Poker and Philosophy

by Bronson, Eric

  We’re now in a position to understand how these insights from the Rationalist and Existentialist approaches to life can be applied to poker.

  The Rationalist approach emphasizes strategies of reasoning as the best hope for human progress and individual success. Poker players should try to live by the Rationalist ideal of rational self-management so they won’t be prone to self-destructive impulses (“steaming”) when things aren’t going their way. Well-known steamers include Phil Hellmuth and Mike Matusow, whose sulking, temper tantrums, self-pitying confessionals, and other antics are the stuff of tournament legend. After being eliminated from the World Series one year, Hellmuth challenged the player who knocked him out to play heads-up for one million dollars (Positively Fifth Street, p. 196). Check out the composure of Eric Seidel, Barry Greenstein, and John Juanda to see the results of maintaining a stoical cool and keeping emotions in check.

  Consistent with this approach, we should be realistic about the role of chance and accept some losses in poker with the attitude “that’s life.” We should treat strategic blunders as mistakes from which we can learn. We shouldn’t neglect the long run for immediate gratification. But it’s equally important not to lose sight of the fact that in the long run we’re all dead, as economist John Maynard Keynes, author of A Treatise on Probability, famously remarked. This gives us a good reason to devise strategies for linking the long term and the short term. For example, in poker one’s short-term goal may be to maximize winnings. But one also wants to survive to play another round, which may call for lesser rather than greater exposure to risk in a particular case. In a different case, it may be folly to hang back indefinitely, playing it safe until you’re blinded out. Classic strategies for avoiding being wiped out by attrition as the antes and blinds increase include raising on the flop, reraising on the turn, and playing overly aggressively when you get a strong hand. In his influential book Super System, Doyle Brunson recommends a general strategy of attacking, reraising, putting your opponents all-in, and constantly hammering them (Positively Fifth Street, pp. 217–18).

  Nothing lasts forever, and from this fact some philosophers have inferred that nothing matters. But before we draw any hasty conclusions we should remember the Existentialist point that it’s up to us to give life meaning. Winning the biggest pot of the night, for example, or making the final table in the World Series of Poker can have meaning even if life doesn’t go on forever. Speaking more generally, if life can be meaningful at all it can be meaningful even if death is inevitable. As philosopher Richard Taylor has said, our lives have meaning when we are fully engaged in the activities and projects that concern us most, and “It is the doing that counts . . . and not what [we] hope to win by it.”9 Rationalists and Existentialists agree that nothing great is accomplished without involvement in and commitment to what we’re doing. Of course, enthusiasm is not enough, which is why those who are consistently successful at poker devote time and hard work to it. As countless poker professionals will affirm, they prepare, practice, and learn from their mistakes. To achieve success they become “students of the game” and never stop learning. This points the way to look at both poker and life: to remain insatiably curious about the inexhaustible richness in each and to never stop learning in our quest for experience.

  A Handful of Dust

  Every game of high-stakes poker puts a great deal at risk because the money, prestige, power, and other rewards of the game are on the line. There are few things as intimidating as being put all-in by a Carlos Mortensen or a Todd Brunson. Watching your opponent come over the top can concentrate the mind wonderfully (or woefully). There is nothing quite like poker for bringing into sharp relief how quickly unforeseen contingencies can reduce the promise of victory to dust. The game of poker, like the “game” of life, is not merely a matter of knowing but also of doing, and each decision reveals something more about our character. By combining aspects of both the Rationalist and Existentialist approaches, and then going beyond them, one might say the aim of playing poker is the pursuit of excellence in the development of oneself as an authentic, autonomous individual. Of course, the idea of self-development through the cultivation of qualities of character such as courage and good temper is as old as Aristotle, but no less relevant to the modern poker player.

  The challenges of focusing ambition, of effectively deploying skills and resources, of testing oneself under the pressure of competition, aren’t limited to the temporal span of a single game or a multi-day tournament. They continue over a much longer arc of development as character is shaped over the course of a person’s lifetime. The challenges we face in the game of poker reflect the unavoidable predicament of being human.10

  ________

  1 Reversing this analogy, Nicholas Rescher writes that the founders of probability “saw in the tactics of sagacious gambling a guide to the rational conduct of life in an uncertain world.” I can’t explore this “chicken or egg” controversy here. See Rescher’s Luck: The Brilliant Randomness of Everyday Life (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1995), p. 132.

  2 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism” (1946), in Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957), p. 13.

  3 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (New York: Vintage, 1955), p. 90.

  4 See Emmanuel Levinas’s discussion of this point in Chapter 16 of this volume.

  5 James McManus, Positively Fifth Street (New York: Farrar, Straus, 2003), pp. 219, 116.

  6 Self-styled “Poker Brat” Phil Hellmuth was heard complaining on the Discovery Channel not long ago: “This guy with two outs calls me?!” (McManus, p. 196).

  7 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), p. 445.

  8 See Jonathan Ellis’s discussion of these “thought attributions” in Chapter 6 of this volume.

  9 Richard Taylor, “Does Life Have a Meaning?,” reprinted in Steven Sanders and David R. Cheney, eds., The Meaning of Life: Questions, Answers, and Analysis (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1980), p. 85.

  10 My thanks to Eric Bronson for encouraging me to explore Existentialist themes in poker and to Christeen Clemens for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.

  5

  The Existential Gambler: Dostoevsky and the Gambler’s High

  PETER J. VERNEZZE

  “I like to bet anything,” writes Amarillo Slim, in his autobiography fittingly titled, The Memoirs of the Greatest Gambler who Ever Lived. From hustling pool to performing death-defying daredevil stunts, Slim never met a gamble he wouldn’t take. Throughout the 1960s, he teamed up with Doyle Brunson and Sailor Roberts to form poker’s greatest three of a kind. Traveling across Texas, they lived out of their car, honing their poker skills against angry gun toting opponents and a cast of characters that would make any B-movie director blush. Long after they split to make their separate fortunes, Slim and Brunson continued to win bets far beyond the poker table. Slim once took $25,000 from Jimmy the Greek on a bet that he could float down Idaho’s River of No Return in the winter. And as for Brunson, his gambles are the stuff of legends. “I’m known as a Professional gambler rather than just a Professional Poker player,” Brunson clarifies. “I’ve been known to bet on just about anything.”

  Long before Albert Einstein questioned whether God plays dice with the universe, philosophers and artists struggled with the gambler’s predilection to “live dangerously.” Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) helped give birth to an entire philosophical school of thought that argued going all-in, against all odds, was the only true way to live. Two of Dostoevsky’s novellas, Notes from Underground and The Gambler, provide a stirring defense of the gambler’s life and helped set the stage for Existentialist philosophy. As we’ll see, Slim and Brunson weren’t the first people to throw caution to the wind, and we aren’t the first ones to want to read all about it.

  What Is Existentialism?

  We need to begin our exploration of risk taking by understandi
ng the opposite viewpoint, what I will call the Quest for Certainty: the attempt to use reason in order to obtain absolute and indubitable knowledge. It’s an ambitious goal and from its start there have been those who have thought it unattainable. But it’s not too much to say that a large part of philosophy for twenty-five hundred years has been taken up with this project.

  As he did in so many ways, Plato (427–347 B.C.E.) defined the debate on this topic. For Plato, the only thing worthy of knowledge was that which was absolute and certain, that about which we could not possibly be mistaken. This belief in the power of reason reached its pinnacle in the Enlightenment, an intellectual movement of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe whose diverse thinkers shared a number of common beliefs about the nature of reason. Embracing Aristotle’s definition of man as a rational animal, Enlightenment thinkers viewed human nature as good and perfectible and saw society on a course of steady improvement aided by reason. Not only was man rational, but the universe itself was rational, and its mysteries would ultimately be understood by means of human reason.

  It’s against this backdrop of the prevailing philosophical belief in the power of human reason that we can begin to understand what I will call the first tenet of Existentialism. Existentialism emerged as a formal philosophy in post World War II France and needless to say the carnage of that conflict raised grave doubts about the Enlightenment view of reason. In Nazi Germany, reason had been employed in ingenious new ways to exterminate millions of people. Man seemed not perfectible and good but in a real sense inherently flawed, if not evil. It’s perhaps no coincidence that the two philosophers most often associated with Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) and Albert Camus (1913–1960), played a role in the war against the Nazis.

  A loss of confidence in human reason, then, is the first defining characteristic of Existentialism, as illustrated in Camus’s essay The Myth of Sisyphus. It is obvious to Camus that reason cannot yield absolute knowledge of either Platonic forms or God: “The world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge.”1 We must, Camus claims, confront the “limits of reason,” and, more dramatically, the “ruins of reason,” for what is left is a world that is “unintelligible and limited.”

  The loss of absolute knowledge entails a fair amount of psychological distress, for it means there is no guidance, no place to turn to for values and purpose. For Camus, this failure of reason leaves one with the sense that life is absurd. In a famous essay, “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” Sartre details how the Existential view of life emphasizes forlornness, anguish, and despair.2 And Kierkegaard, a nineteenth-century Danish philosopher linked to Existentialism, wrote one work devoted to anxiety and another devoted to despair. The second characteristic of Existentialism, then, emphasizes psychological distress as part of the nature of human existence. Existentialism, then, is often misunderstood as a philosophy of darkness whose adherents wear black, are generally depressed, and sit around in cafes smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

  And the parody would be correct were it not for the third characteristic of Existentialism. For all Existentialist philosophies assert that one must overcome this initial loss of value and meaning by an effort of will and intelligence. Camus insists that the first step in overcoming is becoming conscious of our condition and confronting it head on. We must realize we are in the same plight as the mythical hero Sisyphus, who was condemned to roll a rock up a mountain for eternity, only to have it roll down again once it reached the top. Once we recognize our condition for what it is, we can work towards living fruitfully in its midst: “The struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy” (Kaufmann, p. 123). For Sartre as well, there is no inherent meaning in the universe. As humans, we must recognize our condition is unlike that of any other entity. Our existence precedes our essence. That is, what we should be is not out there waiting for us to find; we must create our meaning and purpose. We are “condemned to be free.” At the end of the day we will be nothing but what we have made of ourselves. Existentialism, then, does not recommend wallowing in the absurdity. Rather it advocates working to overcome absurdity to will oneself towards a meaningful life.

  Gambling and Dostoevsky’s Gambler

  Like the existentialist, the gambler also knows when to walk away from reason, and knows when to run. Learning the odds is of great importance to the professional gambler, but sometimes one has to forget everything and simply play on hunch, even if it isn’t rational. “If you’re going to make your living putting the odds in your favor, you damn well better know how to calculate them,” Slim writes in his autobiography. On the other hand, the rational side of life could only take him so far. “I always said that I learned more about life from poolrooms and casinos than I ever did in the classroom” (Amarillo Slim, pp. 12–13). Brunson won his poker championships in 1976 and 1977 by pulling a full house on the river, when all the odds were against him. And that’s where the rush comes in. “I’ve never lost the feeling of exhilaration that comes when you’re doing the best you can and gambling real high,” Brunson explains. “There’s no feeling quite like it.”3

  Few novelists can appreciate the gambling rush as much as Dostoevsky. In his own life he put his future on the line with more than a few irrational gambles. Dostoevsky never bought into the “rational” lifestyle, and that’s why he’s seen as one of the fathers of Existentialism.

  Walter Kaufmann begins his classic anthology, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, with the first half of Dostoevsky’s novella, Notes from Underground, which he calls “the best overture for Existentialism ever written” (p. 14). The novella opens with the narrator informing us of his illness. His liver is diseased, but he refuses to consult a doctor. Reason is not the most powerful thing in us: “You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there’s no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man’s nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole of life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all of the impulses” (p. 73). Rather than seeing reason as a gift from God, the narrator calls consciousness an illness and a disease. Indeed, the underground man even rejects mathematics, perhaps the ultimate illustration of the capacity of reason: “what do I care for the laws of nature and arithmetic, when, for some reason, I dislike those laws and the fact that twice two makes four?” (p. 61). Notes from Underground presents a revolutionary yet disturbing depiction of human nature, one that anticipates much of Existentialism in laying out the failure and inadequacy of reason. Existentialists likewise concur with Dostoevsky’s claim that reason taken to its logical conclusion leads to despair and psychological sickness. This inadequacy of reason ultimately leads Dostoevsky to the life of the gambler.

  Published nearly 150 years ago, The Gambler remains one of the most powerful portrayals of gambling ever recorded. Surely one reason for this is Dostoevsky’s intimacy with his subject. Dostoevsky began playing roulette in casinos in 1863 and for the next eight years had a gambling problem. Never flush with money during this—or any—period of his life, there were numerous times when he had to pawn things or write others for money in order to be able to pay his gambling debts. Hence, The Gambler is no mere act of the imagination but a work with an especially intimate connection to Dostoevsky. An analysis of this novella will allow us to bring together the pieces so far laid out and help us see the connection between gambling and Existentialism.

  Set in the fictional resort spa-casino of Roulettenberg, The Gambler details the farcical-tragic adventures of a retired Russian general, his family, and various hangers on. The story is told from the point of view of Aleksy Ivanovich, a young tutor to the general’s children, who also happens to be in love with the general’s stepdaughter, Polina (who, in typical Dostoevsky fashion, is in love with someone else). At the start of the work, the general is awaiting word about the health of his great aunt, hoping she will
die and that his inheritance will both extricate him from debt and leave him well enough off to persuade a young woman to marry him. Unfortunately, “grandmamma” turns up at the casino alive and well, proceeds to develop a gambling habit, and loses her entire fortune. Aleksy, however, wins enough money at roulette to pay the general’s bills. But when he offers his stepdaughter Polina the money, she rejects it. He decides to blow all of his winnings on a month in Paris with the general’s now ex-fiancée, who has offered herself to him for as long as the money lasts. The last chapter of the work, which takes place some twenty months after the action just described, finds the narrator in another gambling town, broke but hoping to once again strike it rich at the casino.

  It is not so much the plot but Dostoevsky’s observations on gambling that interest us here. Dostoevsky distinguishes between various types of gamblers. There is, first of all, an aristocratic method of gambling. The aristocrat, to whom money means nothing, gambles for nothing more than amusement, strictly in order to watch the process of winning or losing; he is not by any means interested in the winnings themselves. Such a view is dismissed as displaying “a complete ignorance of reality,” where in fact money counts for quite a bit. The rabble, on the other hand, play a small-minded game for small stakes, and neither win nor lose great amounts. Then there are the calculating gamblers: “They sit over bits of paper ruled into columns, note down the coups, count up, compute probabilities, do sums, finally put down their own stakes.”4 While referring to roulette, the depiction of the calculating gambler can obviously apply to any form of gaming. This approach elevates gambling to a rational system that one can win at if one calculates the odds correctly. In short, it is an attempt to include gambling in the scope of the rational.