How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card

The teachings from the games of gambling, probability etc is a valuable life skill that far too few people have.

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.

I mention this in threads/replies below:

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.

Also used to be in that world and identify similarly in terms of my lack of love for gambling.

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

> NL Holdem poker is absolutely a game of skill with an element of variance aka luck/lack-there-of.

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.

Hey I've started playing poker occasionally again, wanna have a chat about poker? My email is in my profile.

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)}`);

> I'm surprised at the general tone of response here towards the subject of poker overall [...] regarded as living a degenerate lifestyle

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.

For me, it's "decisions, not results." Poker will teach you patience and acceptance of that which is out of your control.

That’s it. That’s the entire strategy. I pray that the Texas Hold ‘Em fad doesn’t come back. That was an insufferable decade of hearing how clever everyone was.

That just makes you a tight passive player which is not the worst kind of player to be but also not likely to win you a lot of money

Every game is easier to learn when you start with simple rules and then add new ones as you go.

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.

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.

Article footnote mentions this with the caveat that it requires some dexterity that young children may find challenging. That aside, I think the two games make a great complementary pair and switching between provides a nice contrast for kids.

Life is full of uncertainty. Learning to take calculated risks, where most attempts fail but a few ones pay off big, is an important life skill. Reading other people's behavior to infer hidden information is another one -- Jane Street apparently used to have people learn poker to learn how to infer hidden information from the behavior of other people buying and selling stocks, but invented their own game (https://www.figgie.com/) to teach the same skills more efficiently.

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.

That’s funny. I’ve played poker but I’ve never gambled a cent in my life. How does that work? Oh yeah, we played poker with plastic chips not backed by any money. We just played for fun.

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

You can also use it to teach about the risk of gambling and simple probabilities. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Flush also has a meaning of fullness/abundance, "he was flush wish cash", "his face was flush with embarrassment". It can also mean something level to a surface, as in "this should sit flush against the wall".

Yeah, the only way to learn those skills is to engage in a degenerate gambling pastime, that is a gateway to many other degenerate gambling pastimes.

This entire thread is exactly like arguing with weed smokers on Reddit/r/trees.

After my kids fell in love Uno (in all it's versions) - I got them Monopoly Deal and Monopoly Bid - and I have to say they are both brilliant and fun games in their own right and very different to each other.

We then got the Cludo card games and were equally impressed.

So hang on, you play with just properties and simple cards; so in this simplified version of the game, you're mainly just trying to collect sets?