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.

What the Polls Are Saying

Was thinking a little today about the preponderance of polls that tend to dominate the reporting about the ongoing presidential race. It’s almost claustrophobic, with the only thing seeming to cut through the constant stream numbers being the next outrageous thing a candidate (usually the current GOP frontrunner) says or does.

In fact, after that outrageous thing gets spun through the usual news cycle a few dozen times, the focus immediately returns to those numbers again and how they may or may not have changed as a result. Then come the primaries and caucuses, with even the reporting of actual voting results being prefaced by unending references to exit polls and still more polls appended afterwards.

Of course, there’s the unthinking reporting of poll numbers (which we most often see), then there are more careful examinations of what those numbers actually mean. Like has happened with the rise of “analytics” in sports -- and poker -- some of the analyses of polls have become increasingly sophisticated, occasionally resulting in uncannily accurate predictions of how the voting will go (although surprises still do happen).

I’ll admit I find myself checking in over at FiveThirtyEight frequently, especially on those evenings when there are primaries or caucuses, just to see how Nate Silver et al. are further crunching the numbers as they arrive. FiveThirtyEight helps us judge particular polls’ credence as well as how to sort through all of the data in a way that helps show its actual relevance.

That said, the constant focus on polls tends to eclipse actual discussion of candidates and their various positions and substantive issues, operating like a kind of virtual (and ongoing) scoreboard alongside the delegate tallies. To borrow Global Poker Index CEO Alex Dreyfus’s favorite word, it works to “sportify” the presidential race, or at least making it even more like a sporting event than has been the case in past decades.

Polls become a shorthand for both reporters and voters, fitting easily within 140 characters or as a colorful, eye-catching graph and standing for more involved consideration, and becoming something to cheer or fret over. You know, now that football season is over.

Photo: Voter polling questionnaire on display at the Smithsonian Institution, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Campaign Strategy and Button Mashing

Tonight comes another of the Republican presidential candidates’ debates, the seventh one so far. This one is in Des Moines, with the Iowa caucuses -- the first votes of the major parties’ primary season -- just a few days away on February 1.

The GOP debate would’ve been in the news this week, anyway, but is getting some extra attention thanks to current frontrunner Donald Trump’s announcement earlier this week he wouldn’t be participating due to his ongoing feuding with the host network, FoxNews.

The decision by Trump not to debate has inspired some discussion of campaign strategy, with pundits sharing all sorts of ideas regarding whether his non-participation will amount to a positive or a negative for Trump both in Iowa and going forward.

I find these discussions interesting to follow mostly because of how much time I’ve spent reading about and studying Richard Nixon’s various campaigns from the first 1946 Congressional campaign all of the way through his last 1972 run for reelection.

The “game” (as it were) has changed markedly, of course, with all of the old strategies mostly being inapplicable to today’s political landscape. That said, there are still analogues here and there, including the role of debates and whether they are good or bad for particular candidates.

Nixon, of course, famously welcomed the opportunity to debate John F. Kennedy in 1960, having experienced much success doing so versus various (less savvy) opponents in earlier campaigns. Then later in both 1968 and 1972, Nixon chose against participating in debates with Democratic candidates versus whom he was ahead in the polls, with most seeing those decisions as correctly made as far as risk-versus-reward was concerned.

As if to inspire such comparisons even further, at this very moment I’m seeing Evan Thomas, author of the recent Being Nixon: A Man Divided, popping up on FoxNews being asked what he thinks Nixon would think about Trump not debating. (Thomas unsurprisingly says he thinks Nixon would approve.)

Regarding Trump’s “strategy” (or lack thereof) as it relates to his decision not to attend the Iowa debate, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight tweeted a comment a couple of days ago that perhaps betrayed his own online poker-playing background:

“Still not sure if Trump is the most brilliant political tactician of his era or just a guy randomly mashing buttons,” opined Silver.

The comment evokes the idea of an amateurish or untutored poker player making what seem “random” decisions that don’t add up to a coherent understanding, contrasting that with a knowledgeable player (or “tactician”) whose unorthodox moves you’d have to trust as being part of a larger, complex design.

“Button-masher” perhaps seems to fit Trump (here involved deeply in his first serious political campaign) more readily than does “brilliant political tactician,” but I think like all of the candidates he probably falls somewhere in between these two extremes.

As did presidential candidates in earlier decades, too, for that matter.

Images: “Press this button,” Howard Lake (adapted). CC BY-SA 2.0 (top); @NateSilver538 (bottom).

A (Nate) Silver Lining for Online Poker

Have been hearing a lot of folks in the poker world noting with varying degrees of surprise that Nate Silver -- the statistician and analyst who received a lot of attention for his uncannily correct predictions regarding the 2012 presidential election -- is in fact a poker player.

I was vaguely aware of Silver following the 2008 election, having read a couple of articles reporting that his predictions that year had proven accurate. But I admit I didn’t really start paying attention to his “Five Thirty Eight” site (which in 2010 started to be hosted as a blog on the New York Times site) until just after Black Friday, April 2011.

That’s because in the immediate aftermath of Black Friday, Silver wrote what I thought was one of the best and most thorough explanations of what had happened in an article titled “After ‘Black Friday’: American Poker Faces a Cloudy Future.”

The article not only reported on the DOJ’s action (the indictment and civil complaint), but offered a smart overview of the brief history of online poker in the United States. I actually assigned the article to my “Poker in American Film and Culture” class that semester as a way to get them up to speed on what was happening, as Black Friday introduced kind of an unscheduled detour in the syllabus right at the end of the semester.

In the article, Silver mentions his own experience playing online poker, which in a lot of ways mirrored my own. Silver’s best years online came during the “boom” (from 2003-2006), after which he notes how the games became more competitive in the post-UIGEA environment. He even says he earned most of his income playing during those years (never quite the case for me).

I continued to follow Silver’s non-poker writing after that, and thus was aware of all of his different rubrics and methods of compiling poll data as the 2012 election approached. That’s when we started seeing various attacks on Silver being launched by those not in agreement with his consistently maintained position that Barack Obama was very likely to win.

As happened four years ago, Silver’s predictions proved accurate, with Silver correctly forecasting how all 50 states would vote in the presidential race.

Silver has a new book out titled The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail -- But Some Don’t which I’m interested to read, in part because the book finds Silver returning to writing about online poker in a chapter titled “The Poker Bubble.” There he apparently breaks down and explains the economics behind the “boom” and how so many players -- like himself, and like me -- were able to be winning players online during that 2003-2006 era thanks to the abundance of losing players then among the player pool.

Now everyone’s looking to Silver for his thoughts on, well, anything he wishes to think about. He weighed in on the whole American League MVP debate a couple of days ago, explaining at length how the Los Angeles Angels’ Mike Trout deserved the award over Detroit’s Triple Crown-winning Miguel Cabrera. (Cabrera won.) He also offered thoughts on various topics in an online Q&A this week for Deadspin, including answering a question about the possible legislative future for online poker.

In his response, Silver said his “hunch is that the poker community probably underrates how difficult it is to get ANYTHING done at the federal level, especially in the near term.” However, he’s more optimistic regarding what might happen down the road, thanks to “the intersection of the need for more tax revenues, poker having become increasingly mainstream, [and] better lobbying efforts on behalf of the poker community.”

Silver also adds how “the demographics of poker tend much more toward people who can ‘afford’ to gamble,” a point he presents as an argument in favor of legalizing poker before things like the lottery or other strictly chance-based forms of gambling.

Makes a lot of sense, if you think about it. Of course, when it comes to making sense, Silver’s been pretty much gold of late.