[HN Gopher] Teach Your Kids Poker, Not Chess
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Teach Your Kids Poker, Not Chess
Author : sxv
Score : 19 points
Date : 2022-05-19 14:23 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (momentofdeep.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (momentofdeep.substack.com)
| coastflow wrote:
| 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 a player of chess.
| From a research review paper [0]: "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."
|
| 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 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.
|
| [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2945873/
|
| [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5387767/
| JALTU wrote:
| I can'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'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.
|
| 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.
| dubswithus wrote:
| You play for money?
| dougmsmith wrote:
| That thing you did was really smart and cool, you seem like a
| clever guy.
| Bostonian wrote:
| 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.
| karpierz wrote:
| Sure, but in the same sense that there's a chance in Chess
| because you could be sick the day of your game and play worse
| as a result.
|
| 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.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| My experience is that it doesn't even mean you played better
| than your opponent overall, just that you "made the second to
| last mistake".
|
| 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).
| na85 wrote:
| >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.
|
| 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.
| brianwawok wrote:
| Hey tennis and golf have wind and ant hills and birds. That's
| more "chance" than chess.
| kvonhorn wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| dragontamer wrote:
| How about we play competitive Pokemon instead?
|
| Its got all the reads, bluffs, random chance, meta-gaming, math
| and strategy, and none of the gambling.
|
| ------
|
| 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.
| aporetics wrote:
| There's that famous thing Plato said: if you don't already know
| Poker, don't bother applying to the Academy.
| dougmsmith wrote:
| Learning with random rewards, what could go wrong. Maybe teach
| them DotA instead of baseball as well.
| bush-bby wrote:
| >However, it is important to distinguish poker from a pure game
| of chance, like roulette.
|
| 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.
| cableshaft wrote:
| Poker is nowhere near as deep as chess, but it's deeper than
| you're making it sound. It's not just about reading people,
| especially for Texas Hold'em. Knowing probabilities and how
| many outs for both your pocket and flop, turn and river, taking
| your betting order/big and small blinds/your remaining chip
| stack/whether someone raised for whether you should enter the
| hand or not, knowing when to fold, etc.
|
| 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.
| stu2b50 wrote:
| I wouldn't really say that's a fair assessment either. I
| don't think it's in any way clear that Chess is deeper than
| Poker, or even by what metric you would determine such a
| thing.
|
| Certainly in both games there are no competitors, human or
| robot, that has solved the game.
| schwartzworld wrote:
| That's a naive view of poker, which is absolutely a game of
| skill. You can't force a good hand, but you can use your
| understanding of probability and human behavior to estimate the
| value of the hand you are dealt. The bets you place can be more
| important than the hands themselves. In fact, the best hand can
| lose you a lot of money if you play it wrong.
| bush-bby wrote:
| Those two things, skill and chance, are not mutually
| exclusive characteristics. My point is more so that poker
| should not be treated as if all the skill in the world can
| account for all the bad luck in the world. I mean there's a
| reason there's no equivalent of the patriots in professional
| poker. No one is going to win every single game every single
| time. And I think that forgetting that in the games portrayal
| is moderately dangerous. Because it is a game played with
| money. Sure you can mitigate your risk of loss with skill,
| but it's never 100% controllable, and that should be
| acknowledged with more weight in my opinion.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| I think that is exactly the article's point: even with
| perfect play, you can lose hands or even tournaments. But
| over time, it is a statistical inevitability that you will
| win on average.
|
| 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!
| philwelch wrote:
| Most of the human condition has an element of chance to it.
| Games like chess are extremely unusual in that respect.
| quequeque wrote:
| I would say there is no equivalent of the patriots as there
| are far fewer teams in the NFL, a more suitable comparison
| would be comparing the tournament-style WSOP to PGA(golf)
| majors, where in the past 3 years (11 majors) there have
| been 10 unique champions. Almost all sports games have some
| element of chance where the better team does not always
| win, the NCAA basketball tournament is another good example
| of this, No one is going to win every single game every
| single time.
| NickRandom wrote:
| I play poker and I used to play chess. Explaining the rules,
| tactics and strategies of poker is a lot easier than chess. It
| is also more exciting (subjective opinion rather than a
| statement of absolute truth).
|
| 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
| dvt wrote:
| > But it's a game of chance.
|
| 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.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| You can tell poker isn't a game of chance, because you
| consistently see the same handful of faces at/near the final
| table for the world series of poker out of a field of many
| thousands.
|
| 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.
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