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).

The “Checkers Speech”: When Nixon Bet and Dared Eisenhower to Call

Fifty-three years ago -- September 23, 1952 -- California senator and vice-presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon went on national television for a full half-hour to defend himself against accusations that he had inappropriately used campaign funds for his personal use. The presentation was positively received by the American public, and as a result thoughts about replacing Nixon with another VP candidate on the Republican ticket were swept aside.

Early on in the half-hour Nixon tells how an independent audit had been ordered to examine the fund and that it had determined no improprieties to have existed regarding it. He then provides numerous details about his personal finances, sharing practically every bit of trivia regarding his modest upbringing and the money he and his wife Pat had made and saved over the years, right down to exact amounts owed in mortgages and loans, details regarding his life insurance policy, and the fact that he owned a 1950 Oldsmobile.

It’s quite a tale, this financial autobiography provided by a politician on a national stage. Nixon omits one interesting item, though -- the money he won at poker while a Naval officer serving in the Pacific during the latter stages of WWII. He does mention how at the end of the war he and Pat had about $10,000 saved with which he was able to launch his first Congressional campaign, but in truth some (perhaps even most) of that total came from his having cleaned up in games of stud and draw on Green Island.

After defending himself, Nixon goes on the offensive, speaking about the Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson’s own campaign fund (bigger, and less well monitored), then moves on to praise the candidate at the top of the Republican’s ticket, Dwight D. Eisenhower. He concludes the speech with an invitation to viewers to send their judgments to the Republican National Committee, and as noted the response was quite favorable, showing that Nixon’s defense had succeeded.

The most famous passage of the speech comes at the very end of that catalogue of items regarding personal finances, beginning with Nixon saying “One other thing I should probably tell you, because if I don’t they will probably be saying this about me, too.” He describes the family having been given the gift of a dog, a cocker spaniel, while on the campaign trail. He explains how Tricia, their oldest daugher (then aged six), named the dog Checkers.

“You know, the kids, like all kids, loved the dog,” says Nixon. “And I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it.”

It’s certainly an attention-grabbing moment in the speech. It’s jaw-droppingly maudlin, too, and one of several points during the half-hour that seem almost comic in retrospect. It’s part of a somewhat complex rhetorical strategy employed during the presentation, a stirring of the emotions to go along with the more rational-seeming presentation of facts and other attempts to establish credibility so as to persuade the audience that Nixon was not at fault, was honest, and could be trusted going forward.

Incidentally, the reference to a dog in a defensive political speech had a precedent, something Nixon was well aware of at the time. Exactly eight years before, on September 23, 1944, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had responded to accusations that during a tour of the Pacific -- right after Nixon had left, in fact -- he had left his dog (named Fala) on one of the islands and had ordered a destroyer to go back to get it (at great expense).

The story was false, and FDR jokingly talks about how he personally didn’t mind the Republicans attacking him, but that his dog was much more sensitive. “His Scotch soul was furious... he has not been the same dog since,” Roosevelt cracked, adding that he felt it incumbent on him “to object to libelous statements about my dog.”

Given that he was speaking on the anniversary of the “Fala speech” and was making a pretty deliberate allusion, I can’t help but think Nixon had his tongue in cheek somewhat with his decision to highlight Checkers in a similarly humorous bit of self-justification. But the move meant more in Nixon’s speech, and came to be remembered much more vividly thereafter when people throughout his career would point back to the “Checkers speech.”

One aspect of the speech I find fascinating is how it can be viewed as a strategic move by Nixon in a conflict not against the Democrats or the press who were raising concerns and attacking him for the fund, but rather a part of a kind of “heads-up match” between himself and Eisenhower -- also a fine poker player, as it happens, although there are no stories of Nixon and Ike ever actually playing against each other.

Eisenhower -- a five-star general and war hero, but not really a politician -- was being led by his advisors, who had suggested he choose Nixon as his VP, then were suggesting he find a way to remove him from the ticket once the “fund crisis” broke. In fact, Ike’s advisors likely helped make the crisis bigger than it should have been insofar as they didn’t encourage the presidential candidate to step in and defend Nixon early on when talk of the fund first arose.

How, then, to move forward? Ike didn’t want to ask Nixon to step off, preferring instead that Nixon make the decision himself. But Nixon didn’t want to be the one to make the decision, either -- he wanted Ike to decide.

They had reached impasse, and by going on TV and asking the American public to weigh in, Nixon cleverly forced Eisenhower’s hand (so to speak). It was as though Nixon made a big bet on himself and was daring Ike to call it.

I like how Garry Wills describes the situation in his 1970 book Nixon Agonistes. Says Wills, Nixon “knew this was not what it appeared -- Nixon against the press, or the Democrats, or the people. It was Nixon against Ike -- a contest that... no one can be expected to win” because of Eisenhower’s enormous popularity. Nixon, explains Wills, “was reaching out across [the viewers’] heads to touch swords in a secret duel with Ike.”

When I watch and consider the “Checkers speech,” then, I think not of the board game after which the cocker spaniel was named, but the card game both Nixon and Eisenhower played successfully. And how early in his career Nixon found a way to win this particular, crucial pot.

More on Tricky Dick

I was talking about Garry Wills’s excellent Nixon Agonistes last month, a book written and published during Nixon’s first term as president (i.e., prior to Watergate). The book is about a lot more than Nixon, actually, providing a comprehensive examination of American history and politics as well as other aspects of the culture. It’s a dense, scholarly book, and I recommend it highly to anyone with an interest in the subject and/or era.

Have since picked up a few other Nixon-related titles, including a couple at a used bookstore this week. While I was there I saw taped to a bookcase that picture above featuring a creative use of a Nixon postage stamp (no shinola). Also have spent a few hours here and there listening to some of the Nixon tapes online and marveling at the wealth of other resources available regarding his presidency.

I’m not quite old enough to remember him as president, and so didn’t form any impressions of him until well after his fall. Such a complicated figure, endlessly fascinating yet almost never sympathetic (at least not to me).

In my “Poker in American Film and Culture” class we do discuss Nixon, primarily focusing on the much-repeated tale of his having been a successful poker player while serving in the Navy during World War II. James McManus frontloads his history of poker, Cowboys Full, with a catalogue of stories of U.S. presidents playing poker, and since we use McManus’s book as kind of a core text for the first part of the course, we focus a lot of energy early on thinking about some of those stories, a few of which come up again later on in the semester, too.

Earlier this week Bob Pajich pulled together a nice piece for Card Player in which he goes over the story of Nixon’s poker playing, titled “Men of Action -- Richard ‘The Big Bluffer’ Nixon.” Pajich draws on various sources including a 1983 interview in which Nixon addressed the idea that being a skillful poker player might be of special use to a president. Such is an argument advanced by McManus, too, at the start of Cowboys Full, and thus is one we consider as a class when we read and discuss that first chapter.

As Pajich points out, the place of poker in Nixon’s story is primarily confined to that early period prior to having begun his long, arduous ascent to the White House. It’s interesting, though, to overlay various poker-related strategies to his later political career, including the various ways he misplayed his “big stack” once he became president.

It was John Mitchell, Nixon’s first Attorney General who became part of the notorious Committee to Re-Elect the President (and who’d eventually serve prison time for his role in the Watergate cover-up), who characterized the many abuses of power during Nixon’s presidency as “the White House horrors.” And really, the more one reads and learns about all that was happening during that period, the more horrific it all seems. Talk about putting one’s “stamp” on the presidency (pun intended). It is amazing (and I guess, kind of heartening) to think how the U.S. government was able to survive a Nixon administration.

Like I say, though, the man himself is uncannily captivating. In his book, Wills characterizes Nixon as “the least ‘authentic’ man alive,” a “plastic man” who “does not exist outside his role, apart from politics.” “He lives in a cleared circle, an emotional DMZ, space razed and defoliated, so he cannot be ‘got to’ unexpectedly.” Referring to the ubiquitous Nixon masks that were already beginning to appear at the time of Nixon’s first inauguration (and would become especially popular during Watergate as a countercultural symbol), Wills describes the new president’s uneasy relationship with the youth of his day.

“At the 1969 inauguration,” Wills writes, “the streets were full of ashen Nixons. Kids in town to cause trouble wore crinkly white masks with that undeniable nose. But Nixon’s car sped past their jeering ranks, and, up on the reviewing stand, his face bunched in its instant toothed smile, so circumspect, so vulnerable.”

Then comes the devastating punchline: “He had this in common with the kids; he wears a Nixon mask.”

From the perspective of a poker player, being able to interact with others while existing within an “emotional DMZ” might seem favorable. Always being “circumspect” with regard to how others view you -- i.e., being cognizant of one’s own “image” and how others are responding to it -- is a much-needed ability at the tables, too. I’ve even heard poker players sometimes talk about playing as though they were wearing a “mask,” that is, kind of employing a bit of self-delusion as part of a strategy to prevent revealing too much to others.

But Nixon was “vulnerable,” too (surmises Wills), and while he may have consistently won in those stud games with fellow Naval officers -- and later on, as well, in the other “games” he played within the GOP establishment and the American voters -- there was a lot of uncertainty and self-doubt in his play, too, especially after he took office as president.

I was saying before how I might like to write some sort of short monograph about “Tricky Dick” that focused on his poker playing and perhaps tried to discuss some of these later episodes through the lens of poker. I may still do something along these lines, although now I’m thinking I’ll more likely try to create a kind of textbook for my class that looks at poker in American culture more broadly, perhaps with a Nixon chapter along the way. (Such a book would certainly attract a wider audience, I think.)

So I’ll add working that project to the growing list of goals for the new year. Sort of feeling like Nixon a little bit, who also tended to study and plan a lot before acting. Such was how he learned poker, working diligently away from the table to devise strategies he would then later employ. And as a politician, too, he studied and developed a complicated theory of leadership he then carried to his duties.

But there was a pretty severe disconnect between theory and practice in the latter case for Nixon, I think, wherein the application of his ideas failed. Hopefully I’ll avoid that misstep in the execution of my plans.

Travel Report: APPT Macau, ACOP Warm-Up, Day 2

It is Tuesday morning in Macau. My post will be dated Monday, and I know it is still Monday for many of my readers back in the U.S. But I also know everyone is thinking about Tuesday, anyway, so perhaps it is appropriate somehow I write you from there.

I’ve just returned from a visit to the breakfast buffet downstairs, a daily ritual as it includes procuring the two cups of strong black coffee required by me to continue further. On the walk down and back up, I glanced at television screens along the way set to one of the American news channels on the line-up here at the Grand Waldo Hotel (pictured above). The scrolling items and other headlines consistently indicate various pronouncements about tomorrow’s presidential election.

I usually find some nourishment to go along with the caffeine, and during the time I spend down there I’ve been carrying my used paperback copy of Garry Wills’s absorbing Nixon Agonistes. Am about halfway through, and was just reading yet another keen passage in which the author describes American culture and its government.

Not to rehearse the entire argument, Wills here speaks of the significant component of chance that influences success or failure for Americans, then characterizes how government more or less operates to oversee or manage how ideals of rewarding merit or skill or work can be maintained in such an environment.

People “luck” into money, resources, or other favorable circumstances all the time. They also earn those things, too. Yet all are playing the same game, so to speak. Characterizing capitalist society as a kind of contest in which the natural gifts of the “player” and the vagaries of chance are both important factors, those who govern (Wills explains) seek ways to “contrive the systematization of luck,” with political or ideological differences often manifesting themselves according to one’s approach to that task.

It all resonates strongly with poker, of course. In fact this very idea -- about American society being like a game in which luck and skill both matter -- has become a kind of a central tenet for me whenever I am called upon to argue for the peculiar “American-ness” of poker. (One of a few tenets, actually.)

Continuing the discussion, Wills addresses the oft-employed card-dealing metaphor suggested by FDR’s “New Deal” from long ago. “The New Deal was this attempt at systematization.... Some people had been dealt out of the game, or given too few cards, or cards from the bottom of the deck. To protect the game, the government would give everyone a new deal, making sure it was a fair deal....”

The problem, Wills goes one to say, is that the perceived need for “new deals” just keep happening over and over again. “Each time the cards have been newly dealt, we must collect and reshuffle them to allow for the new players who have drifted up to the table; we are endlessly ‘dealing,’ never getting to the game.”

I think back to the tournament I’m covering today, the $25,000 (HKD) Asia Championship of Poker Warm-Up event in which 18 players remain, Johnny Chan and Joseph Cheong among them. We’ll play down to a winner tonight, which will likely mean another lengthy day of poker.

That the game involves a lot of luck has been shown over and over already, just as every poker tournament does. That it also involves skill has been demonstrated, too, of course.

But one thing that’s somehow assuring is the way the rules of the game are maintained throughout. Each “new deal” is made according to the same principles as the one that came before. That is to say, these “new deals” aren’t like the ones the U.S. government is making over and over when constantly changing the game. As Wills judges the use of the poker analogy, “the metaphor is a mess.”

I imagine I’ll get to sleep one more time -- again, probably just for a few hours -- before waking up tomorrow (Wednesday) and tuning in to the American news channels here to see how things are playing out on Tuesday night. If the presidential election is close, it’ll probably still be in doubt by the time I go start covering the ACOP Main Event on Wednesday afternoon.

Of course, no matter who wins the election, the future of the “game” will be in doubt, too.