The irony is that you can’t really teach someone who doesn’t know anything any poker anything more than what the hands are, and which are considered better than others, by playing Balatro.
Everything else in Balatro is completely divorced from poker. There are a few other shared terms, but they’re defined completely differently in Balatro than in poker (e.g. a “blind” is a stage, 3 stages in a level (small/big/boss), and the levels are called "ante"s, also totally different from what an ante is in poker.
Exactly! And most of the concepts behind the hands are present in other games (double and triples, straights, etc). I played Yahtzee as a kid, and that has pretty much every hand from poker (aside from a flush, because dice don’t have suits). If Yahtzee is offensive to you, I don’t know what to say…