________
1 A “bad beat” jackpot is (usually) a large sum of money that a casino pays differentially to all the players at a table, when four deuces (or some higher hand) is beaten by a higher hand. Casinos differ in their rules, with some requiring the player to have one key card in the hole, whereas others require two hole cards to be involved.
2 The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson House, 1949), p. 27.
3 Israel Scheffler, Conditions of Knowledge (Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1965) p.96.
PART III
Lying, Bluffing,
and “Friendly”
Pummeling
11
Bluffing, Lying, and Bullshitting
BRIAN HUSS
Without bluffing, poker would be a lot less interesting, entertaining, and addictive. Bluffing is one reason—the main reason, I think—why no-limit Texas Hold’em and other poker games are not primarily games of luck. So, if poker is a game of skill, and if bluffing is what helps make it a game of skill, then in order to be a skillful poker player, you must be a skillful bluffer (as well as a skillful bluff detector). Good poker-playing strategy requires a good understanding of bluffing.
Much has already been said elsewhere about bluffing strategy and bluff detecting. My goal here is not to criticize what others have said, but instead shed some light on what good bluffing actually is by making use of some concepts found in contemporary philosophy and psychology. I’m not primarily interested in strategies for determining when you should bluff. I am more interested in how you should bluff after you have decided to do so. So let’s try to figure out how we should think about the act of bluffing in general.
I can think of at least four ways that we might understand bluffing. First, we might think of it as a form of lying. Second, we might think that to bluff is to bullshit. Third, bluffing might be like acceptance. Finally, bluffing could be a case of fooling yourself. Let’s consider each of these possibilities in turn.
Bluffing as Lying
It seems reasonable to suggest that when I try to steal a pot by bluffing, what I’m doing is lying to the other players at the table. I’m in effect saying to them, “I’ve got a good hand,” even though I don’t. For example, suppose I am dealt a decent, but not fantastic hand against two other players. Let’s say I have K-9 unsuited. I’m short-stacked in comparison to my opponents, and I know I have to make a move soon, so I raise double the big blind. The flop comes and it’s rags: 4-7-J. I’m the first to bet, and I go all-in. Of course I have nothing. So it seems tempting to think that by making a big bet I’m saying to my opponents something like, “I’m holding an overpair.” It isn’t true and I’m fully aware of this fact. And isn’t that the very essence of lying? In this case, I know the facts (about my own hand) and intentionally misrepresent the facts in an attempt to deceive my opponents. Therefore I lied, right? Maybe.
Although there are some aspects of bluffing that are quite similar to lying, bluffing and lying are not identical. To see why, consider two important facts. First, as the philosopher Harry Frankfurt points out, when you tell a lie, you’re trying to deceive your audience about two things, not just one. Not only do you try to deceive people about the world “out there,” but also about your own beliefs. If I lie to you by telling you that I own a Ferrari, and if my lie works, then you will have two false beliefs. You will have a false belief about the world out there—that there’s a Ferrari parked in my garage—and a false belief about what is in my mind—that I believe there’s a Ferrari parked in my garage. For this reason, Frankfurt says that the victim of a successful lie is “twice deceived.” The second important fact is that in the context of a poker game, the players expect their opponents to be deceptive about their hands on a fairly regular basis. Only the most naïve player thinks that whenever a player bets big, she must have a great hand.
The upshot is that it’s very difficult or even impossible to truly lie by bluffing. Given that everybody expects me to bluff from time to time, my bluffs don’t count as lies.1 Even when I bluff successfully, my opponents seem to be deceived only once—about the quality of my hand. And they’re probably not completely deceived even about that. They are not deceived about what is in my mind. Or, at least, they’re not deceived about my beliefs to the same extent that you’re deceived about my beliefs when you believe my Ferrari lie. Of course, a poker player might try to figure out what’s in another player’s mind and whether she’s bluffing by looking for tells that reveal an attempt at deception. But your ability to deceive people in a poker game (about either the quality of your hand or your beliefs) is very much diminished in comparison to your ability to deceive people in everyday situations. In short, because lying involves a relatively high level of deception that is very difficult or impossible to achieve by bluffing in poker (because everyone expects that there will be much deception in poker), it is implausible to think of bluffing as lying.
Immanuel Kant might help to drive this point home. The eighteenth-century German philosopher is famous for, among other things, his ethical theory. Kant claimed that it is always morally wrong to lie. His reasoning is as follows: Suppose everyone lied on a regular basis. Suppose everyone lied whenever it was convenient. What would happen? Well, nobody would have any reason to believe what anyone else said. Everyone would just expect to be told lies, and hence would stop paying attention to what others told them. Now, could you tell a successful lie in such a world? The answer is no because in order for a lie to work, your victim has to believe the lie. So, in our world, a liar is someone who wants to tell lies, but doesn’t want everyone else to tell lies (because if everyone else did so, her lies wouldn’t work). Kant said that there is nothing so special about any one person that justifies her in making an exception of herself in this way. He concluded that lying is morally wrong. The lesson for our purposes is that it is impossible to lie in a situation where everyone expects you to try to deceive them. This is why bluffing in poker is not the same as lying.
Another problem with understanding bluffing as lying is that, from a purely strategic point of view, it makes successful bluffing more difficult. Every poker player knows that it’s important not to have any tells. But if you think of yourself as lying when you bluff, you’re more likely to have tells. Think of the other players at the table as lie detectors (or bluff detectors). Then ask yourself how you should go about beating a lie detector. Should you think to yourself, “I’m not telling the truth. I’m saying the opposite of the truth,” or should you avoid such thoughts? It seems clear that whether you’re trying to trick a machine in a police station or other humans at a poker table, it’s best to avoid as much as possible the thought that you are lying. Otherwise, the machine will pick up on your decreased skin resistance and increased heart rate. And a very good bluff-detecting player will see through your bluff. So my advice is: Don’t think of a bluff as a lie.
Bluffing as Bullshitting
In his recent book, appropriately entitled On Bullshit, Harry Frankfurt explains what it is to bullshit someone. We might think that bullshitting and lying go hand in hand, but Frankfurt carefully distinguishes the two. The liar knows what the truth is, keeps the truth in mind, and then tries to trick her audience into believing something other than the truth. In contrast, the bullshitter pays little or no attention to the truth and instead just makes stuff up. Unlike the liar, the bullshitter ignores the facts. The bullshitter may not even know what the facts are. But the liar cannot ignore the facts, because her goal, as a liar, is to mislead you about the truth. For this reason, the liar and the truth teller have something in common—they both care about what the truth is. The bullshitter does not. Another important difference between lying and bullshitting is that while the successful liar necessarily tells you something false, the bullshitter might tell you something true. Because she doesn’t pay attention to the facts, the bullshitter might just happen to hit upon the truth coincidentally. Amarillo Slim said he took two million bucks from seven-card-stud expe
rt Larry Flynt. Flynt disputes the claim, calling Slim a “[insert favorite expletive] liar.” If Slim’s claim is indeed untrue, then more than likely, the fast talker was simply bullshitting, making up a nice clean figure without giving much thought to its veracity.
But how do you bullshit in a poker game? Let’s return to the Texas Hold’em example. How might we understand my K-9 bluff as an instance of bullshitting? There are at least two possibilities. First, instead of taking my all-in raise to say “I have an overpair,” or “I’ve paired the 8 on the board,” we might understand it to mean “I’ve got some kind of hand. It may be a good one, it may not. Now, what are you gonna do about it?” Note that when understood this way, the bluff isn’t really a lie, since it is not an attempt to misrepresent the facts. If the bluff suggests that I may or may not have a good hand, then it is more like bullshit than a lie.
Second, we might think that the only difference between the bluff-as-lie and the bluff-as-bullshit is my psychological state when I make the bet. If I’m lying, then my bluff says something like, “I have an overpair,” and when I say this I am attending to the fact that what I’m saying is false. If I’m bullshitting, then maybe my bluff still says, “I have an overpair,” but when I say this I’m no longer paying any attention to the fact that what I’m saying is false. If this is how bluffing is properly understood, then a good bluffer is someone who has a remarkable ability to control her own thoughts. Once she decides to bluff, she enters into bullshit mode and pries her attention away from the cards in her hand. Of course a good poker player can’t stay in bullshit mode all the time. You usually need to pay attention to all sorts of facts in a poker game, not the least of which is the hand you are dealt. But perhaps a good bluffer is someone who can in effect flip a switch in her head between “pay attention to my hand” and “ignore my hand.” As soon as she decides to bluff, she flips the switch and bullshits away.
Now, from a strategic perspective, it might be tempting to think of a bluff as a kind of bullshit. For the reasons given in the previous section, the bluffer who thinks of herself as lying is more likely to be detected. The reason is that the liar’s beginning reference point is a false claim. Remember that the bullshitter begins without any reference point. She just makes stuff up. So she is not thinking to herself, “I’m not telling the truth.” This should eliminate at least some of the tells and other problems faced by the bluffer-as-liar.
Unfortunately, however, the same thing that makes bluffing-as-bullshitting attractive—its lack of beginning reference point—also speaks against it. In order to be even a half-way decent poker player you’re going to have to make use of many reference points. That is, you’re going to have to take into account many facts. Furthermore, these facts will change throughout the course of a hand. The problem is that because the bullshitter doesn’t make use of reference points, because she ignores the facts, she will simply miss a lot of important events over the course of a game and will not do very well at all.
Consider a game of Texas Hold’em. If it goes all the way to the river, then there are four opportunities to bluff. And whether it’s a good idea to take any of those opportunities depends on many ever-changing factors. There is, of course, your hole cards, but also the cards that show up on the flop, the turn, and the river, the behavior of the other players at all four betting opportunities, the relative size of your stack, the chatter at the table, and so on. These facts must be taken into account. Obviously, then, the pure bullshitter doesn’t stand a chance.
But what about the playing strategy I suggested earlier whereby you only ignore the facts after you have decided to bluff and even then only the facts about what you hold in your hand? What about the possibility of constantly switching between truth-seeking mode (when, for example, you look at the board) and bullshit mode (when you have decided to bluff)? In order for the strategy to work, you need to know when to switch from one mode to the other. And if you’re in bullshit mode, it’s hard to see how you could possibly know that it’s time to switch back to truth-seeking mode given that you’re now ignoring the facts about what you hold in your hand. For example, suppose I decide to bluff pre-flop. So now I enter bullshit mode. I ignore what I hold in my hand in order to avoid the pitfalls associated with bluffing-as-lying. Suppose two players call my bluff and the flop is a monster—A-A-K. I hold neither an Ace nor a King. One of my opponents makes a huge bet that would put me all-in if I called it. It would be a good idea to now exit bullshit mode, cut my losses, and fold. But given that I’m in bullshit mode, what’s going to snap me out of it? I’m not using my own hand as a beginning reference point; insofar as I’m bull-shitting, I’m ignoring my hand. So how can I know that it’s time to stop bullshitting? For all I know I have A’s full of K’s, even though I don’t and even though there’s a decent chance that one of my opponents does. There’s a very good chance that I’m going out.
Obviously, then, you need to attend to what you hold in your hand. Although there are problems with thinking of bluffing as a form of lying, and although bluffing-as-bullshitting might look like a tempting alternative, it doesn’t quite work either. Still, as I hope to show a little bit later, we can learn something about bluffing by thinking about bullshitting.
Bluffing as Acceptance
Bluffing might also be understood as acceptance. Here, I use the word “acceptance” in a fairly technical way. Probably the best way to understand acceptance is to see how it differs from belief. The philosopher Jonathan Cohen, in another appropriately entitled book, called An Essay on Belief and Acceptance, explains how we might distinguish acceptance and belief. When you believe something, you feel that it’s true. You feel inclined to agree when someone utters a statement you believe. If I were to say to you, “You are a human being,” you would, I hope, immediately feel that, yes, it’s true that I’m a human. This shows that you believe it. Cohen says that because a belief is like a feeling, you can’t really control what you believe.
Acceptance, on the other hand, is something that you can control. To accept something is to go about your business as if you believed it were true, even if you don’t. For example, a defense attorney might have overwhelming evidence that her client is guilty, and she might believe that he is guilty. But nonetheless she could (and arguably should) accept that he is innocent, for the purposes of defending him in court. There are several possible reasons for her to accept his innocence: she wants to do her job to the best of her ability, she wants to uphold the rule of law, she wants to make partner in her law firm, and so on. By “premising her deliberations” with the claim that her client is innocent, she will be better able to do a good job of mounting a defense. (Just imagine how badly she would defend her client if she always acted on her belief that he is guilty.) Acting might be another case where people accept things that they don’t believe. Paul Newman probably didn’t believe that he was a con-man living in 1936 when he portrayed Henry Gondorff in The Sting. But maybe he accepted that he was, in an attempt to deliver a convincing performance.
How is acceptance different from lying and bullshitting? Well, unlike lying, acceptance requires you to ignore the truth of the matter to some degree. For the attorney to accept her client’s innocence and to act on her acceptance, she has to set aside her belief that he is guilty. In this way, acceptance and bullshit are similar. But acceptance is importantly different from bullshit insofar as accepting something doesn’t mean that you will just make stuff up. Whereas bullshitters will say whatever pops into their heads, or whatever “sounds good,” those who act on the basis of acceptance will say things that are relevant to whatever it is that they accept. (The defense attorney who tries to bullshit her way through a trial probably won’t fare too well.)
Now, how might bluffing be understood as a form of acceptance? Again we need to consider the psychological state of the bluffer. When I go all-in with King-high, I do not believe that I have an overpair, but I might have decided to accept that I do and to behave accordingly. I can act a
s if I believe I have an overpair, and if I believed I had an overpair in the situation described earlier, I would probably go all-in. So that’s what I do. I’m not lying, insofar as I, like the actor, have set aside the fact of the matter to some extent. A liar can never ignore the fact of the matter. I’m not bullshitting, insofar as I still have some reference point that I start from in making the bet. My reference point is the accepted claim that I hold an overpair.
So is bluffing a form of acceptance? Well, perhaps bluffing involves some elements of acceptance, but it’s not exactly the same as acceptance. The reason is that bluffing involves more deception than acceptance does. Although your ability to deceive in poker isn’t as great as your ability to deceive by lying, it’s certainly greater than your ability to deceive by accepting something. In fact, there’s nothing about acceptance per se that requires any element of deception. But bluffing, by its very nature, must be an attempt to deceive. So when it comes to bluffing, lying is too deceptive, and acceptance is not deceptive enough.
Bluffing as Fooling Yourself
It might be that the best way to bluff is to make yourself believe (and not merely accept) that you have a better hand than you actually do. That is, maybe the best strategy is to fool yourself in an attempt to fool your opponents. If this is how bluffing works (or should work) then it obviously requires a high degree of self-deception. Suppose I see the terrible flop, realize that my hand is weak, but decide to bluff. I might then enter into self-deception mode and through a Herculean effort make myself believe that I have a straight or overpair. If I really can make myself believe this, then of course I’m going to act as if it were true, and hence my opponents will be less likely to detect my bluff. As with bullshit bluffing, bluffing by fooling yourself requires a very disciplined mind.
Poker and Philosophy Page 15