We now find simulations for really everything. For example, we can focus on the most popular sport in the world in Football Manager, while the Farming Simulator offers a wide selection of tractors and farm animals. With games like Factorio, factories can be built. Even the particularly popular Anno 1800 regularly appears on all top lists of the best simulations.
With so many simulators, it is clear that this is one of the most popular genres in Germany and the world. But can the skills from the simulator also be applied to other, more classic games like poker, where strategic thinking is also in the foreground? Are simulation game players automatically better poker players? We investigate this in detail.
Simulations and Poker - Increasingly Popular Pastime
Simulations are among the oldest games that were produced a few decades ago. It started with the Flight Simulator, whose development Bruce Artwick already started in 1977. By 1981, the game was sold by the developer for use on PCs, before Artwick was contacted by one of the world's largest companies. Microsoft reached an agreement for the licensed release on IBM PCs and has not looked back since. Microsoft Flight Simulator became the longest simulator series that still exists today and is scheduled to receive a new installment in 2020.
However, the best-known genre among simulations is reserved for construction games. Here, the focus is above all on achieving as high growth as possible in whatever field. However, the realization of one's own creativity remains an important factor, so that the genre differs from pure economic simulations. The construction simulations are in turn divided into many individual categories, with city building, for example, playing a particularly prominent role with games like Cities: Skylines.
However, the lists of the most popular games on the streaming platform Twitch do not only show simulators in the Top 100. Among other things, poker also appears there in 27th place. At first glance, the two genres of games have only little in common, but on the second, this assessment changes significantly. So it comes in both simulations and in the card classic to an appropriate strategy to beat opponents or the AI. Not least for this reason, it is such a popular game that, above all in the first years of the current millennium, won many new fans thanks to the Internet and still uses this popularity to its advantage today. In all its different variants, poker is the right format for pretty much every player.
The most successful games of their kind
If you're looking for the most successful poker variant, you'll quickly come across the name Texas Holdem. This is the variant that became popular in the 1990s and replaced other, previously more popular versions on the poker throne. In addition to the five community cards, each player has two hidden cards on their hand with which the combinations have to be achieved. But playing successfully in the long term is only possible with a clear basic strategy at poker, as relying on one's own luck is only sensible with purely random games like slots. The first step is to always pay attention to your own credit limits. Going beyond that should always be avoided. To do this, it is important to learn the playable hands "in position" in order to fully exploit the strategic advantage at the table. In poker, there are four options to choose from in each round: checking, betting, raising or folding. To make the right decision here, experience is needed in assessing one's own cards in comparison to the community cards. The easiest way to do this is by calculating the probabilities.
It is precisely these probabilities that are also important when, for example, a city simulator is started. As a player, it must be calculated, for example, whether another street or the hotel on the outskirts of the city is more worthwhile for the lives of the residents. So poker is mainly comparable to turn-based simulator games, in which there are certain activities that can be carried out per round. In the middle of the industrial revolution, the most famous construction game of all time is played: Anno 1800.
The classic by Blue Byte requires a lot of strategic thinking over the course of the game years, so that, if successful, it is just as much fun to play as poker. In addition, there is the anticipation of the opponent's move, which one is better prepared for in both games. Something similar is also the case with Factorio, in which conveyor belts and assembly machines are built from raw materials using skill and strategy. These are then also extremely helpful for the construction of defensive tools.
Do the acquired skills automatically lead to poker success?
It would be fantastic if the skills from simulations could simply be transferred to poker. But it's not that easy in reality - at least in terms of the big picture. Individual skills can be transferred without a doubt from one game to the other. The best example is the aforementioned Anno 1800, where economic aspects and avoiding unnecessary risks are most comparable to poker, for which the Season 2 Pass has been available since March 2020. Here, too, your own funds must be managed reliably and increased in the event of success. As a rule, it is not worth holding bad cards in your hand. In order to minimize the risk, they should be discarded as soon as possible if checking is not possible anyway.
However, simulations promote many other skills, such as imagination. Such an imagination is usually not necessary in poker, as one's own creativity hardly plays a role there in order to be successful. Here it is rather about simple mathematics with probabilities. There are also similarities in trying out or researching solutions. In particular, new players are often faced with insurmountable problems in both genres before they research a simple trick that solves all problems in one fell swoop. As a result, the key qualification required for many jobs of being able to solve problems can be expanded to some extent. In general, many players still derive an educational benefit of some kind or other from simulations. Here the games differ again from poker, where players can acquire knowledge, but this is very niche-oriented.
In summary, we can say that simulation players are not automatically better poker players. However, they acquire many skills that are also useful at the poker table. In addition, however, there are some poker-specific skills that have to be learned separately.
