Six Paradoxes of Poker

Continuing yesterday’s discussion of what poker is -- or, rather, those elements that are essential to the game (cards, money, and bluffing) -- today I want to talk about some of the game’s more interesting contradictions. What follows is a discussion of six such “paradoxes of poker,” all of which add to the game’s complexity and, in some cases, popularity.

Obvious to most is the competitive nature of poker, a “zero sum” game in which no one can win without someone else losing. A rake being taken from a cash game or tournament fees actually make it not quite “zero sum,” but the point still holds -- there are no winners in poker without there also being losers.

That money is being won and lost adds further incentive to players’ desire to best one another, with even the smallest-stakes games sometimes encouraging antagonism given the fundamental need for each player to pursue his or her self-interest. Yet cooperation among adversaries is also needed for game play, and while many rules are unalterable, mutual agreement often must be reached regarding various particulars in order for games to proceed.

There’s one paradox of poker, then -- it’s a game that at once promotes self-interest and community. (For more on that one, see an earlier post titled “Poker, the Antisocial Social Game.”)

Furthermore, poker is often heralded for its promotion of egalitarian ideals -- “a truly democratic activity,” as Al Alvarez once described the game. “Race, color, creed, what you look like, where you come from, and what you do for a living are of no interest at all,” he argues in Poker: Bets, Bluffs, and Bad Beats. “A little green man from a distant galaxy could sit down and play without anyone blinking, provided he had the necessary amount of chips in front of him and anted up on time.”

Charles A. Murray’s New York Times op-ed from about three years ago titled “Poker Is America” (discussed here) anecdotally reinforces such a position, noting how the “occupational and income mix” and variety of races and ethnicities he routinely encounters while playing suggests “a poker table is America the way television commercials portray it but it seldom is.”

Even if the political scientist’s account of never having “experienced a moment of tension arising from anything involving race, class, or gender” while regularly playing poker in a West Virginia casino was met by many with counter-examples of less utopian scenes around his idyllic baize, his point that the game itself does not discriminate remains valid.

Such is one reason why a succession of poker-playing presidents would be inspired to describe their domestic programs in poker terms, with Theodore Roosevelt’s “Square Deal,” FDR’s “New Deal,” and Harry Truman’s “Fair Deal” all aimed at resetting the game of economic opportunity according to poker’s inclusive impartiality. A similar view has been voiced by Barack Obama -- another poker player -- during his time in office, who has often reiterated “I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, when everyone plays by the same rules.”

However, as soon as the cards are dealt and the first pot is pushed to a winner, a problem becomes evident. In a game that necessitates cooperation and promotes parity, chips are exchanged with every hand played. In other words, if all are really are equal at the start, the goal of everyone involved thereafter is literally to better him or herself at others’ expense, or make things as unequal as they can.

As Garry Wills wrote in Nixon Agonistes when describing mid-century administrations’ economic efforts, “to protect the game, the government would give everyone a new deal, making sure it was a fair deal,” but “each time the cards have been newly dealt, we must collect and reshuffle them to allow for new players who have drifted up to the table; we are endlessly ‘dealing,’ never getting to the game.” (“The metaphor is a mess,” Wills concludes.)

I would suggest this paradox of poker is in fact a central part of the game’s appeal, with the game (in a way) providing what society or government cannot. Every hand really is a new beginning, a chance to start over and get it right, to reinvent oneself and others and reimagine one’s place at the table -- or in the world.

Other contradictions characterize poker as well, including the related one that finds poker promoting individualism and self-reliance while also necessitating the kind of collectivism or interdependence described above. Poker is not a team sport, yet it cannot be played alone.

A third paradox of poker is borne from the disparate approaches taken to the game by that great variety of players it attracts, with the so-called “professional” motivated more by profit than pleasure sometimes seated directly across from the “recreational” opponent for whom time spent at the table is viewed a vacation from genuine labor.

From the time of the Civil War and even before, those making a living off of cards adjudged their activity as work, not play, a group that would come to include those 19th-century card sharps for whom the occupation of “gambler” included an understanding of and willingness to cheat and sometimes literally fight for their livelihood. Even the ill-fated Wild Bill Hickok’s last ride to Deadwood was primarily motivated by a desire to earn an income from the poker tables such as the one at Saloon No. 10 where he’d be dealt his final hand.

The subsequent growth of the game in the later 20th century later fashioned new types of poker pros, such as those inhabiting the California card rooms categorized by anthropologist David Hayano in Poker Faces (discussed here) according to their degrees of financial commitment (the “worker professional,” the “outside-supported professional,” the “subsistence professional,” the “career professional”). Las Vegas card rooms would likewise come to be populated by “regs” showing up daily to earn livings off the succession of tourists whose participation in the games were of much shorter duration.

The later rise of tournament poker then created a new class of “circuit grinders,” among them a subsection of “sponsored pros” whose monetary investment would be lessened by the online sites they represented. Tours criss-crossing the United States and several other continents would feature tournament series in which amateurs routinely took on the pros, with the World Series of Poker in Vegas each summer attracting tens of thousands of home game heroes to compete directly with the game’s elite.

That poker can be viewed at once as both work and play is a direct consequence of yet another of poker’s paradoxes -- the fourth in our list -- namely the complicated way the game rewards skillful play yet also does not deny luck as a factor affecting outcomes.

A sound grasp of odds and probabilities has always provided an edge to some, as has being equipped to suss out the significance of opponents’ game-related actions, words, and other non-verbal “tells” while successfully masking the meaning of one’s own. Yet as all who have played poker well know, a hand perfectly played does not guarantee a positive result. “Suckouts,” “bad beats,” and “coolers” frequently occur, the many ways players lose despite outplaying opponents reflected by the variety of terms indicating different types of misfortune.

The relative weight of skill and luck in poker has been the subject of numerous legal arguments dating back to the 19th century, with proponents wishing to distinguish poker from other types of gambling by emphasizing skill, those wanting to forbid the game rather motivated to argue for luck’s role, and judges having ruled for either side many times over.

That poker involves both skill and luck also has encouraged some to argue further for its close connection to American history and the country’s development and character. Defining what he calls the “American DNA,” James McManus has written of “two strands in particular that have always stood out in high contrast: the risk-averse Puritan work ethic and the entrepreneur’s urge to seize the main chance,” noting how poker uniquely satisfies both urges. Here McManus echoes others linking poker to the “frontier spirit” that at once values hard work yielding legitimately gotten gains while embracing risk in the name of seeking even greater rewards.

That a lucky card can help an amateur win a hand against a pro provides encouragement to the former to take a seat against the latter. But an understanding of luck’s role and that skillful play generally wins out in the long term likewise encourages the pro to endure. As Jesse May’s poker-playing protagonist in his novel Shut Up and Deal explains, “Poker is a combination of luck and skill. People think mastering the skill part is hard, but they’re wrong. The trick to poker is mastering the luck.”

A fifth paradox of poker that like others might be said to have added further to the game’s popularity is the way poker alternately -- or simultaneously -- satisfies desires for both realism and romance (an idea I’ve explored here before). As evidenced by a river one-outer denying a 98% favorite to win a pot in Texas hold’em, the cards force upon players an occasionally cold reality that must be accepted. So, too, must players hopeful to win at poker on a regular basis understand and accept their own limitations as a prerequisite to improve.

“There can be no self-deception for a poker player,” pro player Mickey Appleman once lucidly explained to Alvarez (as reported in The Biggest Game in Town). “You have to be a realist to be successful. You can’t think you’ve played well if you lose consistently. Unless you can judge how well you play relative to the others, you have no chance.”

It’s a position well supported by others, including Anthony Holden who in Big Deal once articulated one of the more often quoted pronouncements regarding poker’s unflinching requirement of players to be realistic about themselves: “Whether he likes it or not, a man’s character is stripped bare at the poker table; if other players read him better than he does, he has only himself to blame. Unless he is both able and prepared to see himself as others do, flaws and all, he will be a loser in cards, as in life.”

But even a poker realist like Appleman recognizes how the game can likewise provide an inviting exit ramp to carry one away from reality.

“I’m a romantic,” Appleman continues, with nary a trace of irony, “and for me gambling is a romance.... That’s what I enjoy; the rest is by the way. I play and I play and I play; then I pick up the pieces and see how I did. It’s only at that moment that I realize I was playing for real money.”

Like other favorite pastimes, poker provides many a similar kind of “escape” into a more interesting, consistently gratifying world whose pleasures are precisely related to their distance from the tedious redundancy of the everyday. It’s a game so absorbing it can create a world unto its own, a place where players can be themselves or something else entirely, as though they were not just playing a game, but playing a role as well.

For some, that role might resemble the one forged by many of poker’s most famous players, individuals who by the strength of their card sense managed to enjoy success outside the “system” -- or perhaps fashioned systems of their own.

Real life poker heroes may serve as templates, with examples going back to Doc Holliday and Poker Alice and extending forward through players like Tex Dolly, Kid Poker, and a man named Moneymaker. So, too, might fictional poker players like the Cincinnati Kid or his nemesis “the Man,” Bret Maverick, or Mike McDermott provide notions of the type.

All of these many contrasts add depth and richness to poker, while also complicating significantly the task of presenting a straightforward history of the game. Because poker is a game of bluffing, the line between truth and fiction is frequently challenged by it, with omissions and embellishments often compromising the veracity of even the most straightforward chronicle of a hand or session as conflicting accounts of what took place exhibit Rashomon-like contradictions and hopelessly blinkered subjectivity.

Meanwhile fictional representations of poker necessarily involve creative enhancements that have helped affect understandings of the game and how it has actually been played over the decades whether on steamboats or trains, in saloons and gambling dens, on military bases and encampments, or in card rooms, casinos, and private homes.

One might argue the story of poker as told in popular culture -- in both history and fiction -- is itself one long-running bluff, the game having been shaped into a romantic version of its historical reality by all of the many letters, memoirs, biographies, articles, guide books, paintings, radio programs, songs, films, television shows, stories, and novels describing poker and its players.

We’ll call that yet another paradox of poker -- a sixth and last in the list -- that is, how the game as it is actually played and the fictional renderings of it exist together in simultaneity, overlapping each other even as hands are dealt, bets are made, and narratives about the cards, the money, and the bluffing are constructed.

Images: “Dealer Button - Poker,” Poker Photos. CC BY 2.0 (top); “A Misdeal” (1897), Frederic Remington, public domain (bottom).

It Was the Third of September, That Day I’ll Always Remember

The Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” -- which memorably begins with that line about remembering the date of a father’s passing -- first appeared just about forty years ago in late September 1972.

It’s a great jam, with extended funky instrumental passages surrounding smart lyrics recounting a child’s curiosity about a wayward father who “spent most of his time chasing women and drinking.” “Wherever he laid his hat was his home,” explains the mother, “and when he died, all he left us was alone.”

It’s a song about a man’s legacy, or lack thereof -- really just a few stories reflecting badly on his character and a date for the gravestone -- with compelling characters, what can be construed as a kind of social commentary, and even broader messages about the tenuous nature of existence and our responsibilities to one another during this life (if you wanna go that far with it).

The third of September also happens to be the birthday of someone close to me. Thus is it a day I’ll always remember, though for a much happier reason than is the case for the child in the song.

Maybe it’s that underlying quest for meaning rumbling below the groovy rhythms of a song I can’t help but play out in my head every time the calendar rolls around to this particular day. Or maybe it’s the way birthdays bring to mind the passing of time. Or maybe it’s having gone yesterday with Vera to visit an elderly relative -- in her nineties -- and talking with her about the past (both recent and long ago) and the future (both near and distant)...

But for some reason today I’m waking up thinking about those Big Questions again, including the one regarding how best to make use of the time we have. What we owe each other. What we owe ourselves.

I continue to piddle for pennies online now and then. I break even there -- no, really, I do -- although every time I sign off after goofing for an hour or more I can’t help but feel I’ve lost something kind of significant.

Of course, I’m just a recreational player giving a few hours here and there to a game I mostly enjoy, but to which I haven’t the commitment of many others. Still, I am reminded of that passage near the end of David Hayano’s 1982 study Poker Faces: The Life and Work of Professional Card Players about which I’ve written before, one coming in a section called “The Existential Game.”

“Because of the relentless instability and uncertainty of day-to-day gambling, players continually examine and reexamine their motives, feelings, and entire state of being,” writes Hayano as he tries to sum up the experiences of those many poker pros he’s been discussing throughout the book.

“If the life of the professional poker player were comfortable and predictable, I do not think that such extensive and persistent self-reflection would be required,” he continues. “Living, playing, and surviving in the chance world of the cardroom repeatedly assaults the sensibilities, and several pros have openly commented on the difficulties of ‘lasting’ and explaining what ‘all this means.’”

He goes on to point out how some are plagued with doubts about whether or not playing cards for a living is really worthwhile, as well as gnawing grief that playing poker is not a “particularly productive” way to live (no matter how much money one makes at it). Nor (worry some) is it much of a contribution to society, generally speaking.

Hayano further delves into the way the poker pro’s temporal existence -- specifically the way a cash game player fails to experience much sense of finality and/or structure -- can affect his or her well being. “The dimension of temporality, experienced as an undue prominence in the future, in what the next hand or thousand hands are likely to bring, manifests itself in an existential, if not socio-psychological, kind of imbalance,” suggests Hayano.

In other words, for some the third of September becomes nothing to remember. Nor is any other day, all of which run together in an endless game. Rolling along.

The Perils of Learning As You Go

I’ve written here before about David Hayano’s 1982 book Poker Faces: The Life and Work of Professional Card Players. It’s an anthropological study of professional poker players (of many different varieties) who populated California card rooms during the 1970s and early 1980s.

While the book’s conclusions regarding that particular generation of players are dated in some respects -- having been drawn well before the “boom” and the full-blown revolution that followed -- there remain a number of relatively timeless observations and insights that still readily apply to poker players today.

For a detailed overview of what Hayano covers in Poker Faces, click here to see that earlier post. Today I just wanted to share one observation Hayano makes early on in his study, something I came across earlier this week while rereading. Something about this particular point Hayano makes resonated a little differently with me when I read it this time.

The point comes up in a section titled “Background to a Gambling Career,” a short prelude to the categorization of different types of professionals Hayano subsequently makes. Here Hayano talks about how frequently those who become full-time pros often do so by happenstance, sort of “falling” into the profession after perhaps growing up with the game and experiencing some success during early trials as an adult.

There are a few early “catalysts” -- “adolescent gambling,” “work dissatisfaction,” and a wish for the “freedom to control their own time and money” among them -- that often characterize those who become full-time players. But in most cases, Hayano notes, there isn’t really any sort of formal decision or plan to become a pro. It just kind of happens.

To put it in the anthropologist’s terms, somewhere along the way the pros “have self-socialized themselves into full-time playing with little outside help and almost no deliberate anticipatory socialization.”

That was the observation that struck me this time around, this idea that people who become full-time players generally do so without a lot of forethought, without a lot of guidance, and without a lot of formal “training” or the kind of apprenticeship that characterizes many other professions. And perhaps unsurprisingly, many find themselves struggling down the road when subsequently faced with situations for which they are necessarily ill-prepared.

This is one of those ideas Hayano advances in his study that I think still applies more or less today. And I guess when I think about the utter mess online poker has now become in the U.S., highlighted of late by the Full Tilt Poker fiasco, it is interesting to think about the role played by the pros who started that company. And how it was probably the case for many of them that they hadn’t any real preparation for managing their own lives as professional players, let alone other entrepreneurial ventures such as creating and running an online poker site.

Bill Rini wrote an insightful post yesterday exploring in particular “How Things Became So Screwed Up At Full Tilt Poker.” He speculated some about how it happened that a bunch of smart folks (in his opinion) allowed things to go as wrong as they did there. As he notes near the conclusion, he doubts those who ran FTP “specifically set out to defraud anybody of their money,” adding “it just doesn’t fit with their personalities.”

But it appears that’s just what they ended up doing. (Like Bill, I'll acknowledge the “alleged” qualifier here.) And while doing so perhaps didn’t fit with their personalities, it does kind of fit with the idea Hayano presents of poker pros often having to learn as they go -- a kind of modus operandi that often characterizes the early stages of their playing careers, the self-tutelage required to manage their professions afterwards, and beyond.

David Hayano’s Poker Faces

David Hayano’s 1982 book Poker Faces: The Life and Work of Professional Card Players is different from just about any other poker book you’re going to come across. That said, you probably aren’t going to come across Poker Faces any time soon. The book has been out of print for quite some time, and while used copies are out there, they tend to be a bit pricey.

Unlike other poker-related narratives that highlight the game’s history and/or most famous characters, Poker Faces is a scholarly work written according to the standards and criteria one expects from serious academic inquiry. Hayano earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from UCLA during the 1970s, his dissertation focusing on the Awa and Gimi people of Papua New Guinea. He then took a position at CSU-Northridge, at which point he began work on his next study, this time focusing primarily on the card rooms of Los Angeles county and the behaviors of those who frequented them.

Using many of the same methods of data gathering he employed when studying the isolated Papuan tribes, Hayano meticulously examined the “world” of poker players of that time and place, drawing numerous conclusions about the make-up and “social mechanics of face-to-face confrontation” that characterized their existence.

However, as Hayano explains in the Preface, there was one big methodological difference between this new study and his earlier one. Whereas he might’ve been able to remain situated outside the “world” of the Papuans in order to observe them, Hayano recognized the need to join the poker games if he hoped to learn anything worthwhile about the subjects of his study.

“Poker... is not a spectator sport,” explains Hayano. “The real action in poker is concealed.... The observable movements of chips wagered and cards dealt do very little to reveal the genuine heart of the game.” As anyone who has ever tried to report on a poker tournament well knows, there is a great deal that happens at the table that simply cannot be fully understood from even just a few feet away. And so, in order to get a better idea of the “deep, invisible structures” present in the social interaction of the players, Hayano took a seat at the tables himself in order to improve his perspective.

Today I am not going to offer a full summary and/or review of the book, but rather just will share a few of Hayano’s observations so as to give a taste of what one finds in Poker Faces.

One is another interesting side note in that Preface in which Hayano explains that even just a few years earlier “this study of professional poker players might have been situated more appropriately in the sociology of deviance.” The very fact that someone could conduct a serious academic inquiry of poker in the early 1980s “reflects a change both in our society [with regard to its attitude toward gambling and/or poker] and in social science.”

During the first part of the book Hayano spends time sketching the scene in the card rooms as he experienced it, focusing in particular on describing the lives of the players and the “social organization” or hierarchy among them. He’s especially interested in the regulars, and with a lot of disclaimers ends up offering a typology of different kinds of “professionals.” He admits he uses that term a bit loosely, pointing out that in fact many of those whom he’s describing would not call themselves or each other “pros,” but would rather use terms like “hustler, player, rounder, or no special title at all.”

In fact, he means “professional” in a generic sense to refer to anyone who could be regarded as a regular inhabitant of a given card room (i.e., not a tourist or occasional visitor). He divides these players into “worker professionals,” “outside-supported professionals,” “subsistence professionals,” and “career professionals.”

The first two groups have other jobs which sustain them, with poker essentially being a more or less serious hobby for them, although profiting is not crucial. The “subsistence” pros derive their primary income from poker, yet still “do not many any firm emotional, self-identificational, or social commitments to full-time poker-playing.” Then come the “career” pros who both depend on poker entirely for their livelihood and have made that personal commitment to poker as their chosen “skillful trade.”

The book then goes on to offer some genuinely insightful observations about the various challenges these “professional” players routinely experience, including handling (or “controlling”) luck, dealing with winning and losing, satisfying the need for action, and more. Like I say, I’m not giving a full overview of everything Hayano writes about today, but I did want to share a few other points he makes in the book.

A couple come from his conclusion, titled “The Existential Game,” in which Hayano recognizes that “because of the relentless instability and uncertainty of day-to-day gambling,” players are constantly forced to reevaluate what they are doing and its significance and meaning. “If the life of the professional poker player were comfortable and predictable,” writes Hayano, “I do not think that such extensive and persistent self-reflection would be required.”

It is interesting to consider how “professional” poker players -- a group which for Hayano includes just about anybody who plays a lot and for whom the game is an important part of their lives -- are as a group an especially self-reflective bunch. Hayano pursues the point further, noting that one of the things that poker pros find themselves thinking about a lot is whether or not their lives have any special meaning at all.

“Many people, including poker players themselves, do not see card-playing as particularly productive,” notes Hayano, adding how this attitude adds to the difficulty (and to the “existential” worrying) of the life of the poker pro. Also, for many full-time players, “there is no finality of gain and no peak existence, except perhaps winning a major tournament.” The game just goes on and on and on, a situation that “manifests itself in an existential, if not socio-psychological, kind of imbalance.”

Hayano refuses to cast judgment on the players, though, suggesting at the very end that “perhaps it is unfair to question the ultimate meaning of any individual’s way of life.” Of course, the point he’s just made is that for many pros that is exactly what they themselves are doing all the time, namely, the questioning the meaning of their lives.

The last observation I wanted to share from Hayano’s book is just to note how he ultimately views the society of poker players, ca. late 1970s-early 1980s, as a closed-off, isolated “world” not unlike that of the remote peoples he previously studied in Papua New Guinea. Says Hayano, “In contrast to the Old West and riverboat gamblers, most professional gamblers today operate in a completely distinct social and legal environment.”

In other words, while the games of old (in saloons and on steamboats) might have encouraged a lot of interaction between regular players and “normal” folks, these games he’s watching and participating in are different. It’s a mostly closed-off society he finds himself in when playing in those games, “an abstruse, technical ‘small-life world’” that operates mostly independently of the larger one the rest of us occupy.

Some of Hayano’s findings about players and how poker was played when he studied it still apply today, although many aspects of the game (and its place in our culture) have altered considerably. In fact, I’d suggest this last observation about the “completely distinct social and legal environment” in which poker players once operated has changed a lot, with much more significant interaction occurring today between the poker “world” and the rest of society. Even so, there does still exist a lot of insularity in poker, with examples of some still immersing themselves entirely and shutting out everything else.

I’ve written more than I intended to here, but like I say I’ve really only highlighted a few of the many fascinating observations Hayano makes. Poker Faces definitely deserves to be back in print, I’d say. And we’re overdue for another, similarly serious academic inquiry into professional poker, too.