The poker parent
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.6K Ratings
🗓️ 18 April 2024
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
An eight-year-old girl holds two cards in her hand. She places several plastic poker chips into the middle of the dining room table and makes a bet. Science writer Alex O’Brien has been teaching her daughter how to play poker for three years. She believes that the game will give her daughter important life lessons for the future - critical thinking skills, empowerment, controlling emotions and understanding psychology, probability and risk. But when the game is associated with casinos, gambling and men (95% of players are male), not every one agrees with her decision - including poker players.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm Alex O'Brien, and welcome to the documentary on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:07.8 | This is me giving my five-year-old daughter her first poker lesson. |
| 0:12.3 | This is called the turn card and the last card is called the river. |
| 0:15.9 | You ready to see the river? Okay what do you want to see? A heart? |
| 0:21.5 | I have five and a nine. I haven't matched anything and you haven't |
| 0:25.4 | matched anything but what wins? Me? That was three years ago and I'm still |
| 0:31.1 | teaching her the game. In the poker parent, I'll be sharing why I believe poker gives my daughter important life skills, |
| 0:39.0 | from critical thinking and understanding probability to learning about psychology |
| 0:44.8 | and being able to control her emotions. I'll be meeting other parents to feel the |
| 0:49.2 | same way and some that don't, but I'm not the only poker player who understands the game's appeal. |
| 0:56.0 | I would describe poker as a game that perfectly embodies life and the types of decisions that we have to make on a day-to-day basis. |
| 1:05.2 | It's a mind sport, you win by outwitting your opponents. |
| 1:09.2 | I describe poker as a mind sport, yeah. |
| 1:11.6 | I think you can teach young people how to play in an hour or so then they could spend the rest of their lives |
| 1:17.6 | figuring out how to play properly. A psychologist's tent poker player and two national poker champions one of whom as we'll |
| 1:25.5 | hear later to squeeze with me teaching my daughter but I'm going to start my |
| 1:31.1 | poker parent journey by opening a new deck of 52 cards, |
| 1:37.0 | reading some basic information about my own hand. |
| 1:41.0 | I'm a science writer from Germany who lives in the UK with my husband and our 8 year old daughter. |
| 1:50.0 | Since I am playing poker some 10 years ago, journalism has gradually taken a back seat to playing |
| 1:58.2 | in tournaments and studying the game. |
| 2:00.8 | And whilst most poker players are men things are starting to change. |
... |
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