We played a bunch of Pinochle while my dad and brother were in town last week. I've been playing this game with my family since I was about seven years old. At least, that's when I started sitting on my dad's or uncle's or grandmother's lap and "helping" them play. They taught me the rules and strategy and it wasn't long before I was playing on my own, and even winning occasionally against the adults.
At one point last week, my dad muttered to himself "I think that's all the trump" which got me thinking about playing cards. Part of the strategy I was taught with Pinochle was the importance of counting cards. You need to know how much trump is still out there and who probably has it. It's also good to know who has aces left, if there are any, along with which suits people are short in. If I play a 10 of clubs, I should know either that it will go all the way around or that my partner will trump it.
When I started playing more games with Kevin, our friends from college, and his high school friends, there was always this same assumption that people were counting cards. In Settlers of Catan it's more beneficial to steal cards from people who have what you want. And you know what people have by paying attention to what they draw. In Dominion, your strategy has to rely, in part, on what other people are drawing. If someone is grabbing all the offensive cards, you need to pick up some defensive cards and maybe grab a few of the offensive ones to prevent them from getting all of them. You should have a decent sense of not just the proportions of your own deck but those of your opponents as well.
I guess the point I'm making is that counting cards is always sort of assumed. Generally I lose a card game because I haven't been paying close enough attention to this or because I've miscounted. If I'm focused, I stand a much better chance of winning, because I know how certain plays are likely to go. Occasionally I get lucky and someone else hasn't been paying close enough attention, allowing me to sweep in with a surprise.
So it was confusing to me when I started playing games with some of my coworkers. This was part of project in which we were trying to develop a training type game (and perhaps I shouldn't expect too much from grunts). When I mentioned keeping track of these probabilities, they mostly wrote it off as impossible. Something only a genius would do. Who can keep all those numbers in their head?
It surprised me to learn that not everyone grows up counting cards. The probabilities associated with a deck of cards are so deeply ingrained in my head that it barely even feels like math any more.
I guess I'm wondering if anyone else has experienced this. I realize I'm probably working with a biased sample, but did you grow up counting cards? Do you consider it strategy or cheating (obviously casinos have opinions about this)? Do you think it's a mark of higher intelligence to keep track of probabilities? Or is it something anyone can learn to do?
I too grew up counting cards, maybe not because anybody taught me to, but because I grew up playing poker games with my Grandfather and I loved the (what I found to be obvious) mathematical tie ins.
ReplyDeleteTeaching probability to high school students gave me some insight into a hugely different side of things. Many students I taught while being somewhat familiar with card games had no idea how many cards were in a deck, how many suits there were, and couldn't figure out how many cards of each suit there were given that information. Some of the kids took to it pretty quickly once they figured out that when playing with cards there are a lot of ways to improve your play by thinking about these things, but many students chalked everything I was talking about up to being math (and math is hard, boring, or both). The most full proof way I have found to getting kids interested in learning more about a deck of cards is to sit down with some of them and destroy them at their own game because I'm using probability and they're not. While I'm playing with them I'll talk to them about the choices I'm making and why so that get an idea of the thought process someone who understands the probabilities goes through and why that could possibly be helpful.
In short, I fully believe that everyone can learn to handle those probabilities (or most math for that matter), they just need a reason to want to learn. Of course, I wouldn't be a teacher if I didn't think all kids could learn anything they want to learn.
Zach, that's very noble of you.
ReplyDeleteBut there are some pretty stupid people out there. And most of them started as even dumber kids.
That is all.