Inflection Points

I am recalling at least three occasions when acts of violence so horrific and massive have occurred in this country, I’ve found myself unable not to write about them here on HBP.

This is a poker blog, after all, and while I’ll often write about sports, politics, entertainment, business, music, and other non-poker topics including what it’s like living on a horse farm, I still try to keep things oriented in the direction of poker, which necessarily leaves certain topics out of the mix.

One was the shooting at Virginia Tech in April 2007, prompting in part a meditation on college classrooms (where I’ve spent so much of my adult life, including then when I was teaching full-time). Another was the one at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut in December 2012, also taking place at a school, with many children among the victims.

The third was the bombing at the Boston Marathon in April 2013. As had been the case during the Sandy Hook shooting, I was reporting on a tournament at the time, and wrote then how “it felt odd to be locked in that poker tourney cocoon while such terrible things were happening outside of it.”

The shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando early Sunday morning has again forced all of us out of our respective cocoons. Or has it? Beyond the horror of the scene and the extent of pain inflicted, there’s that unsettling sense already that even the “deadliest mass shooting in American history” -- as some (not all) have described it -- hasn’t necessarily moved the collective to a point of acting in response.

Remember the Harrington on Hold’em books, and that explanation of “inflection points” that comes up in the second volume? That’s the concept associated with the famous “M” ratio signaling how many orbits you have left according to your stack size, and the corresponding “zones” (green, yellow, orange, red, and “dead”) meant to identify what sort of maneuverability you have left according to your remaining chips.

Regarding inflection points, authors Dan Harrington and Bill Robertie introduce the concept by way of a football analogy, referring to a team that is behind having to jettison certain plays from their playbook in order to preserve time and score fast. As the clock winds down, multiple “inflection points” are crossed -- i.e., first short runs are out, then all running plays, then even short passes aren’t viable as the seconds tick away. Finally a team’s options are whittled down to just one -- a long Hail Mary pass into the endzone.

Similarly in tournaments, they explain, when your stack gets too short your reduced to just a few moves, then eventually only the one of going all in. Each time you reach an inflection point, you must actively recognize certain options are no longer available to you.

I feel like each of these shootings first appear as though they could represent “inflection points” insofar as they seem initially to encourage both dialogue and even action designed to reduce the chances of another occurring. But we never seem to reach the inflection point beyond which the option just to keep on sitting tight is no longer available to us.

Perhaps as a collective we’re overwhelmed by the seeming impotence of the majority in the face of those in power (or, in this election year, those seeking power) -- that is to say, those whose all-encompassing motive is to preserve their comparatively elite status. Such a goal is usually best achieved by continuing to encourage all to keep on sitting tight -- that is to say, to prevent us from thinking we’ve crossed an inflection point beyond which some sort of drastic, culture-changing, life-altering action emerges as the only option left.

(Incidentally, the screamingly hurtful, nonsensical noise emanating from the demagogue who has now secured the Republican party’s presidential nomination is meaningfully confusing to many. If regarded with any scrutiny whatsoever, the several “options” he proposes are in truth uniformly self-destructive, and if we step back to take a broader view of the nation’s history, we quickly realize his proposals were shown to be untenable long ago, after we crossed earlier inflection points.)

There’s a point somewhere, I’m sure of it, which if reached will finally force our hand in some constructive way to make such acts of violence less likely. What’s most chilling is to try to imagine what must happen in order for us to get there.

Image: “The Point of No Return,” Pat Hawks. CC BY 2.0.

Minimalism

Some of you might’ve noticed that title from yesterday’s post was a play on the title of a short story by the American writer Raymond Carver, a story called “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”

The story appears in a collection of the same title that was published in the early 1980s, a few years before Carver died (in 1988). Carver’s fame peaked right around the time of his death and just after, actually. Robert Altman was kind of riding the Carver wave there when made an interesting, unwieldy film called Short Cuts in 1993 that cleverly weaved together a number of different Carver stories into a lengthy feature.

Not a lot “happens” in “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Two couples sit around a kitchen table one afternoon drinking gin and sharing anecdotes about themselves and others, all of which present differing definitions of “love.” Eventually the sun goes down, the bottle is empty, and the story just ends.

In terms of plot, the story sort of resembles a poker game. The four characters each have their own “styles,” with one (Mel, the cardiologist) kind of dominating the action. And there’s no particular “resolution” -- the story just ends.

Carver often got grouped with a few other writers like Bobbie Ann Mason, Tobias Wolff, Frederick Barthelme, and others into a category called “minimalism.” The category gets defined in different ways, but chiefly refers to a “lean” or “sparse” style that eschews flowery description and other judgmental intrusions in favor of letting the characters speak for themselves. The style or subgenre can be traced back to writers like Ernest Hemingway and even some “hard-boiled” guys like James Cain and Jim Thompson.

Actually, the name “minimalism” is a bit misleading when it comes to Carver, and, indeed, to most of the writers who usually get filed under that heading. But I suppose the main idea -- that when it comes to the storytelling the author tries to keep out of the way and let the reader decide what to think of the characters -- is a valid way of describing these authors’ approach.

Thinking about Carver got me wondering about how one could be said to employ a “minimalist” style at the poker table.

I’m not necessarily talking about the business of minimizing one’s tells at a live game, the kind of thing Dan Harrington and Bill Robertie talk about in Harrington on Cash Games, Volume II when they discuss “The Patrik Antonius Way” in which the Finnish player “just sits at a table, stiff as a board, and stares silently at a fixed point in space... giv[ing] a good expression of a catatonic trance” while his opponent decides what to do.

No, what I was thinking about was how that effect the so-called “minimalist” writers sought to achieve -- namely, not to “tip their hands” (so to speak) with regard to how they intended their stories to be interpreted -- was probably also an effect one desires to achieve at the poker table. That is, playing your hands in a manner that hides your intentions, your values, your “style.” You let your “cards speak” -- and your bets and your folds -- just as the authors let their characters speak, withholding overt judgments by which to guide readers’ interpretations. Let your opponents try to figure it all out. Show, don’t tell.

The paradox is that it takes maximum effort to be a minimalist. I think that’s one reason why Carver and some of the other writers who were pegged as such didn’t necessarily care for the designation -- it made it sound like they weren’t trying!

It’s a lot easier just to sit there and explain yourself over and over to everyone else. In fact, next time you’re playing, take a look around the table and notice how many of your opponents are doing just that.

Do Not Ask for Whom the Tells Show

Gonna be a lot of folks standing in line today as America finally decides who will be our next president. Lots of big races in the Senate and House, too. Expected turnout (overall) is supposed to be huge -- like in the 70% range, much higher than the usual 50% of registered voters who vote. And some of those lines are sure to be superlong. I believe 34 states (and the District of Columbia) had some sort of early voting, and while a lot of people took advantage, the majority of ballots will be cast today.

I voted about ten days ago. Went down to one of the public libraries near where I live, stood in line for just 45 minutes, and used one of those touch screen machines to cast my vote. Remembering a much longer wait back in 2004, I took a book this time, the second volume of Dan Harrington and Bill Robertie’s Harrington on Cash Games.

I’ve finished both books now. As was the case with the Harrington on Hold’em books, these are highly readable, smart discussions of strategy. I’m certain not everyone is buying into all of the various pieces of advice associated with the tight-aggressive style that gets the most attention in the two books, but there’s definitely a lot in there worth a poker player’s time.

When I was standing in line, I remember reading most of Part Eight, a kind of digression from the primary strategy discussion titled “Tells and Observations.” As you might expect from Harrington, the position taken is that physical tells such as those outlined with great specificity by Mike Caro in Caro’s Book of Poker Tells aren’t nearly as important as recognizing betting patterns.

As the authors put it, “the whole science of spotting tells is more difficult and less useful than most people suppose.” They refer to their 2+2 colleague Mason Malmuth’s point that “tells are only useful when they cause you to make the right decision when otherwise you would have made the wrong one.” And that circumstance -- the one where you actually are able to apply the info you (think you) have obtained in a way that is profitable -- they maintain just doesn’t come up all that often.

Dunno if I would be quite so dismissive of tells, though I do share the pair’s skepticism about being able to break the whole subject down like a “science.” Which is kind of ironic, given that Harrington and Robertie (and Malmuth) tend so frequently toward advice that is somehow “less human”-sounding than most.

You know what I mean -- all of those inordinately long compilations of probabilities when faced with a particular decision in one of their sample hand “problems.” There’s one in Volume II (Hand 6-2) where “you” call a middle-position raise from the cutoff with a pair of sevens, the flop comes 9-7-3 rainbow, and your opponent bets out about three-fourths of the pot. Then we get seven pages running through all of the possibilities (“He has nothing and we raise,” “He has nothing and we call,” “He has something and we raise,” “He has something and we call”), culminating with a chart (or “matrix”) showing the expected EV based on the probabilities established by this exhaustively thorough analysis. Certainly a useful discussion, though I can’t imagine any humans really play poker this way.

Anyhow, even if the authors are dismissive of the value of recognizing others’ tells, they do stress the importance of minimizing one’s own tells. They recommend minimizing one’s movements as much as possible (“The Patrik Antonius Way”), or following what they call “The Scripted Defense” whereby one follows the same, idiosyncratic pattern of movements every time one acts. Again, the idea seems to be to minimize one’s “human”-ness if possible.

There have been a few articles over the last few months analyzing the “tells” of Barack Obama and John McCain. For instance, this July article from the Telegraph concluded that both candidates need to work on their tells. Perhaps at one time -- such as during the debates -- that might have been a genuine concern. Of course, as far as the campaign goes, all that ends today.

Whomever comes out on top, he’ll have a hell of lot more than tells to worry about.