[deepdowntruth]

The first thing I teach friends is the idea of expected value. Maybe kind of a strange thing to start with, but I make it work.

I start out by playing a dice game where he pays me $1 any time a 1 or a 2 lands, and I pay him $1 when a 3, 4, 5, or 6 lands. After about 5-10 minutes, he ends up with all or most of the chips. Then I tell him that the essence of making money at poker is forcing your opponents to make the wrong end of as many of these bets as you can. The best and easiest way for a beginner to do this is to only play cards that are most likely to be better than those of one's opponents.

This demonstration is more convincing than merely dictating "play tight". It also shows them, in a visceral and compelling way, that is more important to get worse hands to put money in the pot than to shut them out from making bad bets.

And then I go from there. They seem to get it. And they start right out with an idea of what they are trying to do in the big picture.

I dunno. It works for me.