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How to Teach Your Kids to Play Poker: Start with One Card

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-08/how-to-teach-your-kids-poker-with-one-card-at-age-four
44•ioblomov•3d ago

Comments

ioblomov•3d ago
https://archive.ph/AjiWY
robocat•3d ago
Training your kids how to lie convincingly to you -- what could go wrong?
quantified•3d ago
It's an essential skill in life anyway, but you also teach the usual ethics and morals and come down hard on them when you catch them in a meaningful lie.

You never got away with anything as a teenager?

anitil•1h ago
I think it's also considered a developmental milestone as lying requires a pretty sophisticated theory of mind, and an understanding of the perspective of another person
TZubiri•2h ago
It's a common misconception that poker is about lying or that you need to lie to play poker.

You can bet with a bad hand, but you don't need to say you have a good hand, if asked you can say you either have a bad hand or a good hand, without any impact to your strategy.

Lying holds no advantage in poker, you can easily play poker without lying, no correlation is intrinsic to the game or its rules, it's just a common association people make

ghostly_s•2h ago
I’m not sure what meaningful distinction you think you're making between verbally lying and implicitly lying with your bet but it's quite tedious.
gretch•2h ago
You inferred it, but it's not implied.

Instead of thinking of a bet as saying "I have good cards" think of it instead as "I have an advantage in this pot", which is not a lie.

In poker advantages can come from cards, or from other objective measures such as position, stack size. And of course from subjective measures like being able to read your opponent.

c22•1h ago
If reading your opponent is a strategy that confers advantage then it stands to reason that deceiving your opponent is as well.
djeastm•2h ago
If we replace the word "lying" with "deception" does that change anything?
wrs•33m ago
Poker players very seldom outright lie, like saying out loud "hey everybody, my hand is great!", and it's usually not just simple "deception" either.

How about "behaving in a way that increases the probability of your particular adversaries making incorrect inferences about your situation"?

thinkingtoilet•2h ago
Ha. I got news for you. They are going to learn that playing poker or not.
striking•2h ago
The article ends

> As a parent, I’m pleased that I’ve given her the tools to put herself through college hustling poker games, and then go work at a proprietary trading firm.

which is presumably written with the same sardonic intent as any other Matt Levine work.

bamboozled•1h ago
The world order is falling apart and being an intelligent person makes you a target of the "anti-elite". I think teaching kids strategy and deception has never been more important.
jefftk•1h ago
When my kids were maybe 6 and 4 we started playing One Night Ultimate Werewolf as a family. It very quickly became clear this was a bad choice: the oldest went from being terrible at lying (and so ~never doing it) to actually being pretty good, surprisingly quickly. As soon as we noticed this we stopped, and while she didn't go back to how she had been there was definitely much less lying and she didn't remain good at it.
DrewRWx•1h ago
Do you think she adopted her pokerface she learned it against you or was there another reason?
jefftk•1h ago
I think it's simpler than that: people get better at things with practice.

Werewolf isn't like poker where people typically try to conceal their emotions and leak nothing; instead you're trying to act like you're on the Villager team regardless of whether you actually are.

bko•1h ago
I think it's balanced by having him or her learn skepticism, game theory, information asymmetry, and adverse selection, among other useful skills.
blitztime•1h ago
I’d say bluffing in poker isn’t really lying. I mean you certainly can look at it that way, but another way to look at it is “I have good hands here more often than you do so here strategically you have to fold when I bet”
jayknight•1h ago
The difference between a lie and a surprise is that soon everyone will know what the surprise was. A lie has the intention of concealing the truth forever.
jenders•2h ago
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more_corn•2h ago
One of the best life lessons I learned was while perusing a poker strategy book in a bookstore as a teen. I’ve never been into poker, not even sure why I picked it up. One thing it said was the most important thing to remember is that most of your hands will be crap. Don’t get attached to a bad hand and don’t convince yourself that an ok hand is a good hand. If you just fold the bad hands and play the good ones you’re already a better player than most.

I took that to heart and it has served me well in life.

wileydragonfly•2h ago
That’s it. That’s the entire strategy. I pray that the Texas Hold ‘Em fad doesn’t come back. That was an insufferable decade of hearing how clever everyone was.
albedoa•1h ago
How much did you lose?
thebigspacefuck•1h ago
That just makes you a tight passive player which is not the worst kind of player to be but also not likely to win you a lot of money
btilly•1h ago
Being a loose aggressive player is far more likely to lead to you losing a lot of money, than winning a lot of money.

Once you consider what the house earns, poker is a net negative for the players. In order for there to be some big winners, there have to be a lot of losers. And a shocking number of those losers will, thanks to our selective memories, consider themselves winning players.

owlninja•46m ago
In popular poker you are just playing against other players, not the house.
eszed•33m ago
Doesn't the house take a percentage of the pot ("rake", isn't it called?).

Not a poker player, just thought that was a thing.

albedoa•30m ago
Yes. The person you are responding to doesn't quite understand the comment they are responding to :) The rake can turn a breakeven or even winning player into a losing player. That's what we mean.
owlninja•10m ago
Sorry, that is fair enough, he is describing a casino. I never played in Vegas during the hold 'em boom, but went to plenty of houses where there wasn't really a rake.
bluGill•11m ago
Depends on where you play. For some the house is a literal house not a casino, and thus no rake.
thebigspacefuck•7m ago
Sure, that’s considered the worst player type to be and generally tight aggressive is considered the best strategy.

Zero-sum nature of the game aside, Meta developed an AI that wins consistently at poker, so it is possible to be good at poker and win consistently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluribus_(poker_bot)

tgijs•1h ago
For me, it's "decisions, not results." Poker will teach you patience and acceptance of that which is out of your control.
citizenkeen•1h ago
I have found Skull to be a superior form of poker for people who want the game without the chip evaluation, and it teaches the same skills.
mattnewton•41m ago
This, eliminates most of the probability math and distills it just down to the game theory and bluffing aspects. One of my favorite games.
PaulHoule•1h ago
Had some family come over and play Texas Hold’em with us and their kids. It was clear they were too stupid to be intimidated so there was no possibility of bluffing, instead I just folded over and over again until I had two really good cards and then would see me no matter what I bet and ai grew my bankroll that way.
sitzkrieg•1h ago
playing poker with the following truly undermines the entire experience:

people that dont understand rules 100%

wagers with no real value (time/money/snacks)

people who dont want to play outright

calvinmorrison•27m ago
GTO goes out the window when a drunk guy sits down with a few friends. Either you're gonna grab the pot a few times or bust because the dude went all in with dueces against your KA. he wins a flush on the river.
bobbiechen•22m ago
I like this. Most people try to teach card games by listing every rule, but it's much easier to play a simpler version then add in new rules.

I play the Chinese card game Zhao Peng You (Finding Friends, part of the Sheng Ji family of games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheng_ji), which is a trick taking game with a trump suit that changes between games, a trump number that changes between games, and a team selection mechanic rather than fixed teams. It's insanely hard to learn everything at once, so we usually start new people with fixed teams and trumps just to get the feel of a team-based trick-taking game, before adding in the complications.

coderintherye•16m ago
Blind Man's Bluff is a great variant: Give everyone a card face-down, they put it on their forehead without looking at it. Bet based on whether or not you think the card on your forehead is higher than other people's. More fun in my opinion.
tetromino_•10m ago
I have always been mystified by the popularity of poker. To me, it is an unpleasant game.

First - the fact that it's played for real money. If I win, I feel like a common swindler stealing money that someone could use to pay their bills or buy something nice for themselves. If I lose, I feel like a swindler's victim. And if the people around the table happen to be my friends - why would I ever wish to victimize them, or ruin their image in my mind by watching them victimize others?

Second - the lack of information. Many interesting games provide incomp9lete information of game state to the players, which one then needs to reconstruct. But with poker, the lack of information is so severe that one has no hope of reconstructing the game state - reasonable possibilities are too many to analyze, one is forced to pretty much guess and make gambles. It's an unpleasant experience.

It seems like a game for people whose brains are wired in a manner incompatible with mine. If I discover that someone likes poker, I find them rather suspicious. And people who teach poker to their own children - like the article'a author - are, to me, utterly incomprehensible.

kevinwang•5m ago
A quick take:

> reasonable possibilities are too many to analyze, one is forced to pretty much guess.

You could say the same thing about chess, but an experienced player wouldn't, because they know which candidate moves are reasonable and which lines to delve into through intuition shaped by experience.

Similarly, you might say the same about poker. The possible hands your opponent has are actually quite large, but an experienced player can have a reasonable idea of the possible hands and their probabilities, which may involve eg ignoring most hands as unrealistic and bucketing hands into classes.

p1necone•4m ago
If you ignore the externalities of winning/losing money the thing that the betting brings to poker that is very hard to replace is the impact it has on the players decision making. People playing poker with "funny money" play the game fundamentally differently to the extent it's almost a different game (arguably worse, certainly less predictable) entirely.

If you take the money out of it you have to replace it with something that matters to the players outside of the game itself for it to work.

(On the lack of information - some versions of poker are different than others but imo Texas Holdem has enough shared information that, combined with the knowledge that people really care about winning or losing informing your ability to read them based on their actions enables very strategic gameplay - the existence of a pro scene with players that consistently do well at a high level of play is evidence of this)

As another aside - I see similar complaints about strategy games that include RNG for things like attack values, and I also disagree with that criticism. I would argue that risk management is an interesting skill that's very hard to include in a game with perfect information.

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