Poker and Philosophy Page 2
Still, there’s a part of poker that defies rationality, and that is perhaps what so intrigues intellectuals. In his great book, Shut Up and Deal, poker playing philosophy graduate Jesse May writes, “People think mastering the skill part is hard, but they’re wrong. The trick to poker is mastering the luck. That’s philosophy.”1
Risk, danger, logic, luck—these are themes that have fascinated philosophers and gamblers throughout the ages. In his poem, “Casino,” British-born poet W.H. Auden would say that Texas Hold’em junkies recklessly play their middle cards because “from numbers their stars are recreated, the enchanted, the worldly, the sad.” From the casinos on Fremont Street in downtown Vegas to the nickel and dime games in your friend’s living room, enchantment and heartache still bring us to the table. And just like that feeling you got when you walked down the Vegas strip for the first time, all philosophy should begin in wonderment.
We’ve therefore asked over twenty philosophers (and card cheats) from the U.S., Canada, and England to help us sort out the meaning of life as it pertains to the poker table, and Texas Hold’em in particular. Sure, there are lots of other poker games. At the Hustler Casino in Gardena, California, for example, poker playboy Larry Flynt favors seven-card stud. And when things were getting heavy over at the White House, good ol’ Harry Truman liked to raise the stakes with his own brand of “seven card, low hole card wild, high low poker.” But analogy whiz Johnny Moss says Texas Hold’em is to stud and draw what chess is to checkers. And unfortunately, there just isn’t much demand for philosophy books about checkers.
We understand that there are plenty of ways to transmit deep philosophical truths: you can read a good book on a grassy knoll, sit in a college lecture, or quietly repose alongside a meditation master, to name a few. None of these ways, though, would impress Tom Nutall, the philosopher-bartender of HBO’s Deadwood. He had little patience for such idle loafing. “Where’s your f**king ball gowns?” he once asked impatiently. “Break out the chips boys, and let’s get a poker game going.”
Now that’s our kind of philosopher. You in or out?
________
1 Reprinted in John Stravinsky’s, Read ‘Em and Weep: A Bedside Companion (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), p. 189.
PART I
Poker’s Life
Lessons
1
Seven Lessons in Philosophy You Already Learned Playing Texas Hold’Em
MICHAEL VENTIMIGLIA
Poker is Life. Life is poker. You’ve seen the T-shirts.
It’s a bit of an overstatement, but maybe less so than one might think. Poker is a beautiful game, an inexhaustibly interesting game. To be a better poker player than someone else means more than being better at playing scrabble or basketball. It means more than just being smarter or stronger. And this is because poker broadly draws on so many of the skills that are necessary for living well. Poker is Life: not because there’s no life outside of poker, but because so much of life can be found within it.
If much of life can somehow be captured in this game played with fifty-two small pieces of plastic, then we should expect to find that the lessons that poker teaches us are similar to lessons taught to us by philosophers. Philosophy teaches us how to live well. It tries to capture the big picture, and it offers advice about how to live within the context of the big picture. What I would like to share with you is seven lessons about life, seven lessons from philosophy that you can learn from playing poker. Since the best poker players in the world decide who is the best of the best by playing No-Limit Texas Hold’em, we’ll focus on this finest variation of the game.
Lesson One: As Human Beings, We Lack Certain
Knowledge
It might seem, at first glance, that philosophy teaches us a very different lesson about uncertainty than poker does. Poker players seem to revel in the unknown; philosophers seem to be terrified by it. Poker teaches us to embrace uncertainty. Philosophy teaches us to explain it away. There’s some truth to this, but at the bottom of my poker playing and philosophical heart, I’m convinced that it is too simple. It’s not fair to either philosophers or poker players.
We’re drawn to poker, in part, because we see the beauty of taking risks, of operating within a context of uncertainty. It remains exciting precisely because we almost always lack certain knowledge. And yet, poker cannot be reduced to a celebration of the unknown. Poker is not about mindless risk. It’s not roulette. It’s not craps. There is a difference between the poker player and the sort of gambler who likes to watch a ball bounce around a roulette wheel. Poker players accept the context of uncertainty, but they make the best decisions they can based on what they believe is true. And, as every Texas Hold’em player knows, there are moments of perfect clarity, of beautiful, glorious certainty that can’t be denied. Think back over your best hands, those few plays that for whatever reason still stand out amongst the thousands of hands you have played. I’ll bet at least one of them is when you knew you couldn’t lose, when you knew you had the nuts. This is one of the best features of Texas Hold’em. Every once in a while you get something you can hang onto and know for sure, at least for one hand. Poker players accept uncertainty—they learn to become comfortable within it—but they never turn down a sure thing.
Just as poker is not merely about mindless chance, philosophy is not just about finding absolute truths. It’s true that the quest for certainty, for some Truth that is foundational and indubitable, has been central to Western philosophy since its inception. René Descartes (1596–1650) is generally taken to be the poster boy for this quest. His cogito—“I think, therefore I am”—stands as the most famous articulation of the philosophical desire for something absolute, something rock solid that we can know for sure. Philosophers have sought to establish certainty based on everything from reason to the five senses, from mystical experience to physics. But there are at least a few good reasons for thinking that philosophy, as a whole, does not teach us to reject the uncertainty that seems to be part of the human condition.
First of all, even most philosophers who have claimed to find the foundation of certain truth have left room for uncertainty and risk. St. Augustine, for example, believed the ground of all certain knowledge to be in the Christian God, but he also acknowledged that we have the freedom to accept or deny God’s truths at our own peril. And the stakes were high: our eternal happiness (or misery) hung in the balance. Other philosophers, like John Dewey, William James, and Friedrich Nietzsche, have urged us to acknowledge that a lack of certainty (or, in Nietzsche’s case, the lack of Truth at all) is just part of the human condition. If Truth exists at all, they insist, we can never be sure that we’ve got it. But the most convincing evidence for the claim that philosophy does not teach us to reject uncertainty is the history of philosophy itself. When we look back at the history of philosophy as a whole, and at the very different and contradictory ways that philosophers have sought to establish some certainty, we cannot help but think that the history of philosophy itself teaches us that nothing is certain. Since philosophers seem to disagree about most everything, philosophy can be reasonably understood to teach us that uncertainty is simply part of the human condition. Really, the most general and broad lesson of philosophy is the most general and broad lesson of poker: Our environment is one of uncertainty. We must learn to operate within it.
Lesson Two: Within a Context of Uncertainty,
We Must Still Believe and Act
You’re sitting on pocket Q’s. The flop is harmless, no flush or straight possibilities after the turn. The River is a K. How hard do you press? You can’t be sure you will win, but you have everything you need to know about the odds, the other players, and your own instincts to make a decision. You must decide, you must act, without knowing for sure what is right. You are in a very human situation: you must commit without certain knowledge.
In “The Will to Believe,” William James (1842–1910) takes on an influential thinker of his generation, William Clifford (184
5–1879). Clifford had claimed that “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”1 Imagine this guy at a poker table, waiting for his pocket A’s and a harmless flop, sitting on his chips waiting for a moment of certainty, watching his stack dwindle down to nothing one blind at a time. It doesn’t work—in poker or in life—and that’s why nobody today reads Clifford.
James has stood the test of time because he understood that usually we have to make decisions without having the nuts. James is still with us because what he offered was truer: “I myself find it impossible to go with Clifford . . . It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained.”2 Within a context of uncertainty, we must still make choices and commitments. Does God exist? You don’t know, but you still have to make a choice—one way or another—if you want to live a committed meaningful life. Are you willing to fight for goodness or will you resign yourself to the status quo? You can’t be sure if you can make a difference, or even what goodness is, but you can be sure that if you do not take a stand one way or another, you will have taken yourself out of the game.
Certainty is as rare in poker as it is in life. But we must act if we want to enjoy the game. Otherwise, we’re relegated to the sidelines, to irrelevance, watching other people fail and succeed. The lyrics to the Rush song, “Freewill,” go: “if you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.” James said it first. If you give in to the fear of making a wrong decision, you have already made a decision that cuts you off from a whole host of possibilities. You’ll get muscled around by the people who are willing to take risks and eventually you will drop out, barely noticed. Poker players understand this. To win, sometimes you have to commit without the nuts.
Lesson Three: Sometimes to Get What You Want,
You Have to Risk All You’ve Got
We know that poker requires risk. This is such a basic premise of poker that it hardly needs mention. To get from A to B, you need to risk A. But No-Limit Texas Hold’em takes this to another level, and this is why it is the game that is played by the best. The best poker players do more than just calculate the odds. No-Limit Hold’em reduces your fate to a single moment of chance—one hand, one flop, one card—the situation in which the odds mean the least. This is something that the textbook player cannot tolerate. The mathematician needs to “grind it out”. The best players will take the risks that can’t be meaningfully quantified, that can’t be reduced to prudence. They take the big chances.
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) made a similar point in Walden. Aware that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,”3 he teaches that we must forgo all the half-measures of security that can be bought or purchased in order to have the freedom for a spiritual life. Without letting go of material security, we are not free for a spiritual awakening. And James teaches that there are times when believing in a mere possibility is necessary for making that possibility a reality. Is this person I am about to marry trustworthy? I can’t be sure, but if I wait for proof positive, she’ll be gone and I will have missed out on the possibility of something I wanted. For James, the person who gets ahead in life is the one “who sacrifices other things for their sake before they have come, and takes risks for them in advance” (p. 213). The risk is required for the reward. We are like trapeze artists who can’t make it to the next trapeze without letting go of the first one. To get where you want to go, you have to spend some time in midair, and for those moments you have nothing. You’re all-in, without a chip in front of you. Real risk is more than just playing the odds for the long haul. It’s throwing it all out there for the sake of something better. This is true both in No Limit Texas Hold’em and in life.
Lesson Four: Trust Your Instincts
You’re sitting on an inside straight draw after the flop. All the books say that this is a bad play.4 But that’s not what you feel. And now you have to decide whether or not to play by the numbers or play this one by your gut.
I’ve never kept a close count of how these hands turn out, but I’m convinced that the plays I’ve made based on instinct have proven to be right more often than the statistics predict. We’ve all had moments when we let our mathematical side talk us out of a hand that we would have won and moments when we stuck it out on pure instinct. This isn’t to say that instincts are necessarily magical. Sometimes they have to do with how another player wears his baseball cap or how she plays with her chips. Sometimes they have to do with your unconscious awareness of other players’ tells. But sometimes they’re just about which way the wind is blowing, about how the cards are going to fall. I am continually amazed by how often they are right.
Philosophers are generally taken to be more mathematicians than touchy-feely types. There is truth to this. In the history of philosophy we find a consistent fascination with mathematics and the sort of certainty that it seems to offer. The Pythagoreans, a school of Greek philosophers who influenced Plato, thought that numbers had mystical qualities. Descartes, whose synthesis of geometry and algebra is still studied by most high school students, modeled his philosophy on the deductive method of geometry. Spinoza (1632–1677) took this to its extreme, drawing conclusions about God, freedom and the self as if they were truths of Euclidian geometry. Philosophy in general has surely preferred reason to feeling, often demonizing feelings and emotions as obstacles to the truth.
But there are important exceptions. Thoreau and Charles Peirce (1839–1914), two American philosophers, both argued for the importance of feeling and instinct. Thoreau claimed that our instincts are our surest guide to the truth. If we have the courage to free ourselves from the “laws of convention,” the ways of thinking and acting in society that people take for granted, we become candidates for intuiting “Higher Laws.” And these Higher Laws are known primarily through feeling. They are our point of contact with the divine. No one, Thoreau teaches, has ever followed her instincts until they lead her astray. Peirce made a similar case, which he referred to as his “Sentimentalism.” What is most interesting about Peirce’s respect for feeling is that he was an expert in logic and science. In fact, Peirce argued that scientists are actually guided by their feelings as they form hypotheses. Reason itself, Peirce teaches, eventually realizes that feelings are important, both in science and in practical matters.
So while philosophers have tended to discount the role of feelings or instincts in attaining knowledge, there are some philosophers who beg to differ. Most philosophers that I have met who also play poker are excellent mathematicians. But they are not excellent poker players. The best know when to play the numbers and when to play their hunches. If Thoreau is right, that river card that feels right will be your friend more often than not.5
Lesson Five: Life Is Competition—Life Is
Co-operation
Poker is about the survival of the fittest. Each player wants what the other players have. Victory comes when all the weaker players have been weeded out, and the best player stands alone. There is an obvious sense in which poker is about competition.
But there is a less obvious way in which poker is also about co-operation. Remember, poker depends entirely upon a stated or assumed agreement, a “social contract” of sorts, that each player will play by the rules. If someone gets caught cheating in a local, neighborhood game with friends, he’s going to need a new neighborhood or at least some new friends. If someone gets caught in Vegas, he’s going to need plastic surgery. If you want to be able to take advantage of the benefits of competition, you first have to agree to co-operate. If you are unwilling to play by the rules, there is a good chance you are going to get kicked out of the game.
Some political philosophers have said roughly the same thing regarding society at large. Although they may disagree about the details, many “social contract” thinkers see society as a collection of self-interested individuals who are willing to co-op
erate for the sake of their mutual self-interest. Maybe the most convincing explanation of this dynamic comes from a thinker who was not a philosopher, but who has influenced philosophy and every other academic discipline for the last one hundred and fifty years: Charles Darwin.
According to Darwin (1809–1882), survival in the competition of life itself is a badge of honor. The fit survive and reproduce. The unfit are swept away. It’s easy to see why so many philosophers, most notably Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), adapted Darwin’s theory of organic evolution into a theory of social evolution. In almost any environment where there is competition to the death, survival itself is a sign of merit. This is why you can’t get a bad slice of pizza in New York City. And this is also why sitting at the final table in a poker tournament is itself an accomplishment. Tournament poker is a competition to the death. It mimics what Darwin thought was our natural predicament. There is some luck or chance involved, just as there is in nature, but the individuals who can use what they’ve got to compete successfully survive. The losers do not. Poker captures this in a way that most other casino games don’t.
But Darwin was also aware that life involves co-operation. Darwin understood that there are many contexts in which cooperation benefits the individual more than outright selfishness or competition. Since Darwin, biologists, sociologists, economists, and others have worked to explain this phenomenon. Most biologists today would argue that people co-operate because it serves their individual or genetic self-interest. Even though individuals are often in competition, they also need each other for the sake of goods that can only be attained or protected by groups. And the individual who has a reputation for dishonesty will find that others are unwilling to co-operate with him. The individual who breaks the rules no longer gets to enjoy the benefits of society.