Poker and Philosophy

by Bronson, Eric

  Here too, then, we find that an important feature of our human predicament is captured in poker. The competition that we take for granted depends on a deeper level of co-operation. Without the rules, it is impossible to play the game. In poker and in life, if you break the rules—and you get caught—you don’t get to play the game.

  Lesson Six: Success Depends on a Mastery of

  Both Appearances and Reality

  Great players don’t need great cards. The cards they have in the hole are only important if they have to show them. And the best players usually only show them when they want to. Most of us have had at least small stretches in which we have approximated this sort of mastery, stretches where the other players were scared off by the bluffs but stayed in for the good beatings. We’ve intentionally gotten caught bluffing just to set ourselves up for a big hand later in the game. We’ve scared people away before the flop when we needed to protect a mediocre pair. We’ve mastered both appearance and reality. There are no cameras there for our games, but we are sure that if the video was running, it would belong in the Smithsonian.

  Life, claims Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), is surface, and the art of life involves skating on it well. Life too is often about appearances. Mastering the art of appearances takes you a long way. You need to appear trustworthy and capable to get a job. You need to appear loving and attractive to find a mate. If you are miserable at appearances, the reality is almost insignificant. Nobody will put the time in to uncover that reality.

  But, of course, if the reality is awful, then appearances will get you only so far. Knowing which contexts call for superficiality and which contexts call for reality is essential for success in life. Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) ethical theory implies that lying is always wrong. This is why almost all Philosophy 101 students understand that Kant’s theory can’t be right. There are times when lying is simply the right thing to do; there are times when full disclosure of the truth is uncalled for; and there are times when perfect sincerity is perfectly appropriate. Knowing when the truth needs to be told and how it needs to be said is part of the art of living.

  Lesson Seven: Perfection Involves a Mastery

  of the Four Classic Virtues

  In the Republic, Plato asks the question, “What is the good life?” By this Plato means, “What sort of life is the most fulfilling, the happiest? What sort of life produces eudaimonia, or human flourishing? What sort of life brings us closest to perfection?” His answer is “a life of virtue.” The happiest person is the person who possesses all four classic Greek virtues and whose soul is, consequently, in perfect balance and proportion. So convinced is Plato that this is the best sort of life that he argues it is preferable even when one is punished for it.

  Wisdom, Plato claims, is the primary virtue. It applies primarily to our intellectual side, and, for Plato, it involves knowledge of what is true. Courage is needed for perfection of the spirited side of the human being. Courage involves having the will to do what we know is best, even when we are afraid or we desire what is less than ideal. Moderation, the third virtue, is most important for our desires. It involves letting our intellectual and spirited side, rule over our desires. When our intellect, our spirited side and our desires are all properly balanced and virtuous, the result is justice, a balance and proportionality in the soul. Plato claims that the just person likes herself, has confidence and self-respect. To the extent that we are capable of incorporating these four virtues into our character, we live the best, happiest, most flourishing human life.

  The best poker players have learned to incorporate these four classic virtues into their poker game. They are wise, which is to say that they have knowledge of the eternal truths of poker. Some of these eternal truths, as Plato himself thought, are mathematical. Poker players need to know the numbers. But perfection at poker also involves knowledge that is beyond the mathematical. Plato may not have agreed, but, if Thoreau was right, perfect knowledge also involves instinct, a gut sense of what to do in any given situation.

  Perfection at poker, as we have seen, requires courage. In Plato’s terms this means a willingness to make the move that you know is right despite the fear of losing. How many times have we avoided going “all-in” because of the thought of having nothing, of having to walk away from the tables while others carried on? How many times have we avoided strong players or folded strong hands because we were intimidated? This is fear. To possess the faculty of courage is to do what we know to be best, consequences be damned.

  Perfection at poker requires moderation, which means, essentially, that our desires shouldn’t be making the calls. Revenge, greed, pride—all of these desires interfere with our capacity for choosing well. The virtuous poker player does not think about revenge. He doesn’t salivate over a big pot, staying in with a weak hand when he knows he shouldn’t. He puts these distractions aside. He does what is right.

  Finally, the result of all of this is justice. And let’s just say that justice, in this context, means two things. It means perfection in the art of poker because all of our faculties are working well and working together, and, more often than not, it means success. Usually, the best player wins.

  Life Is Poker—Poker Is Life

  We have to admit that poker players are not necessarily good people, and there are, perhaps, some good people who aren’t poker players. This is because poker presents challenges that are analogous to, rather than identical to, life’s challenges.

  But I am convinced the lessons we learn from playing poker are similar to the lessons of life, the lessons of philosophy. To accept our lack of certain knowledge, to be willing to act in the face of uncertainty, to be willing to risk what we have for what we want, to trust our instincts, to acknowledge the necessity of both competition and co-operation, to understand the difference between the time for bluffing and the time for sincerity, and to strive for perfect virtue: these are seven of the most important lessons I have learned from poker and read about in philosophy. I don’t think I would have been able to articulate them when I started playing poker as a teenager, but the lessons were there, in the game, waiting to be uncovered.

  At the end of William James’s “The Will to Believe,” he quotes Fitz James Stephen to conclude his argument for why life requires a gambler’s nerve:

  In all important transactions of life we have to take a leap in the dark . . . If we decide to leave the riddles unanswered, that is a choice; if we waiver in our answer, that, too, is a choice: but whatever choice we make, we make it at our own peril. . . . In all important transactions of life we have to take a leap in the dark. . . . What must we do? ‘Be strong and of a good courage’ . . . If death ends all, we cannot meet death better.

  I’m willing to bet that he was right.

  ________

  1 William Kingdon Clifford, Lectures and Essays, Leslie Stephen and Fredrick Pollock, eds. (London: Macmillan, 1879), p. 183.

  2 William James, Pragmatism and Other Writings (New York: Penguin, 2000), p. 209.

  3 Carl Bode, ed., The Portable Thoreau (New York: Penguin, 1982), p. 263.

  4 Remember we’re talking here about No-Limit Hold’em. In Limit Hold’em, where the pot odds are typically much higher, chasing an inside straight is often the correct play.

  5 To become a good poker player you have to know the theoretically correct play in every situation, and generally, you had better follow it. Nothing I say here is intended to deny this elementary truth.

  2

  Karl Marx Meets Texas Dolly

  RAYMOND ANGELO BELLIOTTI

  I used to play medium-stakes, unlimited hold’em in home freeze-out tournaments in the early 1980s. One glorious night, I was one of the final two players at the table. My opponent was a rogue the rest of us called, “Pickle Puss” or “Double P,” for reasons you can conjure on your own. I held about seventy percent of the chips and was dealt an uninspiring Q-4 in the big blind. Pickle Puss, in the small blind, made a sizable bet before the flop. I might
not have called if I were at a chip disadvantage, but given the circumstances Pickle Puss’s bet was not so imposing that it derailed me from seeing the flop. The flop was Q-Q-5. Christmas had arrived early. Pickle Puss made a modest bet. I put him on A-K, A-J, or a medium pair, at best. If he had had the remaining Q or 5-5 in the pocket, he would have gone all-in. If he had pocket A-A or K-K, he would have tried to intimidate me before the flop. I had played with Pickle for a long time and he rarely strayed from certain strategic patterns. He loved to intimidate and once he was pot-committed he would not fold unless a thug put a loaded gun to what passed for his brain. At least I think he would fold under that circumstance. I raised and Pickle, predictably, went all-in. I called. (He had A-5 in the pocket. Having caught bottom pair with high kicker after the flop and not putting me on a Q or pocket 5-5, he figured that his A-5-Q-Q-5 was the best hand at that point.) The turn and river produced a harmless 9-2 combination. I was the night’s tournament hero. (Did you think I was going to include a poker story in which I lost?)

  Pickle then proceeded to do his finest over-the-top Phil Hellmuth imitation, calling me everything except a gentlemen and scholar. I was an “idiot” for not folding prior to the flop, I was “gutless” for not going all-in directly after the flop, I was the “luckiest SOB” on earth and an “undeserving” one at that. Then he used an ethnic epithet that lured me into responding in kind. Let’s just leave it that “Pickle Puss” were the kindest words I hurled at him.

  Is Poker Alienating?

  But is this scene not a clear case of alienation? In general, to be alienated is to be hostilely estranged, to be antagonistically disconnected from others, the environment, even one’s self. To be alienated, then, is to be opposed to or distant from our proper relationship to others, the environment, or our selves. The alienated person is unfulfilled and may be unaware of the causes of the dissatisfaction.

  The philosopher who wrote the book on alienation was Karl Marx (1818–1883). In his groundbreaking work, Das Kapital, Marx argues that under capitalism workers become alienated in at least four ways. First, they are alienated from their employers, the capitalist owners who dictate the terms of workers’ production. Second, Marx warns that workers in the capitalist system, competing for economic crumbs tumbling off the owners’ tables, will soon be alienated from each other. Workers will view each other as competitors in a zero-sum capitalist game. Victory, better wages and working conditions gushing from a promotion, can come only at another’s expense. Third, workers become alienated from their labor. Lacking control over what they produce, how they produce it, and what happens to what they produce, workers experience labor as burdensome. They work only because they must satisfy their survival needs. They dread yet another day at the factory, while looking forward only to holidays and weekends. Fourth, workers become alienated from themselves, from their highest aspirations and grandest potentials. They, instead, are tethered to a capitalist yoke, sunk in everydayness, as their lives are sets of dreary routines punctuated by a few, low level diversions.

  Does my encounter with Pickle Puss highlight the alienation of poker? Did we not view each other as locked in a zero-sum struggle in which only one of us could garner the scarce rewards of money, honor, and victory? If so, aren’t poker players courting at least one of the kinds of alienation that Marxists claim infects the capitalist workplace—workers hostilely estranged from each other?

  Intense competition, whether in poker or elsewhere, can lead to radical personal estrangement, but the connection is far from automatic. Often, competitors sense that they need worthy opponents to achieve greatness. Without Joe Frazier, Muhammad Ali’s boxing reputation would be diminished. Without Ali, Frazier would be considered only an above-average heavyweight champ, not an all-time great. Much the same can be said about tennis rivals such as Borg-Connors and Borg-McEnroe. Although animosity surrounded these rivals, grudging respect and mutual appreciation eventually blossomed.

  My point is not that my battles with Pickle Puss were on that plane, or even that he was a worthy poker rival for anyone above the age of twelve. Instead, I am highlighting one glorious benefit often embedded in zero-sum competitions: the chance for both contestants to exceed their past performances and become better at their projects. In that sense, the competitions are not completely zero-sum. Both contestants can gain in crucial aspects of self-making even though one is declared the winner of the contest, the other the loser.

  The same cannot be said of Marx’s gloomy depiction of factory workers in the nineteenth century. There the competition was zero-sum in all respects. One reason for the difference is that poker, unlike nineteenth-century factory work, is not alienating in one decisive dimension. Whereas workers were supposedly coerced by limited opportunities and survival needs into hiring on with capitalist owners, poker players freely choose their project. Professional poker players do not face the option “play poker or starve.” Other opportunities are available to them, including hiring on as factory workers.

  Doyle Brunson (“Texas Dolly”) is regarded as a patriarch of Texas Hold’em. In the 1960s, he traveled the dusty back roads of Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and points in between with other road gamblers such as Bobby Hoff, Bob Hooks, Thomas Preston (“Amarillo Slim”), and Brian “Sailor” Roberts. Their continual quest was the live game filled with producers, players with healthy bankrolls, expansive appetites to play, but modest poker skills. Once high stakes poker gradually moved from the sawdust joints of jerkwater towns to the glitter of Las Vegas, the road gamblers, to their own surprise, rose first to respectability and are now firmly enshrined as legends. The first World Series of Poker was held in 1970. Of the first nine annual championships, Amarillo Slim won in 1972, Sailor Roberts in 1975, Texas Dolly in 1976 and 1977, while Bob Hooks finished second in 1975 and Bobby Hoff finished second in 1979.

  Even superficial observations of pros such as Texas Dolly, Amarillo Slim, Gus Hansen, Daniel Negreanu, and Sam Farha suggest men who are at peace with themselves and thrilled to be doing what they are doing. They are energized by their labors. While they relish competition and harbor fierce desires to win, they show little or no resentment toward their competition. They instinctively understand that skilled competitors are required to help define their greatness. Amarillo Slim says it best: “The first thing a professional gambler has to do is make friends with himself . . . get rid of any excuses you may already have in stock. Making peace with yourself is the first thing a winner must do—at gambling or anything else in life.”1

  Alienation from other competitors is not an inherent part of poker. Like any fiercely waged contest, though, the possibility of alienation surrounds poker. The wise player resists it.

  Why Poker Energizes Our Species-Being

  If Marx is correct, capitalism mystifies social reality through “false consciousness,” by which we misidentify the origins of our firmest beliefs. We are convinced these beliefs are derived independently from observations of human behavior, when they are actually produced by the needs of particular economic systems. Marx insists that human nature is plastic and formed primarily by the needs of economic structures that reigned in turn but were doomed to evaporate in time. The only ineradicable human yearning is our lust for unalienated labor during which we fulfill our “species being.”

  For Marxists, our species being—our individual and collective human fulfillment—centers on productive activity that is free, social, challenging, stimulating, and transformative. We need to develop our highest creative potentials, choose our own productive paths, engage other people in the process or results of our labors, find work that energizes our talents, and thereby change our environment and ourselves for the better. Marx’s minimalist view of species-being includes the conviction that human fulfillment is intimately linked to the imaginative, unshackled use of productive capabilities. Labor is a distinctively human activity and overflows with value and significance. Only through free, creative activity can people realize their unalienated, speci
es being.

  Imagine an artist, fully absorbed by what she is doing, who gains immense fulfillment from the process of creation, with full control over what she is designing. The gratified artist is working hard in the sense of investing enormous energy in her task, but she is so deeply engaged in her project that leisure time and passive distractions are unappealing. Her strenuous activity fills her soul. To labor for its own sake from passionate commitment is to experience unalienated work and to nurture species being. We fully invest energy as a means of self-expression and self-creation.

  Instead of being automatically alienating, poker can be precisely the kind of activity that energizes our species being. At the 1980 World Series, Texas Dolly and Stuey “The Kid” Ungar battled for the championship. They had, roughly, the same amount of chips. Dolly held suited A-7 in the pocket and raised the pot. Ungar called with suited connectors 4-5. They flopped A-7-2. The flush possibilities of each finalist vanished. Dolly, now holding A-A-7-7-2, bet the size of the pot. Ungar held A-7-5-4-2. He had only a gutshot straight draw. He called. When a 3 came on the turn, Ungar hit his straight and bet $30,000, about sixty percent of the pot. Dolly moved all-in. Ungar, happily, called. Another 2 flowed on the river and Stuey the Kid was crowned the champion.

  Later, Dolly called this hand “one of the worst plays I’ve ever made.” He regretted not overbetting the pot after the flop and not calling after Ungar’s bet on the turn. If this was one of Dolly’s worst plays, though, he has led a charmed poker life. True, if he had overbet the pot after the turn, Ungar would probably have folded. But Dolly’s trap was not a major error. It lured Ungar into calling at a point when he had only about a sixteen-percent chance of hitting his straight. On the turn, though, fortune smiled on Stuey the Kid. Dolly’s second mistake was moving all-in instead of just calling after the turn. After Ungar bet 30 Large, what did Dolly suspect he held? Had the 3 on the turn truly improved Ungar’s hand? Was the reasonableness of the bet—sixty percent of the pot—intended to lure a call? Caution might dictate only a call even when holding top two pair.