The Recap Writer’s Lament

Many times when explaining to someone unfamiliar with poker tournaments what exactly I do when I go report on them, I’ll bring up sports writing as an illustrative analogy. It’s a handy reference point, and while it doesn’t provide a perfect parallel there are a lot of connections between the two.

There’s the “play-by-play”-type reporting of hands and other aspects of a tournament’s progress that resembles sports reporters’ straightforward accounts of games and their results. There are also the profiles and features and player interviews and so on that go along with tournament reporting that similarly can correspond to how a baseball or football or basketball game gets covered.

A short New York Times article appearing a couple of days ago reminded me of the connection once again, one by Ben Shpigel titled “‘Or So It Seemed’: Notes on Rewriting the Super Bowl.”

The article relives the craziness of Super Bowl LI from the sports writer’s perspective. Shpigel notes how he’d written and filed a draft version of his report on the game early in the third quarter, when it appeared all but certain the Atlanta Falcons would coast to an easy victory. Then came the mad scramble to rewrite and amend once New England mounted what turned out to be a historic comeback to win.

Anyone who has ever reported on the final table of a poker tournament can identify with Shpigel’s story. I’m referring in particular to being the one charged with the assignment of writing an end-of-tournament recap of the result highlighting big hands and/or other themes from the final table.

Those who have done it have all been there. Trying to get a head start in order to publish your piece in a timely fashion after the tournament concludes, you’ll sometimes pick a potential winner to foreground, perhaps even writing an entire mini-profile of the player and how the victory fits into the larger picture of his or her career.

The player holding a big chip lead to start heads-up play will often be the one so targeted. Sometimes even with four or five players left there might be one with both a large chip advantage and significant experience edge who the recap writer will be encouraged to make the star of the early-draft version of the story.

Then comes the series of improbable double-ups and suddenly you’re hitting that backspace key. Speaking of, I wrote something for PokerNews this week presenting the Patriots’ crazy comeback as a series of all-in hold’em situations -- “Patriots Use Their One Time in Super Bowl Comeback.”

Depending on how long the final table goes, sometimes multiple recaps get written, all of which get trashed but one. I remember at some point a group of us agreeing that it was bad luck to get too enthusiastic about prematurely selecting one player to win, since doing so necessarily dooms your pick.

And never actually save a draft version naming a winner in the headline, a sure-fire set-up for future pain.

Anyone who has been there will enjoy Shpigel grieving over the many unpublished, alternate realities he’s composed. That group will also nod in ackowledgment when Shpigel explains he is “not in the business of rooting for teams,” but that he does “root for good stories and for blowouts.”

Tournament reporters will probably also like finding out the meaning of the phrase in the headline -- “or so it seems.” Check it out.

Image: “IMAG0021 Backspace” (adapted), Tom Anderson. CC BY 2.0.

Positions and Juxtapositions: Nine Years Later, the UIGEA Then and Now

I’m just going to juxtapose a few items here today, inspired both by an anniversary and some items I’ve read and heard this week.

On this date nine years ago -- just a few months after I started the Hard-Boiled Poker blog -- I wrote a post here called “Deals in the Dead of Night” noting how the night before, after midnight in fact, a federal bill had passed through both houses that thereafter change the course of online poker in the United States once it was signed into law by then-president George W. Bush a couple of weeks later.

As it happened, that same bill -- the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 -- helped pave the way for the birth of a new online industry, fantasty sports.

1. “Senate Passes Bill on Building Border Fence” (The New York Times, Sept. 29, 2006)

“At the urging of conservative groups and the National Football League, among other interests, the port security measure carried legislation cracking down on Internet gambling by prohibiting credit card companies and other financial institutions from processing the exchange of money between bettors and Web sites. The prohibition, which exempts some horse-racing operations, has previously passed the House and Senate at different times but has never cleared Congress.”

2. “Frist Statement on Passage of Internet Gambling Legislation” (Sept. 29, 2006)

“U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, M.D., (R-Tenn.) made the following statement after the Senate passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act:

‘Gambling is a serious addiction that undermines the family, dashes dreams, and frays the fabric of society. Congress has grappled with this issue for 10 years, and during that time we’ve watched this shadow industry explode. For me as majority leader, the bottom line is simple: Internet gambling is illegal. Although we can’t monitor every online gambler or regulate offshore gambling, we can police the financial institutions that disregard our laws.’”

3. “Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006” (Oct. 13, 2006)

“The term ‘bet or wager’... does not include... participation in any fantasy or simulation sports game or educational game or contest in which (if the game or contest involves a team or teams) no fantasy or simulation sports team is based on the current membership of an actual team that is a member of an amateur or professional sports organization....”

4. “NFLPA Adds DraftKings to Partnership Lineup” (Sept. 25, 2015)

“The NFL Players Association (NFLPA), via its licensing and marketing arm NFL Players Inc., and DraftKings, a leading destination for daily fantasy sports (DFS), today announced a group licensing partnership that will allow some of the NFL’s top-rated players to participate in DraftKings’ marketing efforts this season.... The NFLPA licensing partnership will provide DraftKings the right to employ active NFL players for in-product and promotional campaigns across broadcast, print, social media, digital and mobile properties, as well as via experiential, memorabilia and content activations....

As the popularity of fantasy sports continues to grow with more than 56 million players in 2015, a nearly 40-percent year-to-year increase according to global market research company Ipsos, the deal provides DraftKings with a new degree of connectivity by directly involving a group of active NFL players in the marketing and promotion of its daily fantasy sports experience to fans.”

5. “Fantasy Sports Sites DraftKings, FanDuel September Spend Tops $100 Million” (Advertising Age, Sept. 30, 2015).

“According to iSpot.tv estimates, DraftKings and FanDuel together have funneled $107 million into the networks' coffers since Sept. 1. Nearly half ($50.3 million) of that outlay was spent on national NFL broadcasts on CBS, Fox, NBC, ESPN and NFL Network....

DraftKings ads have aired a skull-clutching 16,259 times over the course of the month, which works out to 135 hours and 25 minutes of 30-second spots. That's more than five-and-a-half days, or a full work week, of commercial messaging that's been hammered out in the span of a 29-day period.... By iSpot's reckoning, FanDuel ads have aired 9,463 times since Sept. 1. That translates to nearly 79 hours of total airtime, or a little north of three days.”

6. Dan LeBatard and Jon Weiner (Stugotz), The Dan LeBatard Show with Stugotz (ESPN, Sept. 29, 2015)

LeBatard: “DraftKings is spilling money all over the place, and now they have made an allegiance with the NFL Players Union where they are able to put players in their advertising. And I’m trying to find exactly the right analogy here, because what DraftKings and FanDuel and what the fantasy phenomenon has captured here is, it’s not quite legalized cocaine... because cocaine has a stigma with it.... But we are in an area right now where DraftKings and FanDuel... and their ilk have found this place.... They’ve found a place where it’s gambling -- it’s obviously gambling -- [and] they’re able to spill and sponsor everything in sports and everyone is taking their money.... People want it.”

Stugotz: “I agree with you about the stigma, but wasn’t online poker... didn’t they ban that?”

LeBatard: “Yes... but online poker is a little sketchier, not nearly as popular as this is....”

Stugotz: “I agree, but I’m just trying to figure out the difference between the two.”

LeBatard: “Oh, there is no difference. One’s legal and one’s not.... One is legal because it’s a game of skill, the other is illegal because, poker players will tell you, it, too, is a game of skill, but it’s the same thing.... It’s amazing to watch the arbitrary moralities that we have with this.”

LeBatard: “I just think it’s weird that we are always applying arbitrary moralities, and in this case we are doing it with our legal system and we’re doing it with our government. It doesn’t make any sense to me that this is legal and online poker isn’t.”

Looking for a Way to Make the Story Hold Together

On page 831 of RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, the story of the former president’s life has reached March 1973, the point where “the Watergate affair” (as Nixon often referred to it) had suddenly bloomed into an all-consuming crisis for the administration. By the way, when you reach page 831 of RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon and you are reading an old, used paperback version of the 1100-plus page book, the book starts to fall apart like the one pictured at left.

It’s really quite symbolic, given what is discussed during the last few hundred pages.

It’s at the bottom of that page Nixon begins a new section with the interesting line “It was already clear there was not one truth about Watergate.” From there he identifies no less than four “truths,” sounding a bit like a philosopher for a moment stepping back from the increasingly unpleasant situation he’s been describing to reflect more broadly on epistemological questions.

“There was the factual truth,” he begins, “which involved the literal description of what had occurred. But the factual truth could probably never be completely reconstructed, because each of us had become involved in different ways and no one’s knowledge at any given time exactly duplicated anyone else’s.”

Indeed, whether one reads Nixon’s own blinkered account or that of others who have tried to chronicle the labyrinthine story of Watergate, it’s a bewildering drama filled with players contradicting one another regarding practically every detail of the break-in, the subsequent cover-up, and everything else even tangentially related to the “affair.” This New York Times article from a decade ago states that 69 different government officials were charged with crimes, with 48 of them ultimately serving time.

Nixon’s account unsurprisingly focuses on the most prominent among those group, and as he notes everyone involved had a particular perspective that necessarily excluded the possibility of full awareness of the complicated “factual truth.”

“There was the legal truth,” Nixon continues, “which, as we now understood, would involve judgments about motive. There was the moral truth, which would involve opinions about whether what had been done represented an indictment of the ethics of the White House. And there was the political truth, which would be the sum of the impact that all the other truths would have on the American people and their opinion of me and of my administration.”

It’s kind of a stop-and-make-you-think passage, although soon after it concludes we jump back into the minutiae of meetings and the ever-growing web of entanglements in which Nixon and so many others were to become ensnared. The descriptions of those meetings illustrate that in fact each of these three latter “truths” (as Nixon fashions them) could more accurately be considered strategies for obscuring the factual one.

The “legal” truth omitted or reduced the relevance of facts to their potential status as evidence to support accusations of criminal behavior. The “moral” truth viewed those facts through still another lens, one guided by judgments of right and wrong (or, as Nixon and his men often would overlay on top of such a distinction, what was “good” or “bad” for the country). And the “political truth” -- by far the most important one for the administration through the 1972 election and even into the first part of 1973 -- only considered facts insofar as they could potentially affect Nixon’s ability to govern.

In other words, all of these latter “truths” were themselves particularly motivated interpretations of the factual truth which was itself only partially known and understood by each.

I’ve been preoccupied lately pursuing poker analogies to help explain and understand not just Watergate, but other events in Nixon’s fascinating life. The Watergate affair, it seems to me, existed as a complicated collection of “partial information” heads-up matches being played by Nixon with others and between others all around him. As in poker, there’s the factual truth that no one can possibly know comprehensively, then there are the other “truths” each player imposes on what he or she knows (or thinks he or she knows). And of course, with Watergate, the stakes started small and then got bigger and bigger.

It’s one method of trying to make the story hold together, anyway.

Go For It or Take the Points?

Was captivated like most yesterday by that Packers-Seahawks NFC Championship tilt which ended so crazily with several unlikely plays going Seattle’s way to earn them the comeback and eventual victory.

If you saw the game, you know the plays to which I’m referring, the fake field goal TD, the Hail Mary two-point conversion, and the muff-and-recovery of the onside kick the most vivid of the among them. Those two instances of Green Bay choosing to kick field goals rather than go for it on short fourth-and-goal situations early on also loomed large throughout the day.

Regarding the latter, check out “The New York Times Fourth Down Bot” and its page assessing all of the fourth down decisions made in that GB-SEA game. Applying statistical-based findings about how such calls affect win probabilities, the NYT 4th Down Bot offers judgments on all fourth down decisions as games are being played. The obvious poker-related analogy would be to an online poker player’s “HUD” (Heads-Up Display) offering real-time stats that can be interpreted to help a player make plus-EV decisions on the fly.

As explained here, those findings generally recommend going for it on fourth down much more frequently than most coaches actually choose to do so. Of course, the NYT 4th Down Bot -- like all Monday morning quarterbacks -- can opine at will from the sidelines, not having to face the real-life consequences coaches do when making decisions.

Green Bay’s unwillingness to go for those two first-quarter fourth-and-shorts certainly seemed overly conservative at the time, especially when playing on the road in a do-or-die game versus such a heavy favorite. Not too surprisingly, the NYT 4th Down Bot recommended going for it in both cases yesterday.

Almost every other fourth down decision made yesterday was judged a “Good call!” by the NYT 4th Down Bot. A couple weren’t so cut-and-dry, with the judgments for those being “It’s complicated” and “Too close to call.” Only one other fourth down decision -- also by Green Bay -- was considered incorrect by the Bot, the one at the very end when the Packers punted with four minutes to go when facing fourth-and-14 on their own 39.

That one seems less obvious on the surface, but the explanation suggests the lateness of the decision, being up by 12, and other factors make it so that “teams who go for it would win about 2% more often than teams who punt.” As it happened, GB only gained 30 yards of field position on the play, and it would take Seattle just two quick plays to more than make that yardage back.

I’ve written here before about how I occasionally like looking at these mathematical models that crunch the numbers from thousands of games to give instantaneous interpretations of win probability. The graph from that GB-SEA game was especially wacky, as plotted by Advanced Football Analytics (see left). Green Bay was sailing along at at WP of 80% or above from the late first quarter onwards, peaking at 98% with 3:07 left and then suddenly plunging down to just 14% with 1:33 to go (after Seattle grabbed the lead). Things evened out after the game was tied and went to OT, but Seattle wasn’t challenged thereafter.

Today I was listening to sports talk radio and hearing an ex-player (who years ago also lost a heartbreaking conference championship game to miss a Super Bowl opportunity) talking about how losing hurts much more than winning feels good, another idea with which most poker players are familiar. Interestingly, that same player was also defending Green Bay’s decisions to kick those first-quarter field goals and “take the points.”

I think the first of these ideas -- that losing or failing hurts more than winning or succeeding feels good -- is not unrelated to the second one encouraging the avoidance of risk and acceptance of small victories over the prospect of having to endure what are perceived to be large losses. In any case, as fascinating as the numbers can be, humans and their capacity to be non-rational -- or not bots -- with their decisions are even more so.