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.
> 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
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.