analogous to bluffing in poker).
Basically the fact that there's some external factor you can use to communicate what your move might mean to other players makes the mind games/bluffing/analysis work better than if you were just playing to win. The money isn't just linked to whether you win or lose - it's actually tied to the individual mechanics in a way that affects how each round plays out.
Let me give you a counter-comparison: if regardless of which chess piece was moved, after both players had made a play, they could bet on the game outcome (therefore not changing the ev of a move), I'm not sure players would want to play differently.
Yes. Poker ceases to be interesting when not played for something. Chess and most other games are certainly different in this aspect.
It's hard to articulate how this happens, but when the chips have no value, the game plays totally different, and just isn't poker anymore. There's no point to bluffing, or aggressively raising, or agonizing over whether you should fold your two pair, if a 100 chip bet has the same zero value as a 1000 chip bet. It just ends up playing like a boring, no stakes "guess the number I'm thinking" game.
That's kind of an issue, though. Richer players are advantaged, as are seasoned players who are used to lose large amounts of money. That's not really related to game skills, since there is no way to ensure that players bet something equally valuable to them, which in your reasoning means that some players start with an advantage.
Obviously players with much larger bankrolls can weather variance better, but that should even out at pretty much any table a player should reasonably be at (don't play stakes you can't afford where losing the money severely negatively impacts your life).
I agree with you here quite strongly.
Chess and go even more so are perfect information games, but there is substantial risk in strategies than can be derailed by the opponent noticing them too early or even by not noticing and ignoring bait.
To me, full-information games feel immensely boring, they all look like a harder version of Tic-Tac-Toe that require a bigger brain. Just don't make mistakes and you're guaranteed to win. Harder games like chess just make it so incredibly expensive and attention draining that only a special kind of people get really good.
The fun part of Poker for me is exactly the psychological game of reconstructing the hidden info. Tuning your intuition when you know you still lack it is also fun and revealing.
Regarding teaching children: bluff and lies are rampant in real life. Poker teaches to take it into account and to do it yourself in a no-consequence conditions. Even if you never resort to it you need to know what it feels like to understand others.
It's the first time I've been classified as suspicious, to my knowledge. Cool.
My issue with poker is the money component, especially in cash games (I don't mind it in MTT): I think it's manipulative, basically using dopamine highs to make the game seem more interesting.
It doesn't really take a very high buy-in to achieve those goals. When my buddies and I play, we typically go with a $20 buy in, denominated in dimes or quarters.
If I need to be manipulated for me to appreciate playing, is it really worth? Because we know dopamine rushes have effect on your brain outside of the game, when it's over.
> reasonable possibilities are too many to analyze, one is forced to pretty much guess.
You could say the same thing about chess, but an experienced player wouldn't, because they know which candidate moves are reasonable and which lines to delve into through intuition shaped by experience.
Similarly, you might say the same about poker. The possible hands your opponent has are actually quite large, but an experienced player can have a reasonable idea of the possible hands and their probabilities, which may involve eg ignoring most hands as unrealistic and bucketing hands into classes.
No, chess is on the opposite side of the spectrum! In chess, at all times you have perfect knowledge of the entire state of the board; in poker, you know 2 cards.
That is because although chess appears to be a game of perfect information, it is impossible to calculate anything but a small fraction of possible future game states in a limited time. So skilled chess players must make educated guesses as to which lines are worth calculating, whether their opponent has already studied the current line, and what moves to play to get them out of their memorization.
This is effectively a game of limited information where solid Bayesian reasoning wins, just like poker.
There's always some missing information but it's not quite as bad as you make out. In chess you don't know what the other player is thinking.
you dont know what lines your opponent has studied, and they dont know which lines youve studied
Poker is basically the same type of game as "Among us". You might have some hints but you're not supposed to be able to entirely recreate the game state. If you can, the game is boring.
Money cheapens social interactions. It reduces them to competitive advantage, exploiter or exploited. I do not want to interact with anyone that way, ever. Certainly not friends.
But I acknowledge that this is oversimplified. It is possible for mature people to find an appropriate level of heightened excitement/tension due to the elevated consequences of money. Most people have the self-control to handle/compartmentalize it, or to avoid levels where the consequences become meaningful to them (this gets harder if alcohol is involved, which it seems to always be).
This appropriate level will vary by group, but there seems to be a persistent conflict between "excitingly meaningful" and "respectfully modest" amounts of money. And of course everyone's monetary circumstances are different. And there's a social pressure to participate which may exceed your circumstances. And there's an issue where the strong (experienced) players have no choice but to prey upon the weak (new or less smart) players. These issues are the inescapable ugliness that I just can't get over.
So I will never play any game for money, and I sometimes wonder whether people who enjoy such predatory thinking patterns are deserving of a standard level of trust.
I know it's not that simple, but sometimes it is.
The other arguments, about teaching strategy vs tactics, human psychology (under stress), working with imperfect information, calculated risks, etc, are all valid and important too. And I believe that playing for money elevates these lessons. Some people (for pleasure or necessity) choose to be hard-nosed in life. My enduring privilege is that I do not need to be, and I am very grateful for that.
As a kid (~12 year old) I played for matchsticks.
It’s okay to not like popular things, not every game is for every person. The thing you describe as unpleasant, is what some people enjoy about the game.
> 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.
Well, that is a good chunk of the population. Which isn’t to say it’s wrong to be suspicious of most people, but I’m not sure poker is an reliable indicator.
Edit: It's also a socially acceptable time to lie your ass off. Maybe it's a hit like how GTA is for some people as well.
The whole point is to lie your ass off.
Don't play for real money then. I played a lot of poker with friends, but never for money - everybody gets the same amount of chips at the start and the winner is the last man standing (i.e. the winner of the random all in once most players are out, usually)
Though poker and similar games were only tiny part of our games.
(except some cases where player was utterly doomed and checked out)
It leads to overly aggressive, low-information gameplay, because players will opt to "either win or lose by a lot" over "lose by a little".
Also it seems to be complex enough there is no mental space or time left to talk about anything other than the tiles. Exhausting!
I have been lead to belive that community Mahjong is an excellent time for catching up, but then again, I've never gone and don't know how to play.
For example in amateur chess tournaments it is common for the prize money to come out of the entry fees. Fairly typical might be a $15 dollar entry fee in advance or $20 at the door, and a prize fund of $350 ($200 first, $100 second, $50 third) based on 30 entries. It will be lower if they get fewer entries, but let's say they get exactly 30. Then 3 players are going home with more than they came with. The other 27 are going home $15 or $20 in the hole.
Would you feel bad if you played in such a tournament and finished in the top 3? Some of the 27 losers might have had a better use for their entry fee.
No one is being victimised. Everyone's signing up to potentially lose their money. It doesn't have to be very much money to make it work well, but it generally needs to be some money.
You do have incomplete information, but to the extent you describe it only exists within a single hand. If you play for a couple of hours, you get more information. That's the point. You're not playing the cards, you're playing the people holding them.
And that's a great allegory for life, and you can learn a lot that will help you in life in general.
As such, I find people who don't teach poker to their own children - like yourself - are, to me, utterly incomprehensible.
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."
> 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.
Werewolf isn't like poker where people typically try to conceal their emotions and leak nothing; instead you're trying to act like you're on the Villager team regardless of whether you actually are.
Maybe a mafia style game would be more suitable where both sides are played.
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
How about "behaving in a way that increases the probability of your particular adversaries making incorrect inferences about your situation"?
I'd call that lying with extra steps.
(Which to be clear, im fine with in the context of a game (and in certain contexts even in real life). Plenty of sports can be traced back to ritualized ways of practising to murder people. Take all the field sports of track and field)
Maybe you can argue steganography is lying.
Regardless, i also find the idea that lying is morally wrong reductive. Morality depends on context. There are plenty of cases where being misleading is morally ok in my opinion.
If we assume a default state of avoiding engagement, the average poker player is giving away more information that could lead to correct inferences by playing than bad information by bluffing. Exactly at which point does the lie happen?
Because you treated cryptography as a field in its entirety. I think in practise that is how cryptography as a field works normally. Most secret messages communicated with crypto simply wouldn't be communicated (or just communicated in person) without the availibility of cryptography.
Even if the alternative is communicating in a way open to evesdropping i think there is still an intent requirement.
> Exactly at which point does the lie happen?
When there is intentionality to mislead (including by omission).
If you want to be really nitpicky, the definition i would give would be:
Taking (or failing to take) some action for the purpose of causing an adversary to have incorrect or incomplete beliefs that benefit you.
Is that better or worse than calling it deception?
Instead of thinking of a bet as saying "I have good cards" think of it instead as "I have an advantage in this pot", which is not a lie.
In poker advantages can come from cards, or from other objective measures such as position, stack size. And of course from subjective measures like being able to read your opponent.
Deceiving my opponent has the connotation of this happening in one instance. After you realize that you can't convincingly deceive your opponents in poker into perpetuity, it becomes a game of managing your image —revealing the right information while being conscious of information that you shared in the past (if you're playing someone skilled or perceptive, that is).
On the flip side, what an excellent game to help people pay attention to signals, figure out how to weigh them appropriately, and appropriately act on them when the situation calls for it.
Just because other people may try to lie to you, does not mean that you need to lie in order to succeed.
No one said "lying can't be used at all"
The first is mostly inconsequential in poker, you should avoid having tells in your posture and speak, but the goal is to avoid conveying information about your hand, not conveying false information about it to deceive.
The second is just the game itself, acting as if you had strong cards has a cost, and is not lying, when you bet you are not saying "I have a hand". In a sense you may bet with a bad hand, but you are more forcing your opponent to pay for a chance to win the pot on account of your hand potentially containing a strong hand. You are truthful in your representation of a potential strong card.
In fact if you were to bluff on a situation were you could not ever have held a strong hand, it would be a mistake, and you would stand to lose expected value.
The claim is not that deception can be used as a strategy at all. That btw is actually an uninteresting claim. In almost all games, you can lie to your opponent and probably gain some advantage.
If I were coaching a beginner poker player, I would honestly tell them to play statistically sound poker. That's a good way to make a lot of money.
You never got away with anything as a teenager?
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.
At that point, the table awareness of the bluff is still profitable because it forces others to bet into your strong hands.
A bluff that is revealed is just as good as one kept secret. Many people seem to misunderstand this.
Is that a thing... in English? Or in some specific part of the world?
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.
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people that dont understand rules 100%
wagers with no real value (time/money/snacks)
people who dont want to play outright
(no offence to any tennis aficionados - it's a Poker thing)