Teach Your Kids Poker the Easy Way

No pairs, no flushes, no full houses, no complicated order of hands.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Teach your kids Poker The Easy Way by Matt Levine
read by Bob Danielson. I have three children, ages eight, four,
and also four twins. Studies suggest that three is the
most stressful number of children, but there's an important consolation,
which is the family poker game. Four players are ideal

(00:21):
for spades or hearts, two for spit or gin rummy,
but five is a respectable poker table, and so it
was important to me to teach my kids poker as
early as possible, which turns out to be at four
years old. I initially tried to do this the way
I'd been taught, which is the wrong way. The wrong
way typically begins with the order of hands. The winner

(00:43):
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,
et cetera. 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

(01:05):
is a game of incomplete information. You rarely know if
you have the best hand, and more importantly, 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

(01:27):
all the bets along the way. If you have the
best hand in 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

(01:48):
teaching poker the right way. The right way to begin
is with one card poker. Those who came up playing
dealer's choice games might be familiar with another one card
poker game, sometimes called blue Man's bluff. In this game,
each player is dealt one card, and without looking at it,
places it facing out on her forehead. Each player can
see every other player's card, but not her own. Then

(02:11):
you bet. I find that this does not teach poker
concepts as well as regular one card poker, and requires
levels of sophistication and manual dexterity that are tough for
little kids. In regular one card poker, everyone anties one
chip and gets one card face down. You look at
your card. There's a single round of betting, which proceeds

(02:32):
around the table. If no one else has bet, you
can bet or check do nothing. If anyone in front
of you has bet, you can call or match the bet, raise,
or fold. When everyone else has called the last bet
or folded. Those who are left in the hand to
show their card. The highest card wins, Ace is highest,

(02:53):
then king, so on down to two. That's it. No pairs,
no flushes, no full houses, no complicated order of hands
to remember, though. You do have to remember that a
queen beats a jack. But you learn a lot of poker.
You will always win with an ace, but you have
to learn to maximize the value of your ace to

(03:14):
induce other people to bet into you and call your raises.
One of my proudest moments as a parent was when
my daughter first check raised me with an ace. You'll
probably win with a king, but if someone raises you,
does that mean they have an ace and have your
beat or a queen and are over confident or a
six and are bluffing. There are fifty two cards, so

(03:35):
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, and you might
as well bet, you have position, everyone else has a
weak hand, and you might be able to steal a pot.

(03:57):
The essentials are there. Once the kids have mastered this,
you can introduce the order of hands gently with two
card poker. Any pair beats a high card, highest pair wins,
then teach the rest with five cards straight poker. This
isn't a great game, but it's a brief stopover on
the way to five card draw, which is a perfectly
respectable poker game. Texas hold'em is not far behind. Another

(04:22):
inessential complication that took up a lot of my attention
when I learned poker is the value of chips. I
learned to play with little plastic chips with different values.
Whites are one and reds are five, and blues are
ten or twenty five are something I forget it's not
important now. At my house, we play that each chip
is worth a chip easy. The colors do mean something,

(04:45):
though from our dissolute youth. My wife and I have
nice clay poker chips in a range of colors. Each
player starts the game with a stack of chips and
his or her own color. This encourages gloating. The chips
are all worth the same, but you can tell with
a glance at the stacks not only who's winning, but
also who's beating whom. If you have a bunch of

(05:06):
yellow chips, then you know you've taken money from your father,
and that is satisfying. I once described my system to
an executive at a proprietary trading firm who asked, so
do you cash them out for ice cream? A reasonable
question that had never occurred to me. Real poker players
play for money. Chips are an in game tool for
keeping score, but at the end you settle up for

(05:27):
money or ice cream. Fine, but a game where the
chips disappear at the end is pointless. This is simply
not a problem for twin four year old boys. People
have lost their houses in Vegas with less emotion than
our sons show when they lose to each other. They're
fully motivated, just playing for the thrill of the game.
We taught my daughter this way when she was four.

(05:48):
Now she's eight, a solid no limit hold'em player who's
started on modern poker theory. This is mostly a joke,
though not entirely. As a parent, I'm pleased that I've
given her the tool to put ourself through college, hustling
poker games, and then go to work at a proprietary
trading firm. With our four year olds, we are still
on one card poker, but it is pretty fun and

(06:10):
the dream of a real family poker night is within reach.