Hi all, father of a 3 1/2 year old here.

My little daughter recently has put an eye on the poker chips in our shelf and asked me what they are about. I was explaining it to her a bit and we started playing this little poker-alike card game where we simply get a handful of chips and we iteratively get dealt two cards. The better hand wins. So of course for a three year old a huge portion of this game is to simply explore the different picture cards (king, queen, jack), counting the number of symbols printed on the lower cards to derive whether a card represents a 7 or a deuce (or whatever number) and she didn't even pick up on the suits yet :-D

Now I do have to say that she directly got very much overly excited about this game in order to see who "wins" each flip. A good friend of mine (no poker background) now confronted me with this game fostering gambling behavior and there being a reason why games like poker have an age restriction, essentially arguing it would be way too early to introduce a game with clear gambling elements.

Does anyone with older kids have experiences and an opinion on this? How did this go for you?