How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card

Deception, Lying, and Ethics

• Large subthread argues whether poker is “about lying.”
• One side: bluffing is deception and effectively “lying with extra steps”; teaching it risks normalizing manipulation.
• Other side: you can play optimal poker without verbal lies; actions communicate “I have an advantage in this pot,” not “I have specific cards.” Deception is bounded by the game’s rules, like feints in sports or cryptography hiding information.
• Some distinguish bluffing (temporary misrepresentation that’s eventually revealed) from lies meant to conceal truth indefinitely.

Teaching Kids: Benefits and Risks

• Pro-poker parents see it as a vehicle to teach: probability, risk management, information asymmetry, skepticism, reading signals, “decisions not results,” and bankroll discipline.
• Supporters frame it as practice handling uncertainty and human psychology in a low-stakes sandbox.
• Critics worry specifically about teaching 4–6-year-olds deception and winner-take-all thinking, arguing children that young need security and trust, not adults who are “out to win” against them.

Poker, Money, and Gambling Harm

• Some insist poker without meaningful stakes “isn’t really poker”; money changes behavior, makes bluffing rational, and anchors decision-making.
• Others happily play for matchsticks or chips only; for them it’s just another card game.
• Several raise concerns about gambling addiction, rake turning otherwise winning players into losers, and the ethics of taking money from friends or weaker players.
• Counterpoint: many games and tournaments (including chess, MTG) involve prize pools funded by entry fees; participants voluntarily accept that risk.

Skill, Strategy, and Information

• Many commenters stress poker as a skill game under high variance: understanding odds, expected value, ranges, and long-run outcomes (law of large numbers).
• Debate over how much is raw probability vs reading opponents; mention of AI solvers showing that near-unexploitable strategies exist.
• Some compare poker’s partial information to real-world decisions and even to imperfect-information aspects of chess preparation.

Alternatives, Variants, and Teaching Methods

• Suggestions of simpler or related games: Skull, Liar’s Dice, Werewolf/Mafia, Blind Man’s Bluff, cooperative “poker-like” games, and simplified Monopoly Deal.
• General agreement that starting with stripped-down rules and layering complexity (as in the article’s one-card approach) is an effective way to teach any game.