Nate Meyvis

So, while I'm all about diversity of experience, I also wouldn't recommend being in any kind of hurry to _replace_ your kid's interest in chess with other game-playing interests.

I hope there's something useful in there. I'm happy to discuss any of this at more length. But really, go try to find anything @MattGlassman312 has written about kids and game-playing. He's gone through that age and is an extraordinarily sharp thinker about these issues.

Thanks, Nate. In my experience (3 kids: 11,9,6), poker’s pretty hard for kids to have that eureka that makes one fall in love with a game: winning strat is a bit boring (mostly fold), and in kids games no one folds, so magic of a bluff disappears. Value bets ain’t that fun. 1/

Also, poker isn’t really a card game, it’s a gambling game. That’s good—you can learn a lot of strategic thinking in gambling games—but it sort of requires a financial motive. Two ways to mitigate this: (1) play freeze-out tourneys, kids love that; (2) play real card games. 2/

My dad’squote: “There are only 3 card games: Poker, Gin, and Bridge. Everything else is a kid version of those. But Poker's actually a gambling game w/ cards, and Gin’s boring except as a hustle. So if you want to be good at *cards*, start with Bridge. 3/

And I think that’s right. Bridge (or more likely, the tricks and trumps Bridge derivatives) are the games that make people fall in love with card playing. You don’t have to play for money. The strategic thinking is deep, and the learning feedback is much more intuitive/quick. 4/

My rec is to start with Oh Hell. It’s the perfect Bridge derivative. It’s not the greatest card game (Bridge is), but it’s the best card game, because you can teach someone in 2 minutes, it scales, and you are *never* bored, b/c there are no bad hands. https://twitter.com/mattglassman312/status/808487878774898689?s=21 …https://twitter.com/MattGlassman312/status/808487878774898689 …

But, more generally, we just play an absurdly wide array of strategic thinking games. Throw out almost every board game that was made in the 50’s, they all suck. 6/