Dan Luu writes that, as a newcomer to poker, something puzzles him about how the game is played: Poker players have collectively decided it’s not possible to play the game without trolling unless you play for “serious” money. The reasoning is something like, “obviously, people will make stupid plays like going all in every hand unless there’s real money on the line”. Outside of the implicit collective agreement to do so, this is patently absurd — people play all sorts of games where there’s no money on the line and they don’t, in general, purposely make troll moves, so there shouldn’t be an inherent reason poker can’t be played seriously when there isn’t serious money on the line, but since people have agreed to buy into this collective delusion, it seems fairly difficult to find a poker game where people actually want to play well without putting an amount of money up that’s meaningful to the people playing. As a poker player myself, this rings true to me. OK, I’ve never been serious…
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