This is a much better idea. It’s a game that encourages discussion of your options rather being entirely dependent on hiding your cards, which makes it easier to teach, and it’s not a game where bad fortune might lead to a few players sitting around being bored because they ran out of chips. And it also isn’t teaching your kids to gamble or play terrible games that are incapable of being engaging on their own merit.
Poker is not a terrible game and has plenty of merit to engage.
While Pandemic seems interesting, it’s not the type of game that I’m interested in at the moment. I’d also say that the population of poker players is quite a bit larger than that of Pandemic players, and teaching games that are widely played has value.
I think teaching gambling can be a judgment call. Risk evaluation, statistical analysis, decision making, those are all positive things to learn. If you think Poker is a terrible game then that’s fine too I guess. It’s not for everyone.
The OP asked for advice about playing poker, so it might be polite not to tell people their choice of game is “terrible.” Perhaps that should be another thread.
Playing cards - including poker - is certainly a huge deal in my family, something kids are taught from a young age, and we have enormous fun doing it.
Have the kids play for chips, and have the adults bet on which kid will win. You can have a big pot, with odds, for the big winner of the evening, and side bets on each hand.
Yep. Teaches them a trade, too.
When I taught my father and brother Risk I didn’t tell them it was a game where “players must co-operate to win.” They figured that out on their own, to my dismay.
Oh, **** yeah! Brother, sister, in-law vs brother, sister, in-law. Do you realize early that your own kid is a loser? Then bet against her, publicly. That will teach her not to suck. 
Let the kids play with money, the adults shouldn’t be trying to hustle the kids. It’s a great chance to learn things by having fun. Just let the kids keep the money, whatever you give them and whatever they win. It’s supposed to be fun, and the amounts should be trivial, otherwise adults shouldn’t be playing with children. Later on they’ll get bored and go play video games and the adults can have their high stakes game then. If you don’t want to get money involved then everybody should play for free chips. It’s a game.
Your best case scenario, at a table with adults playing for real, is that the kids are going to bust out early, and then they’re not playing anyway.
So you play for change and let the kids keep what they win. Even if you stake them in for real dollars, they’re still kids. They’re going to lose to the adults and they’re probably going to be bored/frustrated playing at a table where the grownups are playing for real (folding more hands than they play and so on).
When a grownup is playing a grownup game with children, the rule is to tone it back so that the kids can enjoy themselves. Otherwise don’t play at all.
I had a great-uncle who taught me how to play poker using pennies. It wasn’t fun because of the money; it was fun because I was playing a grownup game with my uncle.
I can’t see a mixed game. What if the kids raise the bets to unreasonable levels?
You could play what’s effectively a sit-n-go, to use online poker parlance. Adults buy in for real money. Kids don’t. Last adult standing wins all the real money. Maybe have an agreement that if the last player standing is a kid, then half the money goes to a pizza party or something so there’s something on the line for the kids in addition to pride.
That said, I think that if anything approaching meaningful stakes are being played for by the grownups, this is a recipe for hurt feelings… imagine 2 adults and 1 child are left, and the child gets bored and, not playing for anything, goes all in with nothing. Pretty much any outcome of that is very likely to be a “feel bad” moment.
I remember playing penny-ante poker for the first time with my parents and their best friends when I was 12. The first hand I got I totally bluffed, and won the pot, and my father demanded to see my cards. When he saw what I had he and his friend lectured me about playing poker “the right way” and after two more hands of doing this out of the next five kicked me out of the game! 
Invest in some dice and teach the tykes street craps.
Soon they’ll be coming home from school with pockets bursting with lunch money.
That’s not how poker works, except in the movies. Poker is universally played with “table stakes”, meaning you can’t raise beyond what you have on the table in front of you at the start of the hand.
For OP: I’m with you. Poker is an excellent game to learn real-world skills, and I think it’s great that you’re getting kids involved.
As for structuring the game, I think it depends a lot on how old these kids are. For older kids with suitable personalities, you could structure things such that they have a tiny bit of real skin in the game. Are you playing limit or no-limit? Are you playing sit-n-gos (tourney style) or ring games? The approach would be quite different, I think, for different answers.
If player elimination is okay (sit-n-go, where everyone buys in just once and the top few players get a portion of the prize pool), then it’s straightforward, as suggested upthread by MaxTheVool. Assuming 4 adults and 3 kids, I’d have each adult put up $25 or whatever, then the payout structure could be whatever you like, for example:
Kid 3 = $2
Kid 2 = $4
Kid 1 = $9
Adult 4 = $0
Adult 3 = $0
Adult 2 = $25
Adult 1 = $60
If you want a ring game where players can rebuy if they go bust or nearly bust, then I’d do this: Adults stake themselves as normal. Kids are staked collectively by the adults, including any rebuys the kid(s) need or are allowed. Kid chips = adult chips during play. At cash-out time kids are paid, say, 10% of face value for the chips they have. The other 90% of all kid chip value is redistributed back to the adults equally. Adult cash out is unchanged.
Concretely, if you have 4 adults and 2 kids and everyone buys-in for $20 to start, then everyone gets $20 in chips to start and each adult contributes $20+($40/4) = $30 to the bank. That way the bank value matches the chips-in-play value (required!), and the whole table is now worth $120. If you stopped play after zero hands (for sake of example here), the kids would get 10% of the value of their chips (so, $2), the residual kid stake of $36 would go back to the adults equally ($9 each), and the adults would directly cash out their $20, walking away with $29 of their initial $30.
The economics of it: In essence, each adult in this scenario has agreed to pay $1 to the kids to get them involved and has agreed to let the kids, collectively, to play the role of Asset Manager for another $9. If they manage those assets neutrally (no gain or loss), that $9 is returned. Assuming your players are mostly in it for fun and not trying to make mad cash, this should play out fairly naturally. For the kids, the economics within the game are exactly as they would be for an “honest” poker game. For the adults, there is a subtle difference during play that I would encourage not mentioning to anyone in your game. Namely, a $1 chip in an opponent’s stack at the end of the game is worth $0 to me if an adult has it but worth $0.225 to me if a kid has it (for the example scenario above). Thus, if I have no chance to win a pot but I can influence who doeswin a pot, I would want a kid to win even assuming equal skill levels of all players. The actual impact of this subtlety is reduced if (1) no one realizes it, or (2) the number of adults is large, or (3) the number of kids is small, or (4) the kids almost always lose all their chips anyway.
However, it can’t be played without a financial stake. Going through the motions with chips or pennies or whatever makes it a completely different game, and one that’s not all that interesting. There are better bidding/value card games to play with a non-money crowd.
Or, this being 2016, you could just sit around watching “poker” on TV. :rolleyes:
Winning all the free chips in poker is just as enjoyable as winning all the fake money in Monopoly. I think the kids can play penny ante poker, but if you want to leave money out there’s nothing wrong with playing just for chips. It’s still a game.
I’d disagree. The money in Monopoly (and the tokens in most board games) are just counters to see who’s ahead. In poker, you have to have some kind of real leverage to do anything but see who’s dealt the highest hand. You can’t bluff, no one will ever drop, and every deal just becomes an all-hands showdown… which is at best half the real game.
It has to have blood on it to make someone stay with two pair to a one-card draw.
You seem to be saying poker can be more enjoyable than Monopoly, and I don’t disagree. But it can also be as enjoyable as Monopoly with the chips just telling you who is ahead.
Well, just about everything is more enjoyable than Monopoly… after the first hour.
No, what I mean is that poker involves elements that require players to make a choice between judgment and valuta. If there’s no real money involved, there’s not much need for fine judgment either. Yes, you can play, but as I said, it won’t be poker if you can just shove 20 plastic chips in on your weak hand, no blood, no pain, who cares.
Other games can make a plastic chip or a counting peg or just points on a tally sting, but poker loses its key element if there’s no way to bluff and/or force a player to make a finely shaded decision. So it’s all-hands showdown, and guess what, Ralphy’s two pair win against everyone else’s crap. Whee.
This is really great. I’m going to make a proposal and see if the others would be interested. Just to clarify - are you suggesting that at the close of play, kid value over the discount (10%), is returned to the adults equally, or proportionally to the amount of chips the adults have?
Essentially I have a casual poker game that I play with friends. We started playing before we were teenagers at very low stakes, think pennies and quarters. As we got older we increased the stakes to match our relative risk tolerance and changing income but primarily the game is for fun and to socialize. It’s a ring game, before we knew what that term meant. Now, all of us have kids and getting together for a poker game is more difficult because the kids outnumber the adults.
Some of the kids are now old enough that they can play poker, but just barely and are learning. When the adults get together they are interested so I was looking for a way to be more inclusive.
The former: equal redistribution, regardless of adult chip stacks. The adults have contributed equally to, and are thus equal partners in, an “investment account” that the kids are managing. The kids’ performance in the game changes the value of that investment account, but all adults are still equal partners in it. If an adult goes bust, they still have equity in the kids’ stacks and are owed that value despite their own stack equaling zero. (The adults have separately invested in their own chip stacks and will win/lose cash directly in proportion to how well they manage their own chip stack. No one is staking them.)
Doing it the other way also adds more unwanted (and worse) economic subtleties. As one example: an adult player rebuying near the end of the game would be paying (say) $20[cash] for $20[chips], but is actually gaining cash value of $20+(calculable proportion of kids stack value). Thus, his $20 bill just magically became worth, say, $24.50 simply by agreeing to buy in again.
Thus, there needs to be a firewall between the kid-directed investments and the chips the adults actually buy and play with themselves. Also, just to be clear on the kid rebuy situation: if little Johnny needs another $20 in chips after his fool’s errand with two pair on a highly textured flop, the adults can agree to each pony up their fair share of his rebuy ($5 each if four adults) and add that $20 to the bank. Then, the kid payouts in the end remain equal to each adult.
In principle, the adults can invest different amounts into the kid stacks, so maybe Johnny’s mom puts up the full $20 rebuy, but then she is owed an appropriately larger amount of the payout of the kid equity at the end. Your group may find it more natural, at least the first time, just to require equal contributions from all adults for all kid buy-ins.
You may also find it easier to write all the buy-ins down on paper and deal with actual cash only at the end. That way you can deal with the money owed/earned from the different sides of the firewall all in one go. Although, some folks do like seeing that pile of bills over in the corner as motivation during the game. 