Recently, a thread started on one of the online forums where the original poster asked if people would teach their children poker. It prompted a great discussion, with a lot of very thoughtful replies. It occurred to me that I could offer a relatively unique perspective, since my sons are probably older than the average age of a poker forum poster. And yes, I taught them poker.
I chose to teach my sons poker pretty much immediately after I acquired them at the ages of 14 and 10 when my wife and I got married. I thought it was important to show them that I had some value to their lives. As it turned out, they were more impressed with my ability to prepare fried chicken fingers and chili, teaching them scuba diving was a big hit, and the biggest gift I gave them was music. But I’m glad I taught them poker.
I think that poker is a great metaphor for many things that happen in life, and learning those lessons in the clear and somewhat purer context of a card game is easier (and less painful) than learning them when you play big pots in the real world.
Let me give some specifics:
Risk versus reward
Many of the decisions that you make in life are fundamentally risk versus reward problems. Let’s take a life-or-death one: unsafe sex. I had taught my sons the basics of pot odds, and couched virtually every important decision they discussed with me as, “How big is the pot and how much do you have to call?” So, not enough years into our relationship, when I felt I had to say something on the safe sex subject, I didn’t deviate. The monologue went something like: “The chance of you contracting HIV may be relatively low. But the price – the cost – is your life. Not to mention breaking the hearts of dozens of friends and family members who love you. This is a pot you simply don’t want to play; use a condom all the time.” I remember distinctly one of the boys passing on a social outing with friends when he had an exam at school the next day. “Thought you were going out.” “Nah – big test tomorrow and I need to study. My enjoyment of going out tonight won’t be worth the pain I’ll feel tomorrow.” Pure risk/reward calculation, and I (silently) did the parenting victory dance.
Dealing with incomplete information
One of the things that poker does best is teach you to deal with not knowing everything that you’d like to know when making a decision. Some people are constitutionally inclined to want to know everything about a problem before working on its solution. However, we are often forced to make decisions with incomplete information, and poker gives us a wonderful context for doing that. What are the various outcomes and their probabilities? What is the reward associated with each outcome? Okay – given that, we go forward, knowing that we have made the best decision possible given the information we had. What happens after that may be largely out of our control, but we made our best decision, and we can do no better than that. Understanding that immutable fact of poker helps cement understanding of the equally immutable fact of life.
Controlling tilt
Bad things happen to good poker players all the time. In fact, they happen so much we have a name for them: bad beats. Alas, the same is true of the real world. Very bad things happen to perfectly wonderful people. A drunk driver hits your friend’s car, and she is killed or paralyzed for life. Your coworker is diagnosed with an inoperable cancer. None of us make it through life without those tragedies striking us. This unavoidable pain and suffering seems so random and unfair that it can destroy people’s sense of balance, their ability to get through life. Losing to a two-outer is nothing compared to losing a loved one. But if you understand that the cards (or poker site) don’t have it in for you, sometimes you can carry that lesson to the world around you. To realize that fate really doesn’t have it in for you either. That this freakish, random, totally unfair pain that we suffer is indeed random, and is an integral part of existence.
Ultimately, neither of my sons ever showed serious interest in poker, and I’m glad for that. Poker’s a fine game and a wonderful learning tool, but I honestly don’t believe it’s the best course for most young people – certainly not as a long-term career. I suppose we could have poker games during holiday gatherings, but we’d rather play Scrabble or Wii or, better yet, break out the instruments and pick.
But with that said, I encourage parents to teach their kids poker as one of the zillion things that you share with them. Some day, when they’re faced with an important life decision, they’ll unconsciously frame it as a risk/reward problem, weigh the odds, and make the best decision they can. If they do that, then your poker lessons will have served them well.
Lee Jones has worked in the poker industry for six years, and has been associated with professional poker for almost 20 years. He is the author of Winning Low Limit Hold’em, which has been in print for over 14 years.