Teach your kids poker, not chess(momentofdeep.substack.com) |
Teach your kids poker, not chess(momentofdeep.substack.com) |
Throw in traditional logic puzzles which are entirely about incomplete information.
Kids can learn in many ways. Leverage all of them.
> Why do we then obsess about teaching our kids certain games (sports, specifically)?
I would leave OP's house at 16 if I was their child.
Next time you're on a flight trying this out and you get an invite to join a table against a passenger in the cheap seats, that might be me. Watch your wallet.
Teaching kids the probabilistic nature of life? Sure, if there is a way to teach a kid such things in a meaningful way. But I definitely veto teaching a child poker.
OTOH, chess is great. I didn't study any chess until my 20's. I've never had a problem with the sort of intelligence that is exercised in the school system, but chess exercised my brain in a novel way that might only be experienced in academia via pure math or theoretical physics. The visualization of moves, even a few moves in advance, can initially be surprisingly challenging, especially if there are many seemingly legitimate options. For those who have not seriously exercised this mental muscle before, I suspect it this kind of thinking will feel quite difficult.
After getting to the point where I could solve moderately difficult to difficult chess puzzles -- let's say approaching "master" level if you're familiar with the title hierarchy in chess -- the foresight required for programming, especially the kind that is done in most jobs nowadays, "felt" much easier. This is because getting to that level not only required the ability to visualize N steps in advance, but it also forces one to develop a very strong awareness of mental blind spots, which can be very humbling, and is an highly useful skill to have in this profession.
Would also be happy to see my kid get into fighting games, CCGs, MOBAs, FPS games....they're all cool and fun and deep as hell
The game itself doesn't have intrinsic chance, but as with everything in life, the players do.
I do agree with your last point though, winning doesn't mean you played well, it just means you played better than your opponent.
I also think there’s a larger element to reading your opponent in chess than many people give it credit for — what are they planning? …can you “tilt” them to make them play worse? Etc.
It’s only at the very highest level you should expect people to play nearly perfect games… and even those players discuss the psychology (eg, Hikaru Nakamura is top 50ish and discusses the role of psychology in high level chess).
People have been saying "the players are nondeterministic not the game," but epistemically what is a game with no players?
I play chess seriously in a tournament setting. While it is true the board is revealed, the board is not the game. The board is the operating theater of a game which is entirely within both players minds. People have become overly dismissive with the idea that the game is deterministic because chess engines exist. But chess engines are not even necessarily deterministic because the result of the alpha beta search still vary based on depth and the evaluation heuristic.
Without an evaluation function you cannot even interpret a board position at all. This function is simply not deterministic (unless formalized and then it will be imperfect to situation), and any GM will tell you that some positions are impossible to evaluate.
Additionally there are many times where engines produce suboptimal results until the search space is collapsed by a player like Hikaru. It's not frequent but it definitely happens.
Chess is a game between two Turing machines sharing a tape. Sharing a tape does not allow you to see the state of the machine in each players head. And if you have no players you have no game. This makes chess highly probabilistic in so many senses that using the game theoretic construct of "prefect information game" causes game theorists to seemingly literally not understand it.
Chess is a deeply human game subject to human variance. This is nondeterministic. Poker is also human, in other ways. Anyone who sees chess as deterministic is probably a weak player (less than 2000 fide) and doesn't understand this fundamental aspect of the game. At the higher levels there is even forms of bluffing and swindling, which is fantastic simply because you CAN see the same board and you were still able to manipulate the other player with their own prejudices.
You could say the same about poker. A player looking to improve their game will review their hand histories, and plug hands into PIO or HRC.
That's really not what's meant by chance. Chess is no more a game of chance than tennis or golf.
In poker, there's an element of randomness that's an explicit core part of the game (the deck).
No such mechanic exists in chess.
Chess gives you great feedback. You know why you lost. You learn a stack of new strategies to win.
Poker you might win a lot of hands due to luck. Luck of the hands. Not just your but your opponent having a good but worse hand than you.
Teaching poker is probably harder.
The only thing surveillance can't do, is see what I'll think in the following time period. A second in the future. Can't predict that, no amount of cams and AI models can see into the future that far. Actually can't, meaning that they cannot, predict the future. Can't do it. Apart from that, buy this data point for 6¢, sell this data point for 3¢, nag the user over every channel for a conversion.
But it's the only form of arbitrage left. The only barrier that is still a real barrier between anything. All the other barriers, geographic or legal, have collapsed. You just have time. That's it.
Can you see the future? You get a quadrillion dollars! No joke. Quadrillion dollar problem, like a billion Millennium Prizes.
Just say what will happen tomorrow, today.
Introduce them to many games, sure, but then back off. Once you start directing their play or supervising their play, you do more harm than good.
As a parent, you are supposed to make the choices that increase the chances of better outcomes for the children, whatever the parent considers those better outcomes to be.
This kind of thing was huge in the Chinese community when I was growing up. Every child played chess, was taking violin or piano lessons, was a member of the debate club, was vying for a place on the student council, was in AP classes, was being driven to so many extracurricular activities (chosen by their parents of course), and was downright MISERABLE. One even committed suicide.
Meanwhile the rest of us would go out to wherever we wanted (by bike usually), do whatever we wanted, came home by dinner, and had a wonderful childhood.
MTG has elements from both chess and poker and it's surprisingly easy to learn but stupid hard to master. You also don't have to worry about sex ed :))
It stings a lot less now thinking of my MtG, Pokemon, and Hearthstone spending.
Surprised this article mentions neither.
I feel like this is becoming an all too common trope on social media and for young people, where poker is portrayed as a risky but cool thing to do because you can convince people you’re skilled or better than others at it, and that means taking other peoples money with skill. Which is indeed something cool. Sure there’s reading people. But it’s a game of chance. Selling it as something more has literally no benefit.
A shape rotator that can't convince won't scale.
A wordcel that doesn't understand complexity, is just hot air.
B) Let your kids pick what they are interested in (either, both or neither.)
All of that can be done without reading people at all. In fact in online poker, there's not much reading of your opponent you can do usually, just judging based on their previous actions.
Certainly in both games there are no competitors, human or robot, that has solved the game.
That's reading.
The various strategies of poker (including playing ‘hail Mary’ hands, I’m sick of you bluffing hands and more) versus the play-book of chess (opening moves determine much).
A single mistake in chess can be irredeemable. In poker (unless you go all-in) a misstep can be rectified.
Chess has an elitist/bookish stigma. Poker is for beers, snacks and a game on the TV
I mean... no, it's not? Certainly there are elements of chance, but there are elements of chance in playing soccer or basketball, too, as well as Catan or Monopoly. But I wouldn't call those "games of chance".
I would define "a game of chance" as something where the outcomes solely depend on you betting on the result of a random process. Games like blackjack and craps are like that: even if you learn all the odds on everything and play "perfectly", your outcomes are still fully dependent on the randomness of the shuffle or the dice roll.
Poker is not like that at all. Yes, your outcomes are in part defined by the shuffle of the cards, but you are not playing against the deck or the dealer; you are playing against the rest of the players at the table. You can win with the worst hand if you make the other players believe your hand is better than it is. You can lose with the best hand if another player makes you believe their hand is better. That's just not possible with games like blackjack or poker. Either your cards are better than the dealer's, or vice versa; that's it. Either the dice roll matches with bets you've made, or not, or the shooter craps out. There's no ambiguity there, and you can learn the odds of winning or losing each particular bet that you can make.
(Just a note that you can also learn the odds of having the best or worst hand in poker based on your initial cards, and then update those odds as more cards appear. But in the case of poker, having the best or worst hand is not the same as winning or losing.)
This is fundamentally incorrect. Knowing when to fold is absolutely integral to being good at Poker (assuming tournament/competitive play). In some cases, you might be absolutely screwed by bad luck (like you can be in football if you tear your ACL), but Poker is not a game of luck. It's a game of probabilities and social engineering.
Championships are organized only for games of skill, where you can have at least some chance of predicting the game outcome, make spectators care about this or that player. No one in their right mind would organize the championship in coin flip, or in MegaMillions lottery, because those game are pure chance, you can play them for decades and your chance of winning will be no better than that of a beginner. It would be hard to promote someone as "MegaMillions champion".
Poker isn't a game of chance. It's a game of skill with an element of chance.
Kinda like life.
You don't see that happen on other games of chance, only games of skill. For example, there has never been a repeat winner at the Rock-Paper-Scissors world championship.
An example that makes this element really obvious is turn-based fighting video game Toribash.
:)
That is an important life lesson! If you’re doing a startup, you might execute perfectly and just hit a run of bad luck and have to give up on that idea. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try again!
I don't think anyone is arguing that?
But regardless, in poker you can still win money even if you have bad luck and draw bad cards every single hand. Just as you can still lose money even if you have great luck and draw great cards every single hand.
I think the point is that yes, there is an element of chance, but there's an element of skill beyond just memorizing odds and probabilities. Most people probably do have a better chance of winning more money if they are lucky and end up with better cards more of the time, but that's not always a reliable predictor of success.
If the world of professional poker only involved a couple dozen players and they only played 19 hands a year, you would absolutely see dynasties and near-perfect “seasons”.
Daniel Negreanu?
I'm being flippant here for a reason. I don't care at all about football, and can't remember the last time I've even seen the Super Bowl (or even have notice who was playing). My eyes glaze over if I'm with friends and they start talking about football. But I've heard of the Patriots. Hell, I even know the name of their head coach.
I'm an on-and-off recreational home/casino poker player, but I've never heard of Daniel Negreanu. Professional poker just hasn't achieved popular culture penetration to the degree that football has.
I couldn't name anyone on the Patriots, and I can definitely name more poker pros than I can football players. Doesn't mean anything.
Call this educational stage "deductive naivety": the child will become good at applying logic to their experiences. They will, shockingly quickly, outgrow this phase, and realize that the world does not lend itself to deduction in all cases. Now we can introduce nuance, distinguish between deductive/inductive/abductive reasoning, and start to introduce the child to the multivariate dimensions of the world.
In this way, the child becomes a curious and rigorous thinker. If you choose poker instead, you'll just breed a gambler.
Huh? Chess is fun, but deals in perfect information at all times. Poker teaches a person how to make decisions with imperfect information, which is how most life decisions will be made.
However, it is a closed system and all participants are visible, whereas poker has hidden surprises. It still has known rules. In real life (eg business, investing) the game rules are vague guidelines and you have power laws and pandemics that resemble chaos far more than any game.
Not just because it's pro-social and non-rivalrous, there's arguments for this in game theory itself, in the iterated prisoner's dilemma it's often the strategies that start by cooperating and then fall back on competition that come out ahead when competiting in even good/bad actor competitions.
It's interesting that the original article even says this "Playing games and sports throughout life teach us all sorts of lessons about teamwork, strategy, pressure, practice, emotional control… I could go on."
I don't see any teamwork in chess, I guess there might be in poker (temporarily) but I assume there's only one winner at the end?
Our current culture seems to place most of the emphasis on competition, e.g. Education is all about getting better grades than everyone else and then we put people in workplaces and wonder why it ends up toxic?
Obviously you could argue that people being cooperative first would just lead to them getting exploited more but given we already have vast differentials in wealth, I'd certainly be interested in trying it out or what research on this shows?
Think of race car drivers who, of course, all want to win. But winning by forcing your opponent off the track is less satisfying and less admirable than racing "cleanly" (i.e. cooperating with your opponent to prevent crashes).
Competition, within a well defined set of boundaries, is cooperative.
Edit: I'm not sure whether the competitive impulse is a general feature of humans, or just a byproduct of our age, but it nevertheless is a factor currently, so it has to be accounted for in any vision of how we get from here to a more cooperative future. I'm specifically thinking of Cory Doctorow's Walkway, in which people (implicitly, and with some measure of shame) feel a competitive drive to do more for the greater good than others.
Poker is far, far more mathematical than chess. The idea that poker pros are only going off "reads" is completely ludicrous.
They have a set game-theory-optimal style of playing, and then use an opponents flaws/"tells" to deviate from the GTO style to exploit those tells.
An example of a flaw could be if the opponent is playing shitty hole cards.
If the opponent has played in every pot over the last 30 minutes (something you'll frequently see), then he's playing way too many hands preflop.
This is exploitable.
Just a super basic example, but you'd be surprised at how profitable this is. Beginners play way too many hands. If you want to make money, just fold every hand and let the beginner collect the blinds until you get AAs, KKs, QQs, etc. and then you should bet big. The beginner won't notice and he'll pay you off anyway. You'll be massively +EV.
A more advanced player will notice what you're doing and he'll immediately fold when you bet big. Therefore, you'll have to start incorporating "bluffs" into your strategy so his tactic of folding whenever you bet big becomes unprofitable.
Poker is about figuring out all of these things and then using these tools to make the most money.
Bill Chen wrote a great book called "The Mathematics of Poker" that goes through all the math involved.
It's all probability theory and game theory.
He gave a talk at MIT that goes over some of the basic concepts -> https://youtu.be/BuxCNZ0RVKA
The obvious issue with teaching your kids poker is that it'll be very difficult for your kid to find anyone else to play with. He/she can't go play poker in a casino obviously
Its got all the reads, bluffs, random chance, meta-gaming, math and strategy, and none of the gambling.
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Don't get me wrong. Poker is a great game. But if we're talking about "reading" the opponent, relatively simple decisions that have deep mathematical backgrounds... a large variety of "simultaneous choice" video games (Pokemon, being a turnbased game with 60% to 100% accuracy on common attacks), leads to very rich gameplay, interaction and reads.
I personally see Poker as just one game in a large family of simultaneous-choice, random-chance, incomplete-information high-skill gaming.
Magic: The Gathering is another one. The cards your opponent plays necessarily reveals information (the colors of cards reveals what kind of strategies they are going for, and your opponent chooses to reveal that information only when necessary). I've won games by "holding onto lands" (worthless cards), bluffing that I had a response against my opponent's moves. Just delaying a turn or two (keeping them cautious) bought me the time to draw the cards I really needed to turn the game around.
And I've lost games by going all in (assuming my opponent was bluffing, so I did a high-risk move), and lo-and-behold, my opponent had the "combat trick" needed to break my attack.
A worst-case scenario for a player can arise due to "tilt" in poker, aka a losing streak magnified by negative emotions. From another review paper [1]: "Tilting is defined as “a strong negative emotional state elicited by elements of the poker game (e.g., “bad beats” or a prolonged “losing streak”) that is characterised by losing control, and due to which the quality of decision-making in poker has decreased” [...] After a significant loss, tilt occurs in three phases: (1) a dissociative phase (disbelief, “unreality,” unwillingness to “accept” the events), (2) a phase of indignation and negative emotions (feelings of injustice and unfairness), (3) and the chasing phase."
Since real money can be at stake, especially if a young person starts to play poker online, the consequences can be far worse than for a person who develops an unhealthy relationship with chess. Though a research review paper suggests that these worst-case scenarios do not happen to the majority of young poker players, it can still happen to a significant number of them.
At a kid level, both chess and poker will basically be the same anyway. It’s about fighting frustration and taking the time to think about what you are doing and a lot of memorisation. It’s going to be probability tables for poker and a tone of tactic puzzles for chess.
At this point and to play the optimisation game too, if you want to give your kids a way to work on their memorisation and dedication, you would probably be better served by having them learn to play an instrument. It’s also a creative outlet and is socially useful.
I've played poker and Roulette and Monopoly a lot when I was a kid. Didn't learn that much because no one really knew how to play. Getting piano lessons has been life-changing and I still play to this day.
Let's see, how do we attract some comments here...
People who think that teaching kids serious poker are parents who don't understand the needs of their children, are not in touch with the reality in which their kids live and are more concerned about being great parents than nurturing a young life.
Bold statements? I sure hope so. If the above comment left you unfazed, then read this again: "Raising kids is not an optimisation problem." There's a lot more to life as a young/early parent. Stop obsessing over these silly things and go and spend an hour with your kids, ask them what do to and do it with them in a childish way. They know what they want much better than you do.
Clearly, they cannot play at casinos or for real money online. I suppose they could play for fake money online, but there the dynamics are much different. (Why not go all-in and risk it all if you can just create a fresh account if you lose?) Fake money tournaments, where the goal is to come out on top instead of maximize profit, are probably the best option. But the word "tournament" doesn't appear in the article (and even then, is it really good for kids to be hanging around with the people on online poker sites)?
I suppose implicitly the author is talking about playing heads-up against a parent at the dinner table, or with close family members, with fake money. But people who don't know anything about poker are going to play essentially randomly, and the game won't last long enough/will be too variable for the kid to see any reward from playing "correctly," so I'm not sure there's a point.
Also, the first thing to teach the kid is to fold most of their hands. But sitting out of hands is boring and the kid is going to get bored. It's called "grinding" for a reason...
Something like MTG that isn't pay-to-win would be a better choice.
Teach your kids the games they are interested in, and use that as an opportunity to build bonds.
Poker, chess, go, Catan, Magic, whatever. Trying to optimize your child is so backwards to me.
I agree. My daughter loves Catan: we'll play on sunday even though she's a bit young for Catan.
Recently she discovered hexagonal grids in which you have to find words placed randomly... She loved it. So I quickly wrote a little program generating hexagonal grids and placing words randomly (and then filling the remaining empty hexagons with random letters). Now she gets to pick the words (the name of the cat, the names of her plushies, etc.) and I generate a random grid and print it. She loves it even more because now the game is tailor made!
As a bonus I got to introduce her to some programming concepts: showing her first how the program can generate a little grid of only 2x2 hexagons, then 3x3, then a bigger but still empty grid. How I can then have the computer put a word randomly on the grid. Then another word. Then fill the remaining empty hexagons with random letters. She was sitting on my lap looking very interested... Then I told her she could now choose which word she wanted and from there she was totally hooked.
It made for a happy mom too: it's the first time I coded something for my daughter and it felt good!
I read this like 15+ years ago, so I'm paraphrasing, but it explains the core of why poker and other games mixing skill with chance are so counter-intuitive to humans and difficult to learn compared to games that are primarily skill-based like tennis (or chess, I suppose).
So, in summary: in a skill-based game like tennis, the quality of your results will almost always correspond exactly to the quality of your technique. If you have perfect technique, you'll hit a perfect serve. If you hit the ball into the net, you know you did something wrong. This is what humans are used to and it's the way we evolved to learn. Try > observe results > adjust strategy/technique > try again.
Poker short circuits this system because the results of a single hand don't tell you anything. You can play a hand perfectly and lose your whole stack. Or you can play terribly and win a massive pot. Hell, you can play terribly for an entire tournament and still win a WSOP bracelet if you're lucky in all the right moments.
This means you can't learn poker just by playing a lot, because you aren't getting reliable feedback. Instead, you need to learn the underlying theory, and then how to apply it in the heat of the moment.
In my experience, it's extremely hard for people to really internalize this. They'll say they understand, but then when you ask them about their poker session, they spend all their time talking about the results. People who really get it don't do that: they instead tell you about tricky situations they ended up in and how they decided what to do. There's nothing less interesting to a seasoned poker player than the results of a specific hand... or session... or week's worth of sessions.
I never did read Sklansky, even though I read nearly every other author on the topic. I recently started collecting gambling books. I prefer "stories" books, but I like poker strat books, too. Some of them from the early 2000s are hilariously bad nowadays.
No it doesn't, you forgot the opponent. No matter how good you play, if your opponent plays better you lose.
And in poker you can take two strategies, play tight win small many times, or play loose win few big ones. Poker teaches you which strategy fits to your emotion/personality, and where you feel the most happiness. What I learned in poker is that I am much more of a loose player even if I bet real money. I was once a full time employee of a big tech firm, and playing poker just revealed what has been missing in my life: risk and thrill. So I decided to start by own business to maximize thrill and risk which has been much more 'emotionally' rewarding so far.
I am also a decent chess player (lichess.org elo 1800), but I find poker much more challenging and resembles many aspects of life. The frustration of being rejected by girl is strikingly similar to losing 3-betted pot in poker. The agony of seeing your stock price fall feels the same as your opponent folding his hand while you have a nut. Going through these up and downs teaches you a profound wisdom, as also mentioned in the article, that you shouldn't be taking too much feedback from success and fail but you should optimize the the rate of success of your strategy.
Of course, life is short and we only have few hands. Even if we count a day as a hand, we only have 365 * 40 = 14600 hands. So I don't think either strategy is superior to the other. It is more about what strategy feels right to you. Poker teaches exactly that. You get to know more about yourself
Imperfect information, randomness with room for skill, strongly asymmetric play and scoring, etc., but it also requires cooperation via rather narrow communication channels that your opponents get to observe.
(For those not familiar, four play at a time and you are partners with the person across the table from you. After dealing, there's an auction phase and your bids are the only form of communication you are allowed to use to signal to your partner. The bids are known to everyone, and if your opponents ask you must tell them the bidding convention that you are using. After the auction, the winner of the auction plays for both themselves and their partner -- whose cards are put face up after the opening -- against the other two. Hence the asymmetric play, and the scoring also works differently for the two pairs.)
1. I don't have anyone to play with -- much less three people -- and I don't have much time to play myself either, with two very small children and work taking up most of my time.
2. As a consequence of the above, I don't even know how to start learning to play. I'm a person who learns by doing, but I can't take the time to find and meet up with other interested people.
If only I understood the game, I'm sure I could teach the in-laws and they might humour me and play with me every now and then, but that takes me understanding the game first...
What would you recommend?
It's one of my favorite games to play with friends and money is never, ever involved. You just play to win as many games as possible.
I feel like a lot of people miss out on a very fun game simply because they don't want to gamble and can't imagine playing without doing so.
I personally hate playing poker without real money. I feel like taking out money gets rid of one of the most interesting thing about poker.
I don’t really like fake money either as many people don’t play as seriously as when there is real money involved. I noticed that even when the amount is very small (so it might as well be fake money), people just play different when real money is involved.
I've noticed this with some people too and it's really baffling to me. Do you not play any other games seriously? When you're playing a video game or a board game do you also just not bother trying to win because there's no money involved?
Why do people take exception to this for poker but not for any other games?
If Poker was a good competitive game, there would be an ELO system and people would play because they care about their skill ranking more than they care about gambling. There's a reason you aren't required to wager real money for every League of Legends or Valorant match you play.
Poker is an economic scheme where the House and the Sharks work together to lure people with real jobs into unfair competition / gambling with bad odds.
There is an ELO system of sorts, it’s the size of your bankroll. If you are a skilled poker player, you should win more than you lose.
Tournament poker is different than cash games, there’s a limited pool of chips and the goal is to win them all.
> Poker is an economic scheme where the House and the Sharks work together to lure people with real jobs into unfair competition / gambling with bad odds.
Agreed, it’s Wall Street in the form of a table game.
In Poker, especially in tournaments but over time in cash games as well, there will necessarily be more losers than winners. That's a fine outcome for a competitive environment, and a terrible outcome for an economic one. And because placement is based on willingness to play at certain stakes instead of skill rating, the entire system is designed to mismatch the skill of the participants over the long term.
Betting on probabilities is an entertaining way to adjust levels of confidence to reality. I just don't really like the idea of promoting gambling to children.
- The reward is not always immediate, patience can help you to succeed
- Don't look only on your plans, check your opponents opportunities and threads as well
- When you are behind, there a quite often chances to turn a game around - don't give up
- When you lose, or make a mistake, you can't blame it to bad luck or anyone else
- Analyse your games afterwards - learn from your mistakes
Even for adults the is a awful lot you can learn in chess. Most basic thing, when you took a look on a game in middle play, amateurs mostly look for a small gain from an exchange. More skilled players look at the board and first look at the asymetries of the position and analyse how the can use them in their favor.
Magnus Carlsen really took the game to another level. You see games which look totally even, and 5 turns later where Magnus just reordered two or three pieces to slightly different positions and he manage to get into a winning position - without even exchange a single piece. That's another thing what you can learn from chess: Improve your position by changing small thnings.
The main downside is of course that the bidding system can be quite complex. We were constantly asking my dad what a certain bid meant and what to bid in certain situations. We never really managed to get out of that phase before we switched to simpler card games. I still don't know how to bid properly.
Bidding and the associated learning curve is a common deterrent, which can be side-stepped by turning to Minibridge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minibridge)
Reid Hoffman: Board Games Led To My Success
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqwOLhSkn3g
Military-themed games helped him combine tactics into a strategic plan, while role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons and Runequest taught him problem solving. Playing against real people and not computers helped him keep his competitors’ motives in mind.
“A real strategy is based off of: what are your competitors doing? What is their mindset? What are their assets? What’s the way you can make that work?”
I'll play Sekigahara anywhere anytime with anybody.
Poker is 100% connected to the money part. It also punishes good play and rewards bad play way too often. A kid who grows up playing poker will just grow up cynical and probably become a gambler. There's other games with imperfect information and random elements that are more fun and less gamble-y.
And chess is great because it's a game of perfect information that rewards good play but has enough combinations to still be interesting, at least until you get to a level where everyone is simply drilling opening combinations and training with AI assistance...
Also, we're in an age where video games are mainstream: tons of them are in the educational but fun category and can teach kids stuff...
Any recommendations?
Ideally, if chess was 'solved' like checkers reportedly has been, then the superior chess engine would win the match and betting on the outcome would be a meaningless activity.
Poker remains interesting because the ability to guess the opponent's position hasn't been 'solved' by AI algorithms. If a poker player's position could be read by AI interpretation of facial expressions, body language, etc. I imagine casinos would be all over this.
The real Turing Test question is, can AI simulate players in D&D games well enough to fool human participants?
Games are really fascinating. I see two elements: 1) making something easy into something hard (by limiting a person’s options), and 2) making something hard into something easy (by proportionally increasing difficulty to the near-max of a player’s current ability).
Example:
1) try to put a ball in a net, but you can only use your feet.
2) split into teams and compete against similar skill level
A good game narrows the scope of your options while having a built-in leveling-up system (self or other play is a great way to do that).
Chess teaches "Deep" thinking about complex problems, which is useful particularly with programming. Much of my day is spent in deep complex problems.
Poker teaches quick calculation, negotiation, bluffing, and reading other's motives, which is useful for everything else in the world.
Flash forward to this day and I can't even legally explain how much insane shit that trajectory in life has sent me. I have a photo on my phone of a narco boss's toilet that is an actual medieval style throne basically.
Since he turned fourteen he's been invited to our poker games with friends as well. To be fair, he never gambles with his own money, as I provide his buy in, and he just keeps what he makes or loses it all.
There's more to casual games of poker than just gambling, strategy and luck though. There's chat, shit talking, socialising and bonding. I figure I'm just teaching him how to adult.
The upside is that a healthy exposure to "work doesn't equal outcome", risk calcs, and reading people are very helpful lessons to learn, so personally I'm a bit torn on this. I wonder if there isn't a happy middle ground these days that doesn't require a "buy packs" element.
Magic is the superior TCG in my opinion, thou Pokemon TCG is fun. In any case, don't play the 'pay to win' formats.
Instead, play draft or sealed, which are much more fair.
Dominion has more depth and variety.
Epic Card Game comes close to the complexity of Magic. The issue is most people willing to learn such a game will already be playing Magic or Pokemon...
There's more popular/newer alternatives, I haven't been following the scene.
And it’s pretty well known in the card game community that if you’re looking for cards, you should NEVER buy packs. Buy your singles, and save your money.
Also you can do drafts really easily and cheaply, which gets you into the really layered EV/Sklansky-bucks territory.
The gambling is the most important part, it's balancing between risk and concealing the signal you're sending. Bridge would be another option with a similar problem to be solved, but I don't think pokémon has any of that.
edit: also, the last thing you want to do is get your kids addicted to a pay-to-win game. It's child exploitation.
The strategy is surprisingly deep. See one discussion thread from Smogon: https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/ss-ou-metagame-discuss...
But I’m not going to encourage my kids to play poker. I will teach them the game if they want. But without the risk of actual material loss, the game loses a lot. Money is highly emotional. It’s gain or loss, the emotions that triggers, manipulating those emotions in others, predicting their behaviour based on their state, and even simulating “tilt” and presenting an emotional state are all things that is the makes poker what it. Without that it’s a below average game.
And I’m not going to allow children to gamble with money.
Kids are likely to gamble either way, best to teach them how to handle the loss and emotions.
When I was kid a lot of us would gamble our lunch money (75 cents) playing quarters with each other. Some days I had to skip lunch, some days I got an extra milk, and some I was caught and given detention. A lot of lessons in those outcomes heh.
I thought for a couple minutes about whether this was really noble, or flawed thinking. I didn't come to a conclusion.
I doubt it's very important if children gamble with money or not. I think probably most of them do at one time or another, anyway.
The game meta + competitive play are wildly entertaining.
There's lot available on the internet to learn about competitive pokemon. Something like this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBw6UXAiq0A) is a good entrypoint. But even better - go to a competition with your kids! If they're interested, of course.
A very weak Pokemon, but had the right moves and right team support.
The video game is far more about teamwork and team composition than just throwing the highest stat Pokemon at each other.
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Stats matter for your sweeper (attack and speed), pivot (attack and defense) and sponge (hp and defense).
But there are a whole slew of 'trickster' Pokemon, like Pachirisu, Ninjask, klefki, whimsicott and others who have rare moves and/or abilities that can beat raw stats in the right situation.
Some lower stat Pokemon, like Clefable, are used despite better stat Pokemon (ex Blissy for sponge purposes) because of teamwork, movesets, typing, or abilities.
Unless you talk about pokemon TCG, and in this case, 8 don't know.
Stating "There are other games that are even MORE complicated with even LESS information! That's the game we should be talking about!" adds nothing to the original point the author is making.
When you heard the original saying "we're playing chess, not checkers", are you the type of person to say: "ACTUALLY, Go is far more complicated than chess. The saying should reference Go, not chess!"
Sounds like a skill that could be useful in other areas too.
Controlling tilt is such a big part of the game that there are books written on the subject and it is one of the factors that decides whether you can be a profitable player in the long run.
Saying that poker should be avoided because tilt is bad means that trading also should be avoided because tilt is bad and it can lose you a lot of money.
Yes, if you go into poker to gamble, you will lose money fast. Yes, people who don't know anything about the dynamics of the game will lose to better opponents in the long run. The same applies to chess and trading. Play against better opponents and you will lose, in any game.
Yes, people with addictive personalities or gambling inclinations should most probably avoid poker. But does Billy have gambling problems right now because he played poker with fake chips with his grandma for fun when he was 6? Or are there other bigger factors happening in the background? Is this a confusion between treating the symptoms instead of the disease?
Teaching a kids a gambling game in depth seems like it would increase their chance of getting interested in gambling unless you do this in an abusive way to gave them hate card games.
Just teaching the rules of poker doesn't teach them any of the lessons from the article.
The worst-case scenario for any high level games player is pretty awful. No social life or social skills, obsession, poor job prospects, etc.
Says who? Did you make this up?
Personally I’d find it easier to risk a $100 than to risk e.g. a $100 voucher to a restaurant that I like.
Good lord, if you want to talk about "these days": apparently it's more important to condemn someone than to understand them "these days".
I am competitive and will try to play seriously without money. I don’t know but the quality of game seems to be significantly higher (eg people play more seriously) when real money is involved online or offline. So I just don’t play poker without real money. I acknowledge that this can be a false heuristic.
> Why do people take exception to this for poker but not for any other games?
Maybe because risk management is such a core part of the game and having real money involved makes the risks seem more “real”.
Another part of poker that people tend to gloss over is bankroll management - another critical life skill. A larger bankroll lets someone take a few more asymmetric bets, but first they have to build that bankroll. Sounds more and more like life...
For example, a kid deciding to go to college or not for CS is making the same calculations as they would in a poker game. They have imperfect information, there's a monetary component and an EV component.
Intentions in this situation matter. If you (the parent) want to teach someone to play a game (your children), then why exactly would your intention be to sabotage them to win some fake chips?
I do understand the concern that exposing gambling to kids does not sound like one of the best ideas out there. And i don't think that variance is a topic that will be easily understood by six year olds. But poker is in the gray zone between gambling / not gambling. Meaning that 95% of people who play will lose money. The same percentages can be seen in stock trading. So the question remains, why can some people win in the long, while most lose? (95% is a guesstimate, might be higher)
> Teaching a kids a gambling game in depth seems like it would increase their chance of getting interested in gambling
I'm assuming the same percentage of people with deeper interest in how things work will say the same thing about chess. Or any other game.
Intentions do matter. Explain the problems of gambling in terms of expected value to your kids, and you will increase the chance that they will understand why the vast majority of gambling is not good.
As an adult there are people who I just won't gamble with because of the above reasons, but they are in the minority. As a kid they seemed to be in the majority.
> In game theory, a sequential game has perfect information if each player, when making any decision, is perfectly informed of all the events that have previously occurred, including the "initialization event" of the game (e.g. the starting hands of each player in a card game)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_information
I don’t disagree with your point about our capability to use that information, but that’s what the game is about. If you have perfect information and perfect capability to predict what a move will mean in the future, what’s the point of playing at all? Anyway just wanted to point out exactly what the comment you replied to means by perfect information.
Parent is using "perfect information" as a particular term-of-art in economics and game theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_information
It's not perfect knowledge in the sense of Laplace's Demon where future values will be predicted with determinism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace%27s_demon
Yes I am aware that the latest games in the franchise attempt to address this somewhat - but pick any Pokémon game from the last 20 years and it will be true 99% of the time.
I wouldn’t really want kids getting deep into an online community meta personally.
Many pokemon have self-recovery moves (slack off, recover, etc. etc.). Even when I was 10, I knew that if my sponge took a hit, and recovered the damage faster than my opponent could deal damage, I'd force them to switch.
Set-up sweepers, hazards, status effects and ability combos get complicated for sure. Taunt vs Substitute, Prankster vs Dark, there's too much to memorize here. But kids don't need to reach that level to still have the importance of bluffing, reading, and predicting.
https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/569688211158511616?...
(definitely stealing this technique, we'll see if it pays off in... nine years or so?)
Is it just regular Pokemon game but somehow you play against others online?
Both players take turns simultaneously choosing attacks until they KO all opponent pokemon
+ I also enjoy events where you build your deck on the fly from boosters. Those are definitely a lot of fun.
I tend to spend my time on other things these days, but if I wanted to get back into it, going for draft tournaments would be the way to go.
I found constructed to be far more pay to win and copy-based for my tastes. But draft forces you to make due with the cards you get at random.
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Cards are uniformly random according to rarity, but picks are not. If you get passed a rare and 3x uncommons in the draft, you know the left-hand player picked a common card. After 8 passes, your original stack comes back and you can get a feel for everyone else's deck. When pack2 opens up, you start working towards the 'underrated' colors at the table and going for the meta strategy no one has picked yet.
there are game modes such as drafting that introduce randomness and dynamism to deck construction that avoid this and most card games have this type of game mode.
Both are quite complex but in different ways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium
However, if the opponent is playing sub-optimally you can win _more_ by deviating from Nash equilibrium to take advantage of their specific strategic shortcomings. The risk in doing so is if you are wrong estimating their shortcomings.. you are no longer guaranteed a tie in the worst case scenario.
You can see this play out with a small toy game and a card calculator. Suppose a two player game of Texas Holdem where each player has 8x big blinds. The first player must choose to either go all in or fold. The second player must choose to either call the all in or fold. Players must pick a range of hands to perform either action prior to looking at their cards.
https://openpokertools.com/range_equity.html
Suppose a silly strategy by the second player of folding any hand except pocket aces. You'd be wise as the first player to go all in with any hand and pick up a free big blind with 99.5% certainty. However going all in with every hand is also an easy strategy to take advantage of...
(You can actually go back and forth maximally exploiting the other player's strategy and you will eventually reach Nash equilibrium)
During the competition, Libratus used 4 million core hours on the Bridges supercomputer for analyzing it's prior gameplay and changing strategy.
> During the tournament, Libratus was competing against the players during the days. Overnight it was perfecting its strategy on its own by analysing the prior gameplay and results of the day, particularly its losses. Therefore, it was able to continuously straighten out the imperfections that the human team had discovered in their extensive analysis, resulting in a permanent arms race between the humans and Libratus.
No poker player can beat the best chess player in the world unless they aren't at their level already.
For comparison, 50K hands is a standard length for heads up matches between pros, with the understanding that even then the best player is not guaranteed to win. In live play, you'd be looking at 50-100 hands per hour.
It's true that with a greater skill gap you'd need less time, but you'd still be looking at thousands of hands if you wanted something like 95% confidence that the better player was up.
One player (beginner) wants to have fun (maybe not overtly, but this is usually the case), the other wants to make money.
Part of what poker teaches is patience.
Also, very different than small poker games with friends where the point is hanging out and 'gambling' a bit.
[1] Tournament style is different from an open ended game.
https://www.sirlin.net/articles/designing-pandante
And he did so by making more hands good so you don't want to fold all the time
The short of it though is there exists a perfect range of cards the bot can play where it neither folds enough for you to bluff to gain an edge, nor does it call enough that you can wait for better cards while bleeding chips to gain an edge.
I say this despite also claiming the top DL bot does this anyway and does very well.
A competent but not great player has a chance of beating a pro in one session, but it's definitely pretty slim.
For every tournament you make a big score, you crash out of 5 and get min payout on a few more.
Many of the biggest names in poker have been the biggest losers in a given calendar period. For example, Gus Hansen and Daniel Negreanu are two of the biggest winners of all time yet also have some of the biggest documented losses...
As for how long a session is? 8 hours. I made a living from poker for a few years.