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Comment by looperhacks | Hacker News Reader

> First - the fact that it's played for real money.

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)

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In my experience poker completely falls apart when it's not for real money. It just doesn't seem like a very good game in the sense that people don't try to win unless there's some external benefit to winning. It sucks to play with people who don't care.

Maybe I and my friends are overly competitive at board games, but not tying to win was not a problem for us.

Though poker and similar games were only tiny part of our games.

(except some cases where player was utterly doomed and checked out)

It's not about players not wanting to win, it's about wildly heterogeneous perspectives of winning. If we're not playing for cash, walking away in first place with $30 of the $100 bucks on the table isn't much different than walking away in first place with $80 of the $100 bucks. On the other hand, a second place win with $40 might be considered worse than a first place win with $30 dollars. With cash, those dollar amounts mean something intrinsically.

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".

I run home games with 5c/10c blinds (5$ buy in). Keeps element of real money, keeps things very casual, winning players usually leaves with ~20$. Have food etc, costs losing players less than it'd cost to go out for a sandwich

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