The Humans and the Bots

Had a thought today about the world in which we currently live. It was poker-related, too -- in fact, online poker-related -- so I figured I might share it here.

Post-Black Friday my online poker playing essentially dwindled to some half-hearted noodling on a couple of the small, remaining sites, then disappeared entirely save the occasional play money game on PokerStars.

Not long ago I got an account on this new site called Coin Poker. It went live in November, and I believe it was sometime in December or maybe early January when I hopped on there for the first time. The site is “powered by blockchain technology via Ethereum,” and in fact the games are played with a newly invented cryptocurrency, “Chips” or “CHP” (now listed on a couple of exchanges).

The site had an ICO (Initial Coin Offering) -- actually a “pre-ICO” and then two stages of ICOs -- in which a good chunk of these CHPs were sold for Ethereum. Meanwhile the site has been conducting tournament freerolls to give away the rest of the CHPs. There were a lot of those early on, though the schedule has thinned a little lately.

It’s through the freerolls that I won some CHPs and began a modest “bankroll” on the site, something with which to play in the “cash” games. I haven’t explored where exactly things stand as far as depositing and withdrawing are concerned, and don’t really anticipate doing so soon (unless perhaps I were to run my small total up significantly).

Playing on the site has been diverting, though, and for the first time in several years I have found myself genuinely invested in the games when playing poker online. I’ve even revived some of those earlier online poker memories of pleasure and pain associated with wins and losses, to a lesser degree of course.

When I first started on the site, I’d join the freerolls which like all the games on the site are played either four-handed or six-handed. Very frequently there would be players at the table shown as sitting out, something I grew accustomed to quickly. At a six-handed table there might be three or four seats occupied by the non-playing entrants, and occasionally at four-handed tables I might be the only live one there just scooping up blinds and antes until the field got whittled down.

At the time I assumed the site was filling the empty seats with these “dummy” players just to make the freerolls last a little longer, or perhaps to foster the impression of more traffic than there really was. Whatever the reason, I haven’t noticed the sitter-outers as much lately, or at all, really. As the site has grown a bit more popular, I imagine if there were such a strategy employed before it has now been withdrawn. (I’m only speculating.)

I wasn’t bothered too much by all the players sitting out, although the presence of all of those silent “zombies” at the table did cause me to recall the controversies and occasional hysteria surrounding the use of “bots” in online poker. Coupled with some of the news from the past few weeks (and months), that in turn has made me think about the significant influence such software applications running automated tasks or scripts online now have upon our lives.

It’s an enormous subject, but in particular I’m thinking about those indictments handed down last Friday by Special Counsel Robert Mueller that charge 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities with conspiracy to defraud the United States via their attempts to meddle with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. If you’ve read through the 37-page document spelling out what happened (or heard it summarized), you’re familiar with some of the methods employed by these agents to manipulate news and opinion consumed by Americans during the campaign, especially via social media.

The report describes in detail how a Russian company called the “Internet Research Agency” (a name sounding equally generic and sinister) employed hundreds to help generate content published via fake accounts with invented personas on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, content that was in turn disseminated far and wide “via retweets, reposts, and similar means.”

The network has been characterized as a “bot farm” and even this week there was evidence of the network or something similar continuing to operate via the rapid spread of various messages (including false ones) in the wake of the deadly school shooting in Lakeland, Florida a week ago.

One of the more curious aspects of the “disinformation operation” (as some have described it) is the way invented news and opinion gets picked up and further distributed by unsuspecting social media users (i.e., Americans not involved with the operation). The indictment describes “unwitting members, volunteers, and supporters” of the campaign the Russians were supporting as having performed such work along with others “involved in local community outreach, as well as grassroots groups.”

In other words, certain messages and information “campaigns” begun by this Internet Research Agency were initially promulgated by a vast number of fake accounts with programs or “bots” helping extend their reach and influence. Then actual, living and breathing humans receiving those messages (and unaware of or unconcerned about their origin) passed them along as well, increasing their audience and influence.

Setting aside questions of legality and jurisdiction (and ignoring entirely the many other areas being explored by Mueller and his team), I just want to isolate that phenomenon of an automated message sent via a “bot” being received and then resent by a human. The fake accounts being directed by the scripts are simply executing commands. The humans who then receive and resend those messages do so consciously, although they, too, act by rote in a sense, simply hitting “like” and “retweet” in what is often an uncritical fashion. (Bot-like, you could say, depending on your predilection for irony.)

When playing against the “dummy” non-players in those freerolls, I could comfortably bet or raise against them every single time, knowing full well that even though they might resemble “human” players sitting there at the table, they weren’t going to play back at me. They were programmed simply to fold every time the action was on them. If you’ve ever played against “the computer” in crude games (including poker games), you’ve probably similarly been able to pick up on the program’s patterns and exploit them to your favor.

Of course, increasingly sophisticated programs have been created to run much more challenging poker playing “bots,” including those powered by artificial intelligence. These programs can in fact exploit the tendencies of humans who often find it very difficult to randomize their actions and thereby avoid detectable patterns. It’s much harder to know what to do against these, as some of the more recent efforts in this area have demonstrated.

Many of those who forwarded along memes, photos, articles, and other bot-created content during the 2016 presidential campaign weren’t aware of the original source of that information (were “unwitting”). They were -- and are, still -- being exploited, in a way, by others who know how they tend to “play” when using social media.

The “game” is getting a lot harder. As far as social media is concerned -- and news and politics and everything else in our lives that has now become so greatly influenced by message-delivering mechanism of social media -- it’s becoming more and more difficult to know who is human and who is a bot pretending to be human.

Especially when the humans keep acting like the bots.

(EDIT [added 3/19/18]: Speaking of CoinPoker and bots, there’s an interesting new article on PartTime Poker sharing some research regarding the site’s unusual traffic patterns. The title gives you an idea of the article’s conclusion -- "CoinPoker’s Traffic is a Farce.")

Image: “Reply - Retweet- Favorite” (adapted), David Berkowitz. CC BY 2.0.

The Man Who Can’t Stop Firing

The most dangerous tweeter alive has fired off several more strange, unsettling, self-implicating messages for all of his followers -- and the rest of us -- to ponder. “Fired” was a word already associated with the reality TV star, thanks to his famous catch phrase. Now it’s the easy choice of verb to describe his weapon-like use of Twitter.

Last Thursday the president’s recently-named Attorney General recused himself from current and future investigations of the 2016 presidential campaign. Such investigations are presently focusing on the influence of Russia on last year’s election and the numerous ties between the foreign power and several of the president’s associates (including the president himself). The A.G.’s decision came after it became widely known that during his confirmation hearing he’d lied under oath about his own meetings with Russian representatives during the campaign.

We know that angered the president, as he let us all know via Twitter. Saw a funny tweet yesterday from the columnist Doug Sanders summarizing the absurdity of such a situation as speculative fiction: “Sci-fi where the president has lost his mind and everyone knows because his private thoughts keep appearing on little slabs in their pockets.”

“The Democrats are overplaying their hand,” the president furiously wrote, choosing a poker analogy in order to express frustration about his A.G. having succumbed to the pressure to recuse himself. The president wished to suggest the Democrats are betting too heavily with too weak of a holding, since (in his view) the connections and communications between Russia and his associates (and himself) are inconsequential.

“The real story,” he added, “is all of the illegal leaks of classified and other information. It is a total ‘witch hunt!’”

He hastily jabbed some more pettiness into his smartphone after that, then traveled to his supervillain-like lair in Florida, his estate in Mar-al-Lago. From there the embittered president launched an incredible accusation Saturday morning that his predecessor, Barack “Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory.”

He first called this action “McCarthyism,” which is at best an imprecise use of a term normally used to refer to someone making unfair allegations against another. Indeed, the president himself seemed to be the one making the unfair allegation, making his phrase “This is McCarthyism!” punctuating his tweet seem unintentionally self-referential.

Many soon picked up on the fact that the claim was derived from a far-right talk show host’s hypothesis that had been turned into a faux-report over on Breitbart, the website formerly run by the president’s assistant Steve Bannon widely known to have published several unsupported conspiracy theories and falsehoods in the past.

The president continued his accusation over a few more tweets, finishing thusly: “How low has President Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”

The “Nixon/Watergate” reference is again another hazy allusion to history being made by the president, in this case triggered by the mention of phone taps. Again, it’s hard not to think that while he intends to suggest a comparison that accuses another, he is instead drawing attention to parallels with himself.

To name one, the investigation into the 2016 election includes questions about the president and his associates (among them his original national security adviser Michael Flynn who has already resigned over the allegations) having suggested to the Russians that United States sanctions against them would be lessened or removed once the new administration took over, severely undermining the Obama administration’s authority and ability to act in the nation’s interests (never mind violating federal law).

Such meddling resembles what Nixon was alleged to have done prior to the 1968 election when interfering with the sitting president Lyndon B. Johnson’s attempts to reach peace in Vietnam. (For more on the latter, see “‘I’m Reading Their Hand”: LBJ, Nixon, and the Week Before the 1968 Election.”)

In fact, the idea of one president accusing his predecessor of having formerly illegally tapped his phones is yet another example of the current commander-in-chief emulating Nixon. So, too, did Nixon on multiple occasions bring up privately that he believed he had been bugged by Lyndon B. Johnson during the last couple of weeks prior to the 1968 election.

For example, on October 17, 1972, Nixon told John Connally (the former Texas governor who served for a time as Nixon’s Secretary of Treasury before leading the “Democrats for Nixon” in the run-up to the ’72 election) that J. Edgar Hoover, FBI Director until his death in May 1972, had informed him LBJ had Nixon’s plane bugged because “he had his Vietnam plans... and he had to have information as to what we were going to say about Vietnam.”

“Johnson knew every conversation,” Nixon told Connally. “And you know where it was bugged? In my compartment!”

Later, after Nixon had been reelected and once Watergate began seriously heating up, Nixon would again bring up LBJ’s alleged bugging of his plane, wondering aloud to others how they might make it public so as to make the bugging of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters seem less remarkable -- or at least not without precedent.

But Nixon never did that. Meanwhile the current president -- going off a speciously-sourced story that the present FBI Director is denying could be true (and a spokesman for Obama and others in the know are suggesting to have been wholly impossible) -- got out his phone and pulled the trigger without hesitation. And without even informing his staff he was doing so. And without seemingly any care for the effect such an accusation might have on the country he was elected to lead, or its standing in the world going forward.

I wonder sometimes what this presidency would be like without the tweets. Would it seem as obviously unhinged? Perhaps. After all, that first press conference in mid-February was an absolute horrorshow -- way, way more distressing than any performance by any president ever, including Nixon at his most petulant and paranoid.

Then again, it seems possible that if he were not to tweet he would at least seem less demented, wouldn’t it? Or is it too late? I mean with every single tweet he hurts himself, and often hurts lots of us, too. It seems like he has to figure that out at some point, right?

Or not. Brace yourself. He’s about to fire again.

Don’t Leave Early -- You Might Miss Something

So today we’re all remembering Steve Harvey’s Miss Universe faux pas from a little over a year ago. I suppose that’s where all of this stuff started.

We must have reached a point in our shared cultural history where we were all getting a little too comfortable with the idea that “it’s all been done” or we’ve “seen it all before.” Like lifetime poker players who’ve been one-outed on the river enough times to be numb to it, we were all lulled into thinking we could safely shut the teevee off before the end and not miss anything.

Just off the top of my head here, I’m thinking back to that absurd second-round game in last year’s NCAA playoffs between Texas A&M and Northern Iowa, the one in which the Aggies were down 12 with just 44 seconds left in regulation and somehow managed to tie the sucker -- without even calling a timeout (!) -- and win in double-OT.

You have to think a few folks shut the set off before the conclusion of that one.

Sports provided a couple more similarly preposterous finishes last year, highlighted by the Cleveland Cavaliers overcoming a 3-1 deficit in the NBA finals to defeat the seemingly unbeatable Golden State Warriors. Then came the Chicago Cubs similarly coming back from 3-1 down (and from a 108-year title drought) to beat the Cleveland Indians, although not until after the Indians stunningly scored three runs late to tie things up (with an apocalyptic-seeming rain delay prior to extra innings adding further to the delirium).

Then came election night, another stunner for many that seemed to take a crazy turn mid-evening when all of the projections suddenly swung the other way. And of course that completely loopy 25-point comeback engineered by the New England Patriots against the Atlanta Falcons to win Super Bowl 51 is still fresh in everyone’s minds, a game that absolutely no one other than perhaps the Pats thought could possibly play out the way it did.

Vera and I watched the beginning of the Oscars last night, but didn’t bother to stick it out until the end. We hadn’t seen most of the movies. Indeed, we probably only go to the theater about once every other month or so, if that.

Whenever Vera and I do go to the movies, we have a routine where we always stay through the end credits, which invariably makes us the last two people to exit the place. Not sure why we do that, to be honest, although by doing so we necessarily catch any of those funny little post-credits like Ferris Bueller telling the audience to leave or the rider still waiting in Ted Striker’s cab in Airplane!

We were curious to see how the Oscars started, then, but not engaged enough to stick with it. Vera did, however, ask me to DVR the rest before we gave up. I didn’t ask to add the extension when recording, and while I haven’t checked it yet I’m sure I didn’t get the ending as I understand it ran quite late.

I’ve heard about it though, of course, and watched a clip this morning of the remarkable gaffe that saw the wrong film named as best picture, and multiple acceptance speeches being given before the correction came. Seemed fitting, I guess, after more than a year’s worth of such improbable twist-endings.

Hang around poker tournaments enough and you see examples of players all in and at risk leaving the table before the last card is dealt, sometimes when they are still drawing live. Every once in a while -- I’ve seen it happen maybe three or four times -- the departing player’s unlikely runner-runner actually comes, leading to the player having to be recalled to the table by staff or a friendly opponent.

After all of these head-spinning conclusions, gotta think people are going to stop being in such a hurry to get to the exits. Now everyone is going to start sticking around past the end.

For an explanation of all this that is fun -- or frightening, depending on your point of view -- check out Adam Gopnik’s piece for The New Yorker today, “Did the Oscars Just Prove That We Are Living in a Computer Simulation?”

Image: “ P1080262,” Jon Seidman. CC BY 2.0.

Rigged!

It’s probably undeniably partisan-sounding to suggest something as audacious as the idea that there is a non-zero chance the result of the 2016 presidential election was entirely unaffected by some variety of selective tampering or outright fraud.

Making such an overture is probably also an invitation to charges of groundless paranoia, not unlike the reaction many had nearly a decade ago to suggestions that online poker could in any way be rigged.

Earlier today poker pro David Paredes -- one of those who originally began to raise suspicions about cheating on UltimateBet (which turned out to be true) -- sent a tweet alluding directly to the latter while indirectly commenting on the former.

“When my friend and I first examined odd-seeming data on UB, every smart poker player called me an idiot. We wound up getting 22M refunded,” said Paredes.

We’re two weeks on, now, from that surprising Election Night that began with continued confirmations of Hillary Clinton’s wide lead in the polls suddenly being consumed by actual returns that reversed the outcome in favor of Donald Trump. The initial response by some included dismay regarding the seemingly erroneous polling data, with many exceedingly curious about how the pollsters could have gotten it so wrong.

In the last few days talk of recounts and closer scrutiny of the ballots in certain states is getting a little louder. It still doesn’t feel much like anything will come of it, but it’s enough to inspire some interesting lines of speculative thought.

Stepping back from it all and imagining a scenario in which there was some form of tampering done in a few key states that affected the outcome, I’m reminded of poker’s early history and the rampant cheating that marked the game’s first century. In particularly I’m thinking of schemes followed through by card sharps in saloons and steamboats who set up their victims initially with unsupported accusations about cheating and/or games being unfair before cheating themselves.

One method falling into this category was for the card sharp to lose a few hands, then call for a new deck as a way to imply a belief that something untoward was going on. The request might be accompanied by grumbling about cards being marked, which ideally would elicit protestations from others that the game was honest. A new deck would then be introduced -- one that he himself had doctored earlier -- enabling the sharp to cheat and win in a game others had already declared to be square.

Another tactic sometimes used by cheaters would be to make conspicuous pronouncements about how much they were losing when in truth they were cleaning up. For example, there’s a long story in John Nevil Maskelyne’s Sharps and Flats: A Complete Revelation of Cheating at Games of Chance and Skill (1894) about a Spanish sharp named Bianco who marked cards in advance and had decks shipped to locations in Havana he subsequently visited.

“He played everywhere, of course, and where he played he won,” explains Maskelyne. “To avert suspicion, however, he was careful to complain constantly of the losses he had sustained.”

Going further, sometimes among a group of colluding players the one managing the cheating would himself purposely lose in order to throw off the scent. George Devol refers to such a scene in Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi (1887) when once was playing with his cheating partner Canada Bill Jones. “Bill did the capping,” he says, “and as he lost, their suspicion did not light on him.”

The common thread here is that losing players are less likely to be thought of as cheaters, and more likely to be of the group accusing others of cheating. Meanwhile the winners are more likely to be defensive about games being fair in order to ensure their victories are understood to be legitimate.

During the final months of the campaign, Trump (who according to the polls had been consistently positioned as losing) consistently forwarded a “rigged election” narrative, even going so far as to enlist supporters to volunteer to be a “Trump Election Observer” and “Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary From Rigging This Election!” (Here’s an archived version of the invite from Trump’s website, now removed.)

In fact Trump went so far as to file a lawsuit on Election Day in Las Vegas having to do with how voting was being managed in the state. The complaint concerned early voting and polls being allowed to stay open later than scheduled, something the Trump campaign characterized as evidence of a “rigged system.” A judge rejected the suit that afternoon, directing the campaign to take it up with the Secretary of State, but the story lingered throughout the day and early evening as a continuation of the “rigged” narrative being advanced.

Here’s an overview from Politico detailing the many types of fraud that were preemptively suggested by Trump’s campaign. The narrative earned a predictable response from the Democrats (who by all indications were “winning”) who decried the suggestions as not only lacking evidentiary support but a threat to the stability of the nation’s government. “Why Trump’s talk of a rigged election is dangerous” was the headline of one CNN article that made the same sort of argument found in many places during late October/early November.

Many of those calling for audits now find themselves in a position not unlike the one occupied by those poker players who’d earlier insisted on the game being square who then later themselves began to harbor suspicions about cheating.

What might come of it remains anyone’s guess. Indeed, amid such an atmosphere of failed predictions, it is hard to be confident about any forward-looking statements, although it seems more likely than not that nothing substantial will result from these calls to “audit the vote.”

That is to say, as was the case in 1960 and 2000, there may remain doubts in the minds of some about the legitimacy of the election result, but ultimately it doesn’t appear there will be any serious, legally-consequential revisiting of the matter during these next couple of months.

I wonder, though, how the story of the 2016 campaign and election will be told decades from now -- and in what ways the word “rigged” will be used in the telling.

Image: “Vote!”, kristin_a (Meringue Bake Shop). CC BY-SA 2.0.

Trumpster Fire

There’s something kind of unusual going on around here. I smell smoke.

No, nothing in the house is burning. Nor is anyone burning leaves or anything nearby, at least not today. But the smoky smell is lingering. Everyone is starting to notice.

It comes and goes. I’ve smelled it more often in the mornings when feeding the horses, while in the afternoons it seems to die down. Then it’ll come back later as the sky darkens and night falls.

We’ve been aware of the smell for several days, perhaps a week. The longer it lasts, the more worrisome it becomes. In the last day or two I’ve started to think of it as symbolic, too, representing a similar kind of vague threat that recently started to hang over us.

Our farm is located in the western part of North Carolina, a couple of hours away from the mountains. It’s up there that around 15 different forest fires have been burning up something close to 50,000 acres over recent days, forcing more than 1,000 people from their homes.

Firefighters have had difficulty controlling the fires thanks to the drought conditions we’ve been experiencing in this part of the state. And there’s no rain at all in the current 10-day forecast, which doesn’t bode well.

I’ve been staying inside mostly. Yesterday I noticed our county had been colored in “red” on the map, designating the air quality as “unhealthy.” There’s a worse color -- “purple” for “very unhealthy” -- although none of the counties have been shaded thusly just yet, I don’t think.

I mentioned the symbolism suggested by the smoky smell and the vague feeling of anxiety it inspires. I refer of course to the flashpoint of last week’s election, and the gradually building apprehension caused by the president-elect’s quizzical movements and proclamations, stress-causing tweets, and hazy plans to make over the country in ways even his ardent supporters have to regard as troubling.

And there were plenty of supporters, including around here. I mean if you look at a different map of the state, around three-fourths of the counties were red on that one, too.

I won’t recount all of the many whiffs of trouble we’ve been noticing. For that you can read Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker who provides a catalogue of items in a new article titled “Donald Trump’s First, Alarming Week as President Elect” -- kind of like hand histories, you might say, from a series of inexpertly played hands.

Recounting much from the election winner’s two interviews, the half-dozen press releases from his transition team, his “several important personnel and policy decisions,” and his 23 tweets, Lizza concludes the “first week was marked by seeming chaos,” suggesting that “what we’ve learned so far about the least-experienced President-elect in history is as troubling and ominous as his critics have feared.”

We don’t know what’s coming next. Most of us like to think whatever changes the future might bring won’t be destructive or hurtful or otherwise for the worse. But we don’t really know. Depends on a lot of things, including things we can’t control. Not unlike the wind, or the rain (or lack thereof).

The smell persists in a threatening way. Sometimes, after being exposed to it for a while, we become less aware of it. But then it hits us again -- bitter, a little pungent, even stinging.

And we wonder how close or real the danger really is.

Photo: Citizen-Times.

Oh, Yeah... Online Poker

Was asked yesterday about what the election of Donald Trump as the next U.S. president might mean as far as online poker in the United States is concerned.

It’s a good question, although as I thought about it I quickly realized that if I were to make a list of issues to be concerned about regarding Trump’s taking over, there are probably 70 or 80 others I’d rank higher importance than online poker. Then again, it is an issue I am at least attentive to, given how much of my life is affected by the vagaries of poker’s place in the culture.

My first instinct was to say it probably didn’t matter much at all who won on Tuesday, as neither Trump nor Hillary Clinton were going to be huge proponents of any sort of federal regulation permitting online gambling and/or poker in the U.S.

I remember my shuttle ride from Atlantic City to the Philly airport last weekend. My loquacious driver was a Trump supporter, and even had a little Trump/Pence sign he held up and shook at me when making one of several points about the current state of his state and of the nation as a whole.

Thanks to the event from which he was driving me -- the inaugural PokerStars Festival New Jersey series -- we’d gotten onto the topic of online poker in the U.S. He was insistent Trump was the candidate to support for those wanting online poker up and running again. I expressed doubt, though, saying I wasn’t sure either candidate was going to be all that excited about such a cause.

I was thinking in part of the possibility of someone like Sheldon Adelson, the deep-pocketed Trump supporter and anti-online gambling lobbyist, perhaps influencing a Trump regime in a certain unpleasant direction. Then again, there’s New Jersey governor Chris Christie now standing by Trump’s side who signed NJ’s online gambling bill into law three years ago. Meanwhile VP Mike Pence has openly supported the Adelson-backed Restoration of America’s Wire Act (RAWA), if that might be said to tip the balance.

In any event, the Obama administration obviously has not viewed online gambling a cause to support, and if you think about certain measures like the surreptitious “Operation Choke Point” that targeted online gambling (in part), the evidence suggests an outward (if not so evident) antagonism toward it. I wouldn’t imagine a Clinton administration would have been so excited to adopt an alternate position than the current one allowing for the slow, slow trickle of state-by-state legislation with no federal push.

Like I say, it probably doesn’t matter much. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act -- the 10-year anniversary of which just recently passed -- has effectively reduced online poker in the U.S. to the point of near-insignificance, at least on the federal level. That could change one day, but just as I felt a week ago, there’s no more reason to think that it will anytime soon.

Even so, there’s a whole lot else to worry about first.

Image: “poker-online-logo” (adapted), texasholdempoker. CC BY 2.0.

Upside Down, Unexpectedly

Poker steels a person to handle the unexpected.

Those who’ve played the game even for a short while -- and who’ve paid attention enough to absorb some of the odds and probabilities and learn what is likely and what is not -- become accustomed to surprises. You know, kings cracking aces, the occasional one- or two-outer showing up on the river, or various runner-runner revelations that can make improbable winners of all-but-certain losers.

Of course, even when in possession of this knowledge, we still experience a certain level of surprise when such things happen. If we’re human, that is. Experiencing such emotion is part of what helps keep the game interesting to a lot of us. After all, in our “normal,” day-to-day lives, we rarely experience surprises, and indeed often try to map out our activities so as to avoid them.

Regardless of who you supported, the result of last night’s presidential election was more than likely not what you expected to happen.

Watching the coverage play out starting during the early evening when the first polls closed on the east coast, all the reporting emphasized the high likelihood of Hillary Clinton winning. In fact more than one outlet used a poker metaphor to describe Donald Trump’s needing to win several states in which Clinton was favored, saying his position was like “drawing to an inside straight.”

A couple of hours in, though, just after nine o’clock ET when another round of states’ polls closed and more projections and calls were delivered, the situation suddenly swung the other way. For Trump supporters, it was a delirously exciting 20-25 minutes or so; for those backing Clinton, it was a nightmarish sequence, occurring rapidly enough to make it hard to grasp fully the implications of what was happening.

The betting markets were slightly ahead of the game with their numbers last night. My friend Rich Ryan was tweeting out Pinnacle’s lines on a regular basis all night. Actually he’d been doing it for a week, with “HRC” the big favorite, climbing as high as -780 as things got going last night. In the space of an hour that figure dropped to -124, then after lingering there a while the sucker flipped to show “Trump/Other” at -122. An hour later Trump was up as high as Clinton had been, and by shortly after 11 p.m. here it already seemed all but certain there was no way Trump would lose.

I had CNN on, and sure enough Jake Tapper was revisiting that poker analogy not long after the flip had occurred. Recalling the earlier reference to Trump’s seemingly slim chances, he noted how the situation had been changed to Clinton being the one drawing not just to an inside straight, but to an inside straight flush, suggesting the need for a one-outer rather than a four-outer. (Am still hunting down the exact quote -- when I find it I’ll include it here.)

I was mentioning yesterday Nate Silver’s much-cited election forecast. He’d famously predicted 49 of 50 states plus D.C. correctly eight years ago, then got all 50 of them right along with D.C. in 2012. This time he (or his models) whiffed on five key states -- Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan -- all of which he had going Clinton’s way, and all of which Trump won.

Signing off from the coverage over on FiveThirtyEight last night, Silver actually wrote he wasn’t surprised by the outcome given that the polling had indicating the possibility of a competitive race. But he also admitted that “in a broader sense... it’s the most shocking political development of my lifetime.”

Yesterday I also brought up the analogy of picking NFL games, bringing up again that Pigskin Pick’em contest I’ve enjoyed over the last several years. Sometimes when writing about the contest I’ve alluded to those “Win Probability” graphs and how wild they sometimes appear in games that end with unlikely finishes where one team snatches victory away from the other following a final, surprising twist (or two or three).

The graph tracking last night’s developments was similarly dizzying. Just below is the one from The New York Times, which is pretty much identical to the ones created by other outlets overnight:

The reasons both for Trump’s win and for the failure of so many to see it coming are going to be discussed for some time. I have my own ideas, though don’t necessarily want to try to sort them out here just yet.

When a poker hand or football game gets all twisted around at the end, it’s usually easy enough to isolate the card(s) or play(s) that caused the outcome. This one is a lot more complicated, though still can be explained.

All of that effort will have the effect of lessening the shock of experiencing that head-spinning half-hour last night. When the blue and red graph lines unexpectedly dived upon one another, crossing paths in a sudden rush that literally turned the story they were telling upside down.

I mean, really... whatta river.

Image: “Election 2016” (adapted), DonkeyHotey. CC BY 2.0.

On Being “In Play”

Happy Election Day, all.

I voted this morning. I would have tried voting early, but I was on the road -- to Malta, then to New Jersey -- for pretty much the entire time early voting was available for me.

I arrived at the nearby church that functions as my polling station right at 6:30 a.m. so as to avoid any long lines later today. The place was already packed, and in fact it was hard finding a place to park. But the whole process only took about a half-hour to get through, and now I’m back on the farm where I’ll be tuning in tonight with everyone else to see how it all goes.

North Carolina is a “battleground state” this year, with enough electoral votes to matter and genuine uncertainty over whether it’ll be tipping toward Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. I noticed yesterday Nate Silver had placed NC on a “Tier 1” line with Florida as a key indicator of how things are ultimately going to go.

Eight years ago the state barely chose Obama, while Romney won by a wider margin in the last election. The polls having been suggesting Hillary wins NC by a smidgen this time, but it’s truly up in the air at the moment. (Bill Clinton lost NC by small margins in both ’92 and ’96.)

It’s curious to be voting in a state that is “in play” like this, given how most elections that hasn’t really been the case. It reminds me a little of the Pigskin Pick’em game that has been increasingly distracting me every week since I’ve been out front in the sucker since Week 2.

Every week’s slate of NFL games contains many games that essentially aren’t significant since practically the entire pool picks the same way. Such was true, for instance, with last night’s Buffalo-Seattle game in which almost everyone took the Seahawks (and won, although it was a close one).

Meanwhile other games last weekend were most definitely “in play” -- e.g., Philadelphia-NY Giants, Carolina-Los Angeles, and Denver-Oakland, which in each case saw about half the pool go one way and half the other. Those outcomes therefore meant something, affecting the pool standings, while the unanimous (or near-unanimous) games did not.

Of course, what I’m describing is all a matter of perception. It’s like when we talk about a poker hand and after fourth street brings an apparent “blank” we cheerfully say “the turn changed nothing.”

But almost always the turn is not wholly insignificant (except in those relatively rare instances when a player is already drawing dead after the flop). It moves the game forward another betting round, having meaning even if it doesn’t change who is ahead in the hand.

So, too, do these games (or states) that aren’t “in play” still significant to the overall contest. (In fact, who’s to say, really, which states are and are not, until later tonight?)

In any event, regardless how the election turns out, things have certainly changed here in the U.S. and will continue to do so going forward. After the last year-and-a-half, it feels like practically everything is “in play” now.

The Unpredictable Leader

Among the various, repeated themes of this year’s presidential election has been the unpredictability of the Republican party’s unbelievable choice for a nominee.

Ever since he announced his candidacy in mid-June 2015, observers have been focused intently both on his strange, highly unorthodox campaign and his penchant for saying and tweeting out odd, often unexpected comments and criticisms -- statements made all the more strange-seeming given his status as a candidate and eventually the frontrunner choice of his party.

I mentioned just a couple of days ago my Richard Nixon course and how the current presidential campaign does (or does not) compare to ones from the past. In the course we discuss some of Nixon’s poker strategy, something he himself talked about at length in a few different contexts. There’s one quote in particular from Nixon that we as a class tend to go back to frequently when discussing both his poker playing and the strategy he’d employ in campaigns and while in office -- a quote about being unpredictable.

The quote actually comes amid a discussion of how poker and politics tend to overlap, so the advice Nixon is putting forward actually relates to both. Speaking in 1983, Nixon complains about what he calls “the almost insatiable tendency of American politicians to want to put everything on the table. Their inability to know when to bluff, when to call, and above everything else, how to be unpredictable. Unpredictability is the greatest asset or weapon that a leader can have.... And unless he’s unpredictable, he’s going to find that he loses a great deal of his power.”

To be fair, Nixon was speaking primarily of a president dealing with foreign heads of state, although the observation applies not only to poker but to other areas of political strategy. Nixon frequently in his campaigns made big “moves” or “plays” that were unanticipated by many of his opponents. As president he also often would be unpredictable, and liked to use televised speeches to make genuinely surprising announcements about Vietnam, the economy, various policies and initiatives, his trips to China and Russia, and later on, Watergate.

I wrote a little about this quote and its connection to the Republican candidate earlier this year, responding to a pundit who was congratulating him for being “the best poker player in the Republican field” and in particular being very good at being unpredictable.

I’ve taught the Nixon course a few times now, and during our discussions of the quote we’ve tended to agree with the idea that unpredictability may well be a good campaign strategy. We can also readily see how it might be a favored trait when dealing with foreign powers, especially when in conflict with them.

However, we’ve also recognized that we don’t necessarily like our leaders to be too unpredictable with us. We need to be able to count on presidents not to say or do things that don’t at least conform with our idea of what we expect of them (never mind wildly oppose that idea). Even if they present ideas or courses of actions we hadn’t specifically anticipated, we need those ideas and courses of actions to fit with our earlier “read” of the person whom we’ve chosen to lead us.

That’s because even though it may be hard to remember when we think about our relationship to our elected leaders, we aren’t their opponents. At least we shouldn’t be.

The unpredictability of the Republicans’ current leader -- earlier heralded as savvy and strategic -- has become much less celebrated over recent weeks. It has also become a genuine cause of concern for those contemplating what his presidency might be like, including among many of those formerly enthused about his unpredictability.

What happens next? It’s hard to say. And yeah, that’s unsettling.

Image: “I wonder if #TheDonald reads every tweet about him” (adapted), Steve Baker. CC BY-ND 2.0.

Debate and Switch

I’ve mentioned here a couple of times how I’m once more teaching an American Studies class called “Tricky Dick: Richard Nixon, Poker, and Politics.” The class covers Nixon’s drama-filled political career, with a bit of emphasis (especially early on) on his poker playing.

We end up spending a fair amount of time in the class remarking upon how tactics used in campaigns and/or while serving in office often can resemble or at least recall poker strategies. The course additionally provides a detailed introduction to American political history from just after WWII to the mid-1970s -- the start of the Cold War era up through the end of the Vietnam conflict. And since during that period Nixon was a vice president for eight years, ran for president three times and won twice, and served as president for five-and-a-half years, there’s a lot of focus on the White House and the presidency’s centrality to American politics.

I’d never taught the course during a presidential election, and so had been looking forward to the chance to do so this fall semester. We’ve had some kind of uncanny moments already, such as when I happened to have assigned a viewing of the first debate between John F. Kennedy and Nixon the same week the of the first debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

There have also been opportunities to discuss some of the references to Nixon that have come up both in coverage of the campaigns and even from representatives of each major party. Of course, any comparison of a candidate to Nixon is understandably meant as a criticism, especially when the comparison comes from the Democrats or Republicans.

For instance, not long ago Trump was attempting to liken Clinton’s email saga to Watergate. Meanwhile Democratic VP candidate Tim Kaine compared Trump’s apparent encouragement to the Russians to hack the Democratic National Committee’s servers to the Watergate break-ins, too.

There have been other moments when we’ve been encouraged to bring up the current race when discussing things like Nixon’s early hard-fought campaigns (and their “dirty tricks”), the Alger Hiss spy case, the “fund crisis” and Nixon’s “Checkers” speech, and the ’60 campaign and election. (We’re only now getting to 1968.)

The whole “#TrumpTape” craziness over the weekend -- and rumors of additional tapes -- again somewhat evokes what became the major issue of Watergate, namely the revelation of the secret White House audio recordings and subsequent, protracted legal battle to force the Nixon administration release them.

But truthfully, most of the parallels tend to feel more than a little forced, I think. Why? Because thanks to the Republicans’ unbelievable choice for a nominee, this year’s presidential race is essentially sui generis, meaning any comparison tends to fall apart as we try vainly to pretend Trump even faintly resembles the weakest “real” candidate ever put forward by a major party.

As you might imagine, when my students watch and comment on the 1960 debate between RMN and JFK they are noticing many, many differences with what they are seeing today. Indeed, the contrast couldn’t be more stark, starting with the respect shown between the candidates, the civility of the proceedings, and the generally elevated level of discourse.

If you’ve never seen any of the four debates from 1960, go watch the first 10 minutes of the first one to see what my students are talking about when listing these differences. Then think about the unpleasant, badly moderated, stress-inducing and mostly useless ordeal a lot of us endured last night.

I mean, they call them “debates,” and for the sake of convenience I guess that’s what we have to refer to them as, too. But that’s obviously not what they are.

Future historians will inevitably point back to 2016 and show how what we ended up with this year could be traced back to that first televised debate on September 26, 1960, the night “style” began to challenge “substance” in a more vivid, conspicuous way than had been realized previously when it came to presidential politics. Might be easier to show the connection a half-century from now, although some are already working on making the argument, I’m sure.

Meanwhile for those of us living through 2016, it’s getting harder and harder to see any connection with the past -- never mind worrying about what the future holds.

Photos: “Presidential seal,” Ted, CC BY-SA 2.0; Kennedy-Nixon First Presidential Debate, 1960, JFK Library.