An on-ramp to games of incomplete info for children
Matt Levine on teaching his 4-year old poker:
How to Teach Your Kids Poker, the Easy Way (non-paywalled version)
The wrong way [to teach poker] typically begins with the order of hands. The winner of a poker hand is the player with the best hand, so you have to know which hands are better than others. A straight flush beats four of a kind, a flush beats a straight, three of a kind beats two pair, etc. For a child, this is a lot to memorize, though also an exciting assortment of trivia to know and argue about.
But this isn’t what poker is about. Poker is a game of incomplete information — you rarely know if you have the best hand — and, more important, a game of betting. The essential action of poker is betting, or folding if the betting gets too rich for you. The winner is the player with the best hand who’s still in at the end of the hand, and you get to the end of the hand only if you call all the bets along the way. If you have the best hand and fold, you lose. And if you have the worst hand and make everybody else fold — by bluffing, by betting and acting like you have a good hand — then you win.
That dynamic is more central to poker, and more fun to learn, than the order of hands. And you can get to it immediately, if you begin teaching poker the right way.
The right way to begin is with one-card poker…
You’ll probably win with a king, but if someone raises you, does that mean that they have an ace (and have you beat), or a queen (and are overconfident), or a six (and are bluffing)? There are 52 cards, so you can estimate the probabilities if you are mathematically inclined, though if you are four you probably won’t.
You probably won’t win with a six, but if you bet it confidently you might bluff everyone else out. If everyone else checks, and you’re the last person to bet, you might as well bet: You have “position,” everyone else has a weak hand, and you might be able to steal a pot. The essentials are there.
- A cool version of a “liar’s” game which hits the same notes as poker but with less complexity:
- 🔗kids as market-makers (moontower)
…and weird timing but this is an invitation I got out-of-the-blue in the neighborhood dad chat:
I’m hosting a poker night, but with dice games instead of poker. Liar’s Dice and Left, Center, Right.
If you recall from A couple game recs from Xmas 2024, I recommeded LCR:
Left Center Right (1 min video)
This game is pure degeneracy and takes less than a minute to learn. Asian grandmas and 5-year-olds alike will lose their minds over it. Huge party hit this holidays. It’s actually an old game, but new to me. It has zero skill so when I heard how it works I immediately poo poo’d it but playing it in a group of 15 for a little cash is amazing.
If you want to make it skillful just create an open outcry side-market on who the winner is. Let’s say “Ann” is playing…Ann futures settle to 0 or 100 depending on if Ann wins so you can bid, offer, or trade any integer price between 0 and 100 based on your assessed probability of Ann winning. It’s a faithful simulation of mock trading (and really similar to the StockSlam game I was playing a couple years ago).