Poker and Philosophy
Page 17
Another poker skill is manipulating other players’ beliefs and emotions: convincing them that you have a better or worse hand than you actually have, confusing them about your own style of play, and being able to manipulate their emotions, so that they go on tilt and make poor decisions. On Day Three of the 2002 World Series of Poker, Varkonyi knocked out renowned champion Phil Hellmuth with a play which led to the subsequent “hair cut” incident following the final table win. (After getting knocked out, Hellmuth was so angered, he said that if Varkonyi actually went on to win the WSOP, he’d shave his head . . . and Varkonyi was later given the clippers to do just that.) At the start of the hand, Varkonyi made a late position raise with Q-10 suited. Hellmuth re-raised from the big blind with A-K off-suit, favored mathematically to win. Varkonyi went all-in and Hellmuth called, perhaps based on probability and the strength of his A-K, but also perhaps based in ego and the assumption that Rob was way too amateur to compete. “I got a little lucky when the flop came A-Q-10,” Varkonyi said, “but that’s poker.” Hellmuth must have figured for sure he had top pair and kicker to win, but Varkonyi had the better hand with two pair. That was the end of Hellmuth’s WSOP play (ironically, 10’s full of Q’s later gave Varkonyi the WSOP win on the final hand).
Nonetheless, manipulating others’ beliefs and emotions requires some lying and deception, like bluffing and outright lying about your hand. But is the poker skill in question being able to manipulate all of their beliefs and emotions by whatever means? No. The skill is much narrower than this. Telling someone that his car is being towed is a way of manipulating his beliefs, but this is wrong, because it goes beyond the game. Making offensive racist jokes may be an effective way to play with someone’s mind and put him on tilt, but this also goes beyond the game.
Other players’ beliefs about your cards, about your poker experience, and about your style of play all concern the poker game, so a skilled poker player will manipulate these beliefs in other players. Other players’ feelings about their own play are feelings about the poker game, so a skilled poker player will manipulate these feelings by showing a bluff, for example, or being sarcastic. Other players’ feelings about racism, however, are not feelings about the game, so manipulating these feelings by telling a racist joke is not a poker skill.
This theory helps us resolve our tricky borderline cases of lying and deception. Lying about being single and about being a Marine are morally wrong lies to tell during poker because lying about topics unrelated to poker is not a poker skill, and so the implicit rules of poker do not allow such lying. So when players agree to play poker, they are not agreeing to be lied to about such topics. You do not have their implicit permission, so it is morally wrong to lie about those topics.
This theory also explains why collusion is against the rules of poker. Being able to manipulate other players’ beliefs and feelings about the game is a poker skill. When collusion occurs—when players work together and share information—the ability to manipulate others’ beliefs and feelings becomes much less relevant to the game. When collusion occurs, winning depends most upon sharing information with others, and depends little upon more skillful card playing decisions. Since good poker rules ensure that poker play tests poker skills, a rule allowing collusion is not a good poker rule.
Unintentionally seeing another player’s cards, and not letting them know that you’ve seen them, is morally acceptable according to our theory. Being discreet—for example, by guarding your cards—is a poker skill. Getting more information from others than they are able to get from you—for example, by reading their facial expressions or tells—is a poker skill. Even though failing to tell them that you have some sort of edge is deceiving them about your poker play, deception about the poker game is allowed by implicit poker rules, and therefore is morally acceptable deception.
Poker and Ethics
The morality of lying is largely based on the implicit and explicit rules of the particular situation in which we find ourselves. What are the rules of poker? In casinos, house rules are made explicit, and clearly posted. But informal games have many unstated, implicit rules. For instance, when Pete and his family play, everyone knows without having to ask that peeking at one another’s cards is not allowed. But when Pete’s brother suggests that no bluffing should be allowed in their family game, Pete can reply that this is a bad rule, because bluffing is an important part of poker.
Thus we’ve solved a philosophical puzzle—what’s the difference between a good bluff and a dirty lie? A good bluff tests the other players’ poker skills, but a dirty lie has nothing to do with the poker game.
If poker teaches us to lie at all costs then perhaps we should be careful about its incredible rise in popularity over the last few years. If, however, the game trains us to succeed within an understood framework of implicit and explicit rules, then gimme pocket bullets and I’ll show you the money!
________
1 All of Varkonyi’s quoted remarks are taken from an interview conducted by Susan Solomon on 14th August, 2005.
13
Online Poker: Is it Bluffing when No One Sees You Blink?
DAVID R. KOEPSELL
I admit I was never much of a poker player. We had a few games in college, then law school, and graduate school. We played for change, beer, and occasionally cigars. All of which evokes the typical picture of a game of poker. The image gleaned from years of cowboy movies is of the barroom game around a smoky table, with alcohol flowing and occasional fits of violence. Think of the dead-man’s hand, a pair of A’s and 8’s (the hand Wild Bill was holding when he was shot and killed in Deadwood). The language of poker has now infused our everyday conversation: we call each other’s bluffs, we tip our hands, we put on our poker faces. The image of poker is so quintessentially tied-up with the game of poker, we should question what the necessary conditions are for people to actually play a game of poker, and whether the new phenomenon of online poker qualifies.
Moreover, poker and other games constitute complex social phenomena. Where some games can be the same game when played by a mindless computer (such as tic-tac-toe or other purely numerical games) other games can not. For instance, can a computer play Cranium or Pictionary? The question depends on the quality of the game. If a game relies on more than computation, including some strategy which is at least too complicated for modern computation, then it’s right to question whether a computer game is the same game as that played by humans. Similarly, a computer or network mediated game may lose certain essential qualities so that the online version is not the same game.
There are often essential stages of a game’s evolution when the game can clearly be said to have become the game itself, as opposed to some embryonic form. So, for instance, tennis began as a game played indoors, utilizing walls as well as a net, but the modern game of tennis is clearly not the game involving walls. Tennis proper, evolved from lawn tennis, can arguably be said to have evolved only when the walls were dropped, and a game developed with a ball, a net, and lines on a court.
One simple means of deciding the essential components or attributes of a game is to ask the common sense question: what counts as a game of tennis? This reflects a formulation of the study of “social objects” described by philosopher John Searle in his book, The Construction of Social Reality. So, for tennis, what counts as a game of tennis? A way to determine this is to picture a game of tennis, subtract an attribute, and ask whether what remains still counts as tennis. Is tennis still tennis without white shorts? Is tennis still tennis without the doubles court? Is tennis still tennis without a racket, ball, or net? Also, adding elements may destroy the game’s essential quality. So, is tennis still tennis with walls? We could say that the necessary conditions of tennis include a net, a ball, rackets, and certain measured boundaries. Neither one of these, nor combinations of less than all of these will make a game count as tennis. But in combination, we could say they are sufficient, when combined with some scoring system and rules (which may
also change over time) to count as tennis.
In the case of tennis, essential and historically continuous qualities include the racket, ball, and net. A presently nonessential quality whose inclusion threatens to make the current game of tennis something else is walls. Historically, the essential elements of tennis have remained consistent, while we might say a nonessential attribute has been removed. Are there any such elements which we might point to in poker which help us to determine the essential characteristics, or those things which might be necessary and sufficient to make a game into poker?
In order to understand the current nature of poker, we should look briefly at its history. Games evolve over time, and modern day poker is very different from its genesis. Let’s then look at the essential qualities of generic poker so we can decide once and for all if online poker is really still poker.
The Origins of Modern Poker
Poker appears to have originated in or around the Louisiana delta area at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a place rich with gambling boats and floating saloons. Literary references to the game appear by the third decade of the nineteenth century and describe a game played with a twenty-card pack comprised of Aces, Kings, Queens, Jacks and 10’s. A description of the game in 1848 by Jonathan H. Green in Exposure of the Arts and Miseries of Gambling, indicates that this early version of poker only scored for a limited number of combinations, including two, three, and four of a kind as well as two pair and a “full” which was a version of the modern full house. Since its inception, the game involved five cards in the players’ hands, as well as some form of “vying.”
Vying means that the highest hand may not always be the winning hand, as there are two potential outcomes to any hand in poker: 1) a showdown in which the hands remaining after betting are shown and the best hand wins, or 2) all but one player folds because they refuse to see or raise a bet and thus drop out of the hand, forfeiting their bet in the pot.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the game evolved much of its modern attributes, including the use of fifty-two cards, the addition of the draw and the “jack pot,” which originally required one to hold a jack before one could even bet on a hand. Edmund Hoyle published rules for poker in various forms, most notably adding new types of hands, such as the straight and the flush, both of which were incorporated in the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, R.F. Foster’s Practical Poker, commissioned by the New York Sun and the United States Printing Company, described definitively the game as it then stood. The biggest innovation since then has been the addition of communal cards, which forms an important part of the most popular current version of poker, Texas Hold’em. Communal card games appeared first in the second decade of the twentieth century.
There is some credible evidence that poker evolved from a three-card vying game first seen in England entitled “Brag,” which included a draw, was originally played with twenty-two cards, and which was seen as early as the eighteenth century. Brag apparently disappeared about five years after the emergence of poker, which offered many of the same features, but which allowed for more flexibility due to the size of the hand played.
Primero was a sixteenth-century Italian card game which consisted of a showdown and a hand made of four cards. Various so-called “Poch” games were compendium games, consisting of three stages, including a middle vying stage with a showdown. It is possible that poker’s origins date back to these games.
Historically, at least, the features which seem to combine to make poker a distinct game, include the following necessary attributes: five or seven cards, vying, lexically ordered hands, and a pot. So, any card game employing these features is sufficient to make it a poker game. These are the minimum regulatory features of the game. That is, any group of people who wish to play poker have to at least combine these features. But there is much more to the game. These are minimum features. Poker involves a complex of these “superficial” features, or those things which observers of a game would note, and subjective “intentional” features, or those things only players would note. It is this second class of feature that complicates the question of whether poker can occur in cyberspace.
Poker tournaments are often aired on cable stations, allowing viewers to watch expert poker players (as well as amateurs and celebrities) dart their eyes around a table, or look calm in their exclusive knowledge of what they hold. It has been made more exciting by the cameras at table level which allow the audience to see each player’s cards. Could blackjack make such good theater? How about craps, roulette, or other gambling games? Doubtful. Craps and roulette are based on mere luck, and blackjack can be reduced to probabilities and algorithms. There’s no such thing as playing craps or roulette “well” although one may learn to bet on them intelligently. Once one understands the probabilities in blackjack, the decision to stay or hit is reducible to an algorithm which can be augmented by simply counting the cards dealt so far, or, in other words, cheating.
Playing sports like tennis well depends on physical skills, such as speed, strength and finesse, as well as some strategy. Poker, on the other hand, necessarily involves theatrical skill to play well. It is a game of social engineering. Good poker players must learn to deceive, and they must learn to be deceptive about their deception. In order to determine if poker can be played through some computerized medium, we have to have a precise understanding of the bluff, because without the bluff, poker just ain’t poker.
The Meaning of the Bluff
Bluffs aren’t unique to poker. They are often part of negotiations in various contexts. Nearly every contractual negotiation, as apart from the promise embodied in the contract, involves an element of bluff. Each side of most negotiations hopes to get the very best deal, but if there were perfect knowledge of the complete facts on both sides of every prospective deal, there would be no need for negotiation, and the price would settle into an agreed-upon equilibrium. This obviously is not the case with most large transactions, whether it be a car purchase, a real estate deal, or a job offer.
My father wanted to buy a small farm a couple of years ago. The original asking price had been lowered by $30,000 over a several-month period before he saw the farm. When deciding to make an offer, he sat with his wife and their realtor and discussed what offer they should make. He wanted to “low ball” with a very low offer, but the realtor was afraid this might cut off negotiations. They arrived at a price a bit higher which the realtor thought would not be accepted, but in fact it was. They got the farm for $25,000 less than the present asking price—a bluff that worked.
The bluffs that comprise essential parts of negotiations are not, and generally cannot be lies. A lie would undermine, and make invalid, most contracts that arose from them. The old rule of buyer beware no longer suffices, and a lie uncovered can serve as the basis for breaking the contract which results in what the law calls “fraud.” But a bluff is not a fraud. It is something which the bluffer intends the “bluffee” to regard as meaning the bluffer has a stronger bargaining position than he or she actually has. It can be verbal, but is generally something more complex. At its most sophisticated, a bluff is evinced through body language, careful use of words, and mild representations intended to convey a sense of confidence, or lack thereof, differing from the actual attitude held by the bluffer. Mere lies are typically clumsy bluffs and, besides their riskiness in making a negotiation fraudulent, are often more easily seen through than a bluff.
In a home sale, for instance, the seller may bluff by acting as though he is not as interested in selling as he actually is, or setting a price which is too high, while acting as though it is appropriate. These are not strictly lies, as they are not misrepresentations of fact, but rather carefully concealed opinions or feelings, masked as other opinions or feelings, whether by word, expression, or deed.
A home seller, for instance, isn’t going to get far by pretending he doesn’t want to actually sell his home, fishing for a huge offer, as the home would obviously n
ot be on the market in that case. But perhaps during the showing, or at the negotiation stage, he acts as if he’s simply in no big hurry, seems reluctant to part with the home, winces perhaps as the conversation moves to the logistics of moving, and so on.
Poker experts and aficionados will tell you that the style of a champion poker player’s game depends largely upon the method and manner of the player’s bluffing. With a single home purchase or a job offer, your “opponent” doesn’t get a chance to watch your “game” over time, learn your style, and study your bluffing abilities. This means that a successful poker player has to learn to mask emotions, mix up expressions and styles of bluff, and generally do things to make his or her bluff as convincing as possible.
We are not concerned here with the ethics of bluffing versus lying, and there is good reason to ignore the problem in poker and maybe even in business negotiations, because the parties in each arguably consent to the practice.1 Rather, we are interested in the necessary and sufficient phenomena which describe an act of bluffing, so that it will be possible to determine whether it is at all possible to engage in bluffing over the Internet.
The poker bluff cannot consist merely of the bet, or the raise. It is clear, however, that players use betting and raising as a means of bluffing. Gus Hansen’s play is characterized, for instance, by huge bets, which sometimes are mere bluffs. But if that’s all there were to his bluffing, all other players would quickly catch on. There is more to the bluff than that. So betting may be sufficient to be a bluff, but it is not necessary. Betting is often the first and strongest opportunity to bluff a hand in poker. Opening with a strong bet is one sure way to get other players to think that you are holding a strong hand when you are not.