Poker and Philosophy

by Bronson, Eric

  When play resumed, it was not long before the Texan Ken Smith fell prey to a stellar hand of four A’s held by Green, which eliminated the former and boosted the latter into the lead with a commanding $400,000 chip stack. Ungar’s demeanor remained vigilant, but jittering and quivering nevertheless began to consume his gaunt frame.

  To Lose Is Still to Win

  Anxiety in the face of decision indubitably alludes to the draw of high-stakes poker. The greater the handle (the total amount of money wagered) the greater the suspense and sense of risk. Indeed, just one night of poker can result in both the heights of happiness and depths of despair, and yet, after it’s all over, after the gambler has gone “all-in,” he or she still walks away to live another day (save of course for those who have to be carried out after taking advantage of too many free drinks). For Levinas, this willingness to take risks is a success in itself, even when the result is understood as a kind of loss. To lose, then, is still to win.

  In “The Temptation of Temptation,” Levinas states that had the Jews not decided to accept the Torah, the law of God, it would have “been the signal for the annihilation of the entire universe” (Levinas, p. 41). For Levinas, the Torah is the essence of Judaism and the meaning of what it is to be human precisely because “one accepts the Torah before one knows it” (p. 42). Whereas the philosopher would have resisted making such a decision (theoretically causing the universe to implode upon itself), the Jews accepted responsibility for that which they knew not what. In so doing, they made an ethical statement that forced the universe “to accept its subordination to the ethical order, and Mount Sinai—where Moses presented the law to Israel—was for it the moment in which its ‘to be’ or ‘not to be’ was being decided” (p. 41). Decision preserved creation, and it’s precisely decision that the gambler accepts and the philosopher tends to reject.

  The Final Stretch

  The pressure to decide placed Ungar in a difficult position. Now that Green had taken the lead, Ungar was left with the choice of either playing passively and letting Green and Fisher battle it out, or making a move. He characteristically chose the latter, and a big pot quickly began to build between him and Green. Holding an A-Q pre-flop, Green made a small bet. Ungar responded by raising $10,000 with pocket K’s. Fortuitously, Green called and received another A on the flop. With his new-found pair, Green bet strong and raised the pot to $60,000. Ungar was caught. With an A on the board, his K’s no longer looked so regal. He shifted from right to left and toyed with his chips for a few minutes. Finally, Ungar decided to call.

  The turn lived up to its name as it came with a K to give Ungar trips. Without hesitation, Ungar went all-in by placing his last $90,000 in the center of the table. The crowd looked anxiously at one another and then to Green in anticipation. Three minutes went by before Green decided to call. The river then failed to turn the tide in Green’s favor and Ungar won $330,000 with his trip K’s. This placed Ungar in the lead with $400,000, Green in second with $300,000, and left Fisher with a meager $50,000. Ironically, Fisher then lost with three K’s as Green made a flush, and the last Texan was forced out. It was to be an all-Jewish finale as Green, the Orthodox furrier from Alaska, faced off with the twenty-seven-year-old New York whiz kid.

  At 8 p.m. on the third day, with just two remaining players and blinds up to $8,000, play continued. By 8:30, Green and Ungar were once again battling for a large pot. Ungar held a suited A-J of clubs to Green’s suited 10-2 of clubs. On the flop, Ungar matched his J and, like Green, had a flush draw with the remaining nine and eight of clubs on the board. However, Ungar had the top club flush and, feeling confident, he bet strong. Green called with his open-ended straight and flush draw, which brought the pot to $560,000. The turn then gave Ungar a third J and Green received no help on the river, which, when the dust settled, brought Ungar’s chip stack to $560,000 compared to Green’s $150,000. Green was stunned and struggled to retain composure.

  The championship would eventually culminate at 9:45 that night in a hand pushed by a large pre-flop bet by Ungar who was holding an A-Q of hearts. Green reluctantly called with a 10-9, but then found himself with an open-ended straight draw after the flop. He decided to move all-in and Ungar called. Each then flipped their hands over and Green saw that Ungar was holding a flush draw on hearts. The two players shared a glance and awaited the next two cards that would decide their fate.

  Deciding to Decide

  For Levinas, the willingness of Jews like Ungar and Green to decide, to take action before knowing the result, is a distinguishing mark of the Jewish character. This is the Jewish way of “being in truth,” which contrasts with the philosophical endeavor to first “know truth.” To Levinas, only via the former can one be ethical, since it involves actually doing something; the latter is “the corruption of morality” (Levinas, p. 48). In choosing to be a “philosopher,” one may have decided not to decide. Such a stance undermines the responsibility required by ethics, which brings us to the main thrust of Levinas’s thought.

  Levinas describes ethics as “first philosophy,” which means, among other things, that one must be willing to act out of responsibility for someone else rather than becoming immobilized by theoretical philosophy. This notion largely emerged from the atrocities Levinas experienced and observed in the Holocaust, a tragedy in which he lost nearly his entire family except for his wife and daughter who hid in a French monastery. The Holocaust exemplified the ability of one person to hate another by having “understood” them. In response, Levinas argues that there is a fundamental relationship one shares with the other human being that does not first entail understanding. The other person is first related to, and this relationship vests one in the well-being of the “other,” the other person. In this way, only doing before knowing, deciding to decide in the face of uncertainty, has the power to undermine prejudicial hatred.

  The Photo Finish and Making of a Legend

  Both Ungar and Green decided to decide, which eventually landed them in this final hand of the 1981 championship. With their cards exposed on the table, it quickly became obvious to all that Ungar held the advantage. His A-Q of hearts looked very promising pre-flop, and his post-flop flush draw practically clinched the championship. Green’s only hope was to fill his post-flop open-ended straight draw. When the turn came with a 4, however, he received no help, and the river’s Q sealed the deal for his opponent. Stu “the kid” Ungar won his second Texas Hold’em Championship in 1981 with a pair of Q’s, pair of 4’s, and an A kicker.

  Amidst cheers of praise, people rushed to surround the two-time reigning champion who was due $375,000 in prize money. Green responded by going straight to his wife, introduced her to the press, and exclaiming, “This year, I just accepted the President’s award for the Union of Orthodox Congregations. My daughter’s going to become a mother. I’m building a new house for my lovely wife and our five lovely kids. We’re establishing an Orthodox synagogue up there in Alaska—the first one—and we want to be within walking distance. Yeah, it’s been a good year for me.” No doubt the cool $150,000 he had just won for second place also contributed to his happy-go-lucky mood.

  The 1981 Texas Hold’em championship has gone down in history as one of the most exciting in memory, and it secured Ungar’s place as a poker legend. It was to be his second of three championship wins, and he would ultimately finish his career with five WSOP bracelets, ten major no-limit Texas Hold’em tournament victories (where buy-ins exceed $5,000), and more than thirty million dollars in winnings. He eventually gained such a reputation for skill that most casinos in Vegas barred him from gambling. Unfortunately though, he spent almost every penny on cocaine and various gaming ventures, and died in 1998 at the age of forty-two in a Vegas motel room with just $800 to his name. His heart had finally failed after decades of drug abuse.

  Ungar’s legacy lives on, however, in the hearts and minds of poker fans everywhere, many of whom consider him to be the greatest pure talent ever to grace the green felt. Asi
de from Johnny Moss, he is the only player to have won the WSOP main event three times, with the third coming after a major comeback (and lots of drug use) in 1997. He has also been commemorated in a recent movie entitled High Roller: The Stu Ungar Story (2003) and Nolan Dalla and Peter Alson’s biography One of a Kind: The Rise and Fall of Stuey “The Kid” Ungar, the World’s Greatest Poker Player. Levinas would not have praised Ungar’s “volatile” lifestyle, but might at least tip his yarmulke to “the kid” for deciding to sit taut on the edge of a casino stool rather than resorting to the safety of armchair philosophy.

  Winning at Life

  Gambling can be understood as a microcosm for the game of life insofar as one must make decisions. The major difference between the two, however, is that the latter is not a zero-sum contest in which there can only be one winner. We learn from Emmanuel Levinas that each one of us has access to the grand prize just by taking (ethical) responsibility for our lives and caring for our neighbors, by enacting the Jewish understanding of doing before knowing. Whether we hold’em, fold’em, walk away, or run, we’ve gotta play the game. Only then can we all win.5

  ________

  1 Richard Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Philosophers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 54.

  2 Emmanuel Levinas, “The Temptation of Temptation” in Nine Talmudic Readings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 34.

  3 Though, to be sure, Levinas never explicitly discusses gamblers or gambling in this way.

  4 The details of the 1981 championship to follow are largely drawn from Tom McEvoy, “Set Over Set Turns the Tide in 1981,” Card Player Magazine 16:8 (11th April, 2003), and Al Alvarez, The Biggest Game in Town (Oldcastle: Harpenden, 1991).

  5 I would like to thank Cameron Neblett in particular for his editorial acumen.

  17

  Civilization amidst Wilderness: Poker, Hobbes, and Classic Westerns

  KEVIN L. STOEHR

  In more than a few classic Western movies, poker plays an important role as a leisurely—though also at times deadly serious—game of chance, one that typically entertains everyday saloon patrons while keeping gunslingers amused when they’re not robbing stagecoaches along desert byways or shooting up shop windows on the main streets of prairie townships. Card-playing helps to pass the time in a rather primitive culture where there is not always that much to do beyond earning one’s meals and riding the range.

  Think, for example, of the suave gun-slinging gambler Kent (Brian Donlevy) who rules for a time over the card tables as well as the entire town of Bottleneck in George Marshall’s Destry Rides Again (1939). Or recall the aristocratic military veteran and “notorious gambler” Hatfield (John Carradine) who plays poker right before leaving on a journey to his own demise in John Ford’s landmark Stagecoach (1939). Hatfield spies the beautiful Lucy Mallory (Louise Platt), about to leave in the title vehicle, through a window next to the card table and ponders her refined elegance amidst the western wilderness: “Like an angel in the jungle. A very wild jungle.” He withdraws from the game and runs to catch the soon-departing coach, offering Miss Mallory his protection on the dangerous ride to Lordsburg, a gambler-gunslinger who decides that he can put his cards aside for the time being. And in Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo (1959) and El Dorado (1966), minor characters keep busy trading chips in most of the saloon scenes.

  Poker also plays a role in later “revisionist westerns,” so-called because these movies contain elements that help to revise the genre in dramatic as well as subtle ways. For example, there is the colorful and comic interlude (allegedly concocted as a kind of “intermission”) in Ford’s later epic Cheyenne Autumn (1964), in which an older Wyatt Earp (James Stewart) and an older Doc Holliday (Arthur Kennedy) detect possible cheating at their card table before being disturbed by a newly arrived bunch of desperados. In Henry Hathaway’s Nevada Smith (1966), aging gun seller Jonas Cord (Brian Keith) plays father figure for a short while to the title character (Steve McQueen), a naïve youth who is hunting down his parents’ killers. In teaching the illiterate Smith some substantial lessons about life and human nature, Cord also teaches him a bit about poker, including the fact that one needs to be minimally educated and know how to read the numbers on the cards in order to play. Later in the movie, Smith finds one of the men for whom he has been looking (Martin Landau), sitting regally at a poker table in the middle of a saloon. The poker table sets the stage for a climactic encounter.

  By focusing on the role of poker in classic Western movies, we see poker as a game of paradox. Poker expresses the tension between nature and civilization, between order and lawlessness. This tension is also the basis of the political theory of English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). Hobbes, like Hatfield in Ford’s Stagecoach, ponders the possibility of “angels amidst jungles” and of the role of morality within the wilderness. The paradoxical nature of poker—like that of the Hollywood Western—blurs the otherwise clear lines of demarcation between individual and community, reason and luck, logic and intuition.

  The Wild West and Civilization:

  A Hobbesian Paradox

  It’s the prevalence of the poker game in the cinematic embodiment of Old West mythology that calls to mind the distinction as well as relation between the constraints of community-building in early frontier life (the move to a state of civilization) and the radical freedom enjoyed by those who did not submit readily to the strictures and structures of civilized existence. The game of poker is built upon this very tension between community consensus and cut-throat competition.

  Such a tension forms the foundation of the political state or community, according to Thomas Hobbes. This influential thinker argued that civil society—as a structured, rule-governed form of civilization—is produced by the need for security and stability, a need that arises from the dangers and chaos of a lawless, savage condition of humanity. And while poker is a communal, typically civilized game with well-defined rules of gamesmanship and sociability, it’s also a game that calls upon a certain “primitive” spirit of survival and individuality in its “winner-takes-all” environment of competition and greed. And so the Hobbesian tension between law-determined civilization and lawless wilderness is represented by the game of poker, not to mention by the “culture” of the Old West itself.

  Hobbes did not arrive at this important idea while living in a vacuum. At the time that Hobbes was a young man tutoring the son of a rich family and living a comfortable life that afforded leisure time to philosophize and to travel, there was a sense of severe political turbulence in England. The King, Charles I, was in constant battle with the legislature, or Parliament, and the result was a fair degree of political and social chaos throughout the British realm.

  The “state of nature,” according to Hobbes, is the primitive condition in which humans share a constant struggle against one another for self-preservation and self-protection. In principle, it is a condition of warfare, and the dangers and fears that accompany such a savage state of affairs prompt humans to seek a peaceful and secure existence in the form of a political community and on the basis of an unwritten “social contract,” an implicit agreement to get along with one another. In the state of nature, which reveals what human nature is really like without conventions of law and order, there is no morality and justice. Everyone determines what is “right” and “wrong” according to his or her own self-interest or pursuit of personal security and happiness. Humans are basically self-interested because human nature is inherently ego-driven, according to Hobbes, which means that humans are fundamentally motivated by their own instinct for survival. The state of nature revolves around the principle of the survival of the fittest, and we can always revert to this primitive condition if civilized society somehow falters and weakens, like a poker game in which the breaking of rules may lead to a disruption of the game and perhaps even to an act of primal vengeance.

  Civil society is the condition that is artificially constructed by humans to pur
sue the common good of self-preservation, self-protection, and general happiness. In this human-made civilized state, we agree to surrender a portion of our natural right to unlimited freedom and to heed the rule of an absolute sovereign who oversees this civilized “commonwealth.” We consent to restrict our own power for the sake of security.

  Civilization, however, is often a delicate construction that thinly veils the truth of human nature in its most basic state, just as poker in the Old West helped to tame restless hearts, even if only for a brief spell. We’re often reminded, even in modern society, that human life is a constant battle that is, in Hobbes’s own words, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” But in modern society, we mainly attempt to get along and to surrender some of our rights because we realize that we cannot fully guarantee our safety and happiness by doing everything alone. This is also a lesson that had to be learned by those pioneers and settlers who lived on the dangerous Western frontier.

  Poker, Paradox, and Ambiguity

  The role and significance of the poker game in Western movies is paradoxical in different senses. A paradox is a statement or judgment that appears to be absurd or self-contradictory on the surface but that may in fact be true—or at least reasonable—at the end of the day. For example, opposites that do not seem compatible in any sense may in fact fit together within a larger picture, such as the presence of good and evil or of reason and irrationality in the complex personality of the same individual. A Hobbesian world, whereby selfish, independent people give up some of their autonomy to live in community, is by nature paradoxical in its expression of opposing tendencies in human nature.