[Kablooie]

There are certainly aspects to gambling that should be more widely known. In particular the experiments from psychology that showed that training animals to perform tasks with random rewards for sucess is much more effective than just giving them a reward every time they correctly perform the task. As in, a _lot_ more effective - and this is certainly part of why gambling does cause problems for so many folks. Certainly the slot machine people have been all over this kind of research, and have consciously applied it to their designs. I doubt that knowing that would help after the fact, but it's something that children should be taught the same way they explain why nicotine is addictive, and what tar does to your lungs.

I wouldn't worry too much about teaching them poker per se though, because
like most games, it does teach some useful skills, in particular training them to think about why another player is betting the hand, looking for betting patterns, getting a really good gut feel for the way probability works, are i suspect something that will be very useful long term. It's not that you can readily escape from some kind of gambling activity in our society, so if they end up understanding why there are professional poker players, and no professional roulette players, they'll be in pretty good shape.