In my experience poker completely falls apart when it's not for real money. It just doesn't seem like a very good game in the sense that people don't try to win unless there's some external benefit to winning. It sucks to play with people who don't care.

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__s 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I run home games with 5c/10c blinds (5$ buy in). Keeps element of real money, keeps things very casual, winning players usually leaves with ~20$. Have food etc, costs losing players less than it'd cost to go out for a sandwich

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matkoniecz 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Maybe I and my friends are overly competitive at board games, but not tying to win was not a problem for us.

Though poker and similar games were only tiny part of our games.

(except some cases where player was utterly doomed and checked out)

	▲	OkayPhysicist 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		It's not about players not wanting to win, it's about wildly heterogeneous perspectives of winning. If we're not playing for cash, walking away in first place with $30 of the $100 bucks on the table isn't much different than walking away in first place with $80 of the $100 bucks. On the other hand, a second place win with $40 might be considered worse than a first place win with $30 dollars. With cash, those dollar amounts mean something intrinsically. It leads to overly aggressive, low-information gameplay, because players will opt to "either win or lose by a lot" over "lose by a little".