Learning from a child's game

[SpeakEasy]

I've started playing cards with my five-year-old daughter. Go Fish, Snap, Uno -- fun kids games. One night, I was just playing around with cards on the floor, dealing ten hands of hold 'em and a flop, turn and river, and seeing which of the ten hands would win. My daughter plopped down and decided that she wanted to play, too. We "invented" the following game together, which has been an amazing eye-opener for me...

The game -- Deal ten opening hands of hold 'em face down as in a regular game, except deal five to your opponent and five to you. Each person looks at their five starting hands and selects one of the five hands to keep; the remaining four hands for each player are discarded. Each player turns up their starting hand. The dealer deals out three successive runs of common cards as in hold 'em (that is, the flop, turn and river three times, skipping the "burn" cards). After each set of five common cards, the winner is determined (let the child figure this out -- also teaches them to watch for straights and flushes). The set of five common cards are collected and turned face down next to the winning hand to keep track of who won. The winner is the player that wins the most out of three rounds. Then collect all cards, shuffle and re-deal.

Its fun for children because its easy to play, they are actively involved with each step, it teaches them to make decisions (which hand to play when its close -- Q9 or JT?), and it moves quickly. If you want to teach a youngster how to play poker, this is an excellent game -- they learn the value of hands by selecting the best from five starting hands, and the determine the winning hand each time. When my daughter sees poker on TV, she's now always saying something like "Look, Ace-Jack. That's not as good as Ace-Queen, is it? And Queen-Queen would be better, too."

Here's the fairly amazing thing this game has taught me about hand strength: almost EVERY round of this game ends up 2-1. Try it. It is very rare that one of the two hands wins 3-0. The starting hand has to clearly dominate (ex. KK vs. J7) to end up winning 3-0. Even in the pair vs. pair situation (ex. JJ vs 44), the 44 will probably win one of three times. More than playing real poker, this simple game helps put the "bad beats" into perspective, because you realize that with any 5 random common board cards from the remainder of the deck, the "underdog" will usually win 1 out of 3 times unless it is clearly dominated. (I understand that if you dealt out all of the remaining cards in the deck into groups of 5 (which you can do 6 times with the remaining 32 cards), the results would look closer to the actual starting-hand winning percentages.)

If you play cards with children, try it. I suppose you could add some chips to the game to add fun/complexity. Each person starts with, say, 10 chips. In a 2-1 result, the loser gives one chip to the winner. In a 3-0 result, the loser gives 3 chips to the winner.