Teach your kids poker, not chess

Nah, teach your kids chess, so that they can exercise their deductive&#x2F;calculating muscles during that golden phase of childhood in which our brains are malleable enough to easily learn new languages: realize that artificial languages (i.e. deductive systems) are all functionally equivalent, and use chess as just another avenue into building deductive fluency; use multiple such avenues (e.g. music, Euclid).<p>Call this educational stage &quot;deductive naivety&quot;: 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&#x2F;inductive&#x2F;abductive reasoning, and start to introduce the child to the multivariate dimensions of the world.<p>In this way, the child becomes a curious and rigorous thinker. If you choose poker instead, you&#x27;ll just breed a gambler.

How about we play competitive Pokemon instead?<p>Its got all the reads, bluffs, random chance, meta-gaming, math and strategy, and none of the gambling.<p>------<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong. Poker is a great game. But if we&#x27;re talking about &quot;reading&quot; the opponent, relatively simple decisions that have deep mathematical backgrounds... a large variety of &quot;simultaneous choice&quot; video games (Pokemon, being a turnbased game with 60% to 100% accuracy on common attacks), leads to very rich gameplay, interaction and reads.<p>I personally see Poker as just one game in a large family of simultaneous-choice, random-chance, incomplete-information high-skill gaming.<p>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&#x27;ve won games by &quot;holding onto lands&quot; (worthless cards), bluffing that I had a response against my opponent&#x27;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.<p>And I&#x27;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 &quot;combat trick&quot; needed to break my attack.

Poker may have good life lessons, but I would hesitate to wholeheartedly recommend poker to children because the worst-case scenario for the player is much worse than for a player of chess. From a research review paper [0]: &quot;In the majority of situations, gambling in adolescence does not appear to have obvious serious negative consequences; however, in a number of cases it does. There are several risk factors for adolescent problem gambling, including parents with gambling problems, an earlier age of first gambling activity, and greater impulsivity. Children of problem gamblers tend to gamble earlier than their peers.&quot;<p>A worst-case scenario for a player can arise due to &quot;tilt&quot; in poker, aka a losing streak magnified by negative emotions. From another review paper [1]: &quot;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.&quot;<p>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.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC2945873&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC2945873&#x2F;</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC5387767&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC5387767&#x2F;</a>

Teach your kids things you enjoy teaching them and they enjoy doing with you. Raising kids is not an optimisation problem.<p>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.<p>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.

My problem with this article: I did not see a concrete suggestion for where children should play poker.<p>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 &quot;tournament&quot; doesn&#x27;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)?<p>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&#x27;t know anything about poker are going to play essentially randomly, and the game won&#x27;t last long enough&#x2F;will be too variable for the kid to see any reward from playing &quot;correctly,&quot; so I&#x27;m not sure there&#x27;s a point.<p>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&#x27;s called &quot;grinding&quot; for a reason...<p>Something like MTG that isn&#x27;t pay-to-win would be a better choice.

Yeah...<p>Teach your kids the games they are interested in, and use that as an opportunity to build bonds.<p>Poker, chess, go, Catan, Magic, whatever. Trying to optimize your child is so backwards to me.

I believe it&#x27;s Theory Of Poker by David Sklansky that has a great section in the beginning comparing poker to other games, and specifically to tennis, which I&#x27;ve never forgotten.<p>I read this like 15+ years ago, so I&#x27;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).<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;s the way we evolved to learn. Try &gt; observe results &gt; adjust strategy&#x2F;technique &gt; try again.<p>Poker short circuits this system because the results of a single hand don&#x27;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&#x27;re lucky in all the right moments.<p>This means you can&#x27;t learn poker just by playing a lot, because you aren&#x27;t getting reliable feedback. Instead, you need to learn the underlying theory, and then how to apply it in the heat of the moment.<p>In my experience, it&#x27;s extremely hard for people to really internalize this. They&#x27;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&#x27;t do that: they instead tell you about tricky situations they ended up in and how they decided what to do. There&#x27;s nothing less interesting to a seasoned poker player than the results of a specific hand... or session... or week&#x27;s worth of sessions.

I think it is perceived to people differently by the stance they chose to take (voluntarily or involuntarily) about life. There are a set of people who see life as maximizing risk to stand our from the herd. It is mostly people who learned the world not by books, but by experience: Musicians, artists, entrepreneur, etc. The other set of people try minimizing the risk to make life predictable: engineers, lawyers, doctors are likely to fall in to this category. I don&#x27;t think one is superior to the other. It is just matter of your innate genes, early life experience, or from your parents whether you are risk seeking or risk avoiding.<p>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&#x2F;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 &#x27;emotionally&#x27; rewarding so far.<p>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&#x27;t be taking too much feedback from success and fail but you should optimize the the rate of success of your strategy.<p>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&#x27;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

Personally, my favorite card game is contract bridge.<p>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.<p>(For those not familiar, four play at a time and you are partners with the person across the table from you. After dealing, there&#x27;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.)

One of the worst things about poker IMO is that everyone unnecessarily links it with gambling.<p>It&#x27;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.<p>I feel like a lot of people miss out on a very fun game simply because they don&#x27;t want to gamble and can&#x27;t imagine playing without doing so.

Teach your kids the basic social skills that society mistakenly believes other children will teach them, instead of teaching them the only competitive game so universally boring that people can only play it with money on the line.<p>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&#x27;s a reason you aren&#x27;t required to wager real money for every League of Legends or Valorant match you play.<p>Poker is an economic scheme where the House and the Sharks work together to lure people with real jobs into unfair competition &#x2F; gambling with bad odds.

I&#x27;d go for teaching them chess. Much more thing you can learn. The most obvious<p>- The reward is not always immediate, patience can help you to succeed<p>- Don&#x27;t look only on your plans, check your opponents opportunities and threads as well<p>- When you are behind, there a quite often chances to turn a game around - don&#x27;t give up<p>- When you lose, or make a mistake, you can&#x27;t blame it to bad luck or anyone else<p>- Analyse your games afterwards - learn from your mistakes<p>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.<p>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&#x27;s another thing what you can learn from chess: Improve your position by changing small thnings.

Wouldn&#x27;t Bridge be a better option than poker? It has many of the same elements, except for the gambling aspect, but adds cooperation, communicating with your partner through a bidding system where you&#x27;re trying to figure out if you have a fit and can play.<p>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&#x27;t know how to bid properly.

I played a lot of chess and a bit of poker as a kid and got a lot more out of the chess. Maybe I just didn&#x27;t put enough into the poker but I think I sort of never really got what was going on with ranges and frequencies and sort of just &#x27;played my hand&#x27;. Chess really stretched and &quot;if this than that&quot; muscle very deeply in a way I think actually benefited me. I dont think any amount of playing poker without a coach would have led me to any important understanding. Games of randomness are deeper than deterministic games, but I think it&#x27;s also easy to play them for a long time without even noticing how you could improve.

According to Reid Hoffman (Linkedin) - Avalon Hill and Runescape are the games to play - YMMV.<p>Reid Hoffman: Board Games Led To My Success<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=zqwOLhSkn3g" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=zqwOLhSkn3g</a><p>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.<p>“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?”

My parents let me play with them and their friends when I was a kid. I got WAY better as the night went on and they got loaded.

These kind of articles remind me of TED talks where you pretty soon get the feeling that you should not be wasting your time by reading&#x2F;watching it.

Kids can handle more than one game in the same childhood. But yes, do teach them poker. My grandmother taught us all poker when we were young.

Chess is one of the few competitive games that hasn&#x27;t been overtaken by an obsession with money. Sure, chess competitions have prizes, but the focus is on the skill of the player, not the prize amount. Chess also has an illustrious history going back thousands of years, which to me is almost more interesting than the game itself.

IMO chess is better for kids. And I say this as someone who played competitively as a kid, later who made a living playing poker for a year or so (then decided the lifestyle and stress wasn&#x27;t for me).<p>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&#x27;s other games with imperfect information and random elements that are more fun and less gamble-y.<p>And chess is great because it&#x27;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...<p>Also, we&#x27;re in an age where video games are mainstream: tons of them are in the educational but fun category and can teach kids stuff...

The element in poker that tends to be missing in chess is the side bet on the outcome of a game and the various ways the probabilities of winning&#x2F;losing are calculated (with respect to winning the bet, not game outcome itself).<p>Ideally, if chess was &#x27;solved&#x27; like checkers reportedly has been, then the superior chess engine would win the match and betting on the outcome would be a meaningless activity.<p>Poker remains interesting because the ability to guess the opponent&#x27;s position hasn&#x27;t been &#x27;solved&#x27; by AI algorithms. If a poker player&#x27;s position could be read by AI interpretation of facial expressions, body language, etc. I imagine casinos would be all over this.<p>The real Turing Test question is, can AI simulate players in D&amp;D games well enough to fool human participants?

I have two kids and actually do what the article concludes with: teach them both types of games (in my case, replacing Poker with Hearthstone and the card game Coup). I’d also recommend Lichess as it is always easy for the kids to find a game and there are some variations to keep them interested in continued play.<p>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).<p>Example:<p>1) try to put a ball in a net, but you can only use your feet.<p>2) split into teams and compete against similar skill level<p>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).

Why not both?<p>Chess teaches &quot;Deep&quot; thinking about complex problems, which is useful particularly with programming. Much of my day is spent in deep complex problems.<p>Poker teaches quick calculation, negotiation, bluffing, and reading other&#x27;s motives, which is useful for everything else in the world.

When I was a kid in the 90s my best friends dad was like this crazy asian gangster who let us shoot off his AK-47, drank blue powerade exclusively until he fucking died from diabetes, bought us piles of pirated playstation games and linked us with modchips... He also taught us how to play poker so when they banned pokémon cards at our school we just started CLEANING all the kids out playing poker instead.<p>Flash forward to this day and I can&#x27;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&#x27;s toilet that is an actual medieval style throne basically.

Teach them both. My son learned chess when he was around five, and we play every now an then, and he plays online as well with his mates.<p>Since he turned fourteen he&#x27;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.<p>There&#x27;s more to casual games of poker than just gambling, strategy and luck though. There&#x27;s chat, shit talking, socialising and bonding. I figure I&#x27;m just teaching him how to adult.

Man, just teach your kid everything. Chess, poker, bridge, driving, swiming, making fire, cooking, carpentery, whatever you can. Take care about them. Go ice creams often.

Agree or disagree? The author has pointed out that Chess is deterministic, so there is an optimal, solved move to win every time. It feels more a game of memory, rather than strategy. Stochastic games help to overcome this. But many games of chance are troubled with too much randomness defeating good strategy play intrinsic to the game or very narrow skill pigeon-holed to pick a particular strategy built into the game.

I&#x27;m pretty ignorant about poker so maybe someone can put me right. It doesn&#x27;t really seem like an appealing game: you can either analyze the cards you can see, but that doesn&#x27;t tell you much, or you can analyze your memory of what has gone before, but that sounds really hard - i don&#x27;t think i&#x27;m good at remembering things nor does it sound fun. Plus analyze the psychology of other players of course.

Yes, having played a bunch of both, chess is cool but poker is a better and funner bet. Only turn based game where you can make proper money if you are good enough (not to mention you can make solid and reliable money as a private game dealer). And the player pool is a much more diverse and amusing bunch of degens<p>Would also be happy to see my kid get into fighting games, CCGs, MOBAs, FPS games....they&#x27;re all cool and fun and deep as hell

There is an element of chance in chess. Whether an opponent plays an opening you have recently studied and how many mistakes your opponent makes is out of your control. The author says poker teaches you to focus on the process rather than the outcome. A chess player who wants to improve will not assume that winning a game means he played well -- he will analyze the game later, perhaps with a chess engine.

Poker or Chess, please make your kids actively participate in something. This will help them to avoid as much passive consumption as possible.

The book &quot;Thinking in Bets&quot; by poker champion Annie Duke made the same point about life being more like poker than chess

It is useless unless they also understand probability theory, laws of averages, tell me how good you are after 100k hands.<p>Chess gives you great feedback. You know why you lost. You learn a stack of new strategies to win.<p>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.<p>Teaching poker is probably harder.

On the contrary, with surveillance these days, games of poker are turning into games of chess. There is no private information these days. Every character I type can be seen as I type this, with &quot;flight time&quot; meaning time between keypresses, and press time I forget the term for that, there&#x27;s a term.<p>The only thing surveillance can&#x27;t do, is see what I&#x27;ll think in the following time period. A second in the future. Can&#x27;t predict that, no amount of cams and AI models can see into the future that far. Actually can&#x27;t, meaning that they cannot, predict the future. Can&#x27;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.<p>But it&#x27;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&#x27;s it.<p>Can you see the future? You get a quadrillion dollars! No joke. Quadrillion dollar problem, like a billion Millennium Prizes.<p>Just say what will happen tomorrow, today.

Teach your kids poker is zero-sum gambling and explain what that means. So much promotion of vice everywhere.

I don&#x27;t get why the author felt that he needed to shit on chess to demonstrate the qualities of poker. They&#x27;re incredibly different games, with entirely different goals. It&#x27;s like comparing Bergman&#x27;s <i>Persona</i> and <i>Indiana Jones</i>. Really, what&#x27;s the point?

The analogy doesn’t work because the edges in chess are huge and the edges in poker are tiny. Many of the best situations in poker are 80-20 advantages. How good of a chess player do you have to be to have a 20% chance against Magnus?

Or better yet: Let your kids play whatever they want to play. There is no wrong game or inferior game.<p>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.

This article underplays the psychological aspects of chess, of which there are many. When players are reasonably matched and the stakes are high, psychology plays a huge part.

Why not both or a combination?<p>MTG has elements from both chess and poker and it&#x27;s surprisingly easy to learn but stupid hard to master. You also don&#x27;t have to worry about sex ed :))

Poker is not a card game, it is a people game played with cards.

Poker would be nice for kids if it didn’t have an implicit link with money and gambling. Is there another imperfect information game around that is less toxic?

Reading bluffs and calculating pot odds are unique skills to poker that translate well to real-world situations.<p>Surprised this article mentions neither.

&gt;However, it is important to distinguish poker from a pure game of chance, like roulette.<p>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.

Both skills are important.<p>A shape rotator that can&#x27;t convince won&#x27;t scale.<p>A wordcel that doesn&#x27;t understand complexity, is just hot air.

There’s that famous thing Plato said: if you don’t already know Poker, don’t bother applying to the Academy.

I have heard a saying of a boxing coach &quot;Boxing is not chess. You need to think here.&quot;

A) False dichotomy.<p>B) Let your kids pick what they are interested in (either, both or neither.)

At this point might as well teach them to go stripper club to find a wife

Why are the mutually exclusive?

right, and start with the short deck version to have more fun :)

Teach your kids both.

Why not both and add Go (territorial alignment), Monopoly (capitalism), Risk (negotiation), and every other board game.<p>Throw in traditional logic puzzles which are entirely about incomplete information.<p>Kids can learn in many ways. Leverage all of them.

Why not both?

Poker is dumb. Préférence is better.

Learning with random rewards, what could go wrong. Maybe teach them DotA instead of baseball as well.

Unhealthy clickbait. Best line:<p>&gt; Why do we then obsess about teaching our kids certain games (sports, specifically)?<p>I would leave OP&#x27;s house at 16 if I was their child.

I can&#x27;t help but mention that I play poker on commercial airline flights against the programmed computer opponent. I have crushed them three times in a row. I would&#x27;ve thought the programming would have been a wee bit tougher, but maybe they want us to feel good about ourselves and our card counting, pixel-reading acumen. It works.<p>Next time you&#x27;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.

I initially thought the author was being metaphorical. Teaching poker to a kid is a very risky proposition. If they have any propensity for addiction, the dopamine rush of gambling may take hold of their thought patterns before they have the wisdom and mental maturity to counteract such urges.<p>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.<p>OTOH, chess is great. I didn&#x27;t study any chess until my 20&#x27;s. I&#x27;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.<p>After getting to the point where I could solve moderately difficult to difficult chess puzzles -- let&#x27;s say approaching &quot;master&quot; level if you&#x27;re familiar with the title hierarchy in chess -- the foresight required for programming, especially the kind that is done in most jobs nowadays, &quot;felt&quot; 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.