Racing Presidents, the Future of No-Limit Hold’em, and the Significance of Context

Over the weekend I was able to take a quick trip with Vera up to Washington, DC to enjoy a couple of days’ worth of leisure.

We’d been a few times before in the past, and thus had already done much of the usual sightseeing stuff. This time we mostly just enjoyed some good eats in various restaurants, checked in on a museum, saw the Washington Monument being repaired, and did a lot of walking around. We made it to a Washington Nationals game, too, and had a laugh watching the Racing Presidents run around the field between innings.

The huge-headed mascots include George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Howard Taft, and Theodore Roosevelt. Of those I know Lincoln played a little poker. Taft isn’t known so much for his poker-playing, I don’t think, although he was a member of the Queen City Club in Cincinnati that had some card rooms. TR, though, was the big poker player of the bunch, and as it happened Roosevelt won the race on Saturday afternoon.

I was searching around online a little this morning and found a piece about the Racing Presidents visiting Mount Rushmore a few months back. While there, it looks like Teddy took a trip over to the famous Old Style Saloon No. 10 in Deadwood, the site of the famous poker game in which Wild Bill Hickok met his demise. In fact, old “Square Deal” Teddy took the opportunity to sit in on a poker game while there (pic above via the Black Hills Travel Blog).

Got a chance to visit a number of cool bookstores while in DC as well. At one of them I picked up several poker-related titles on the cheap, some of which I’ll be sending out as prizes in the Hard-Boiled Poker Home Games. One of the books I picked up was Mason Malmuth’s Poker Essays.

First appearing in 2000 and including a lot of previously published items (among them several revised Card Player columns), it is the first of three volumes’ worth of similar essays published by Malmuth. Like a lot of titles published back then, the book is probably more interesting in the way it provides evidence of an earlier, pre-boom era of poker than for specific strategy advice. Also included are several pieces offering opinions about the staging of tournaments and talk about structures, as well as some thoughts on how card rooms were being run at the time, thus providing more interesting reading as reflections on the Las Vegas and California poker scenes circa 1990s.

This is the book that also contains a couple of Malmuth’s most quoted lines about the future of no-limit hold’em and tournaments. You might have run into these statements before somewhere, which in retrospect obviously read a little differently than they might have back when they were made.

In a chapter called “The Future of Poker,” Malmuth discusses 11 different variants then being spread in card rooms, offering his thoughts about the current and future popularity of each. He’s high on fixed-limit hold’em and seven-card stud (at the time the most popular variants in most rooms), and down on both pot-limit Omaha and fixed-limit Omaha (the latter having been spread during the late ’80s and ’90s, but hardly at all since). He thinks razz and Omaha/8 will survive, while draw poker probably won’t.

Of course, it’s his assessment of no-limit hold’em -- the first game on his list -- that grabs the attention the most while reading today. “The problem with no-limit hold’em,” writes Malmuth, “is that the expert player has too great an edge over weak players and will virtually never lose to these people.” He adds that “since bad players almost never win, they either go broke, find another game, or quit playing poker altogether.”

Those thoughts then inform what seems an inevitable conclusion for Malmuth.

“Unfortunately, there is not much future in no-limit hold’em.”

There’s another essay titled “Are Poker Tournaments Dying?” that offers a similarly bleak forecast. “I suspect that as years go by, there will be fewer major tournaments in Nevada casinos,” speculates Malmuth, although he does think things might play out differently in California. He also recognizes that there are “a few events, like ‘The World Series of Poker,’ [that] are spectacular successes and probably will continue to be so.”

“But as far as Nevada is concerned,” he says, “the great poker tournament boom is, in my opinion, past its peak.”

It isn’t fair, of course, to go back and isolate Malmuth’s proclamations about no-limit hold’em and tournaments almost a decade-and-a-half later like this, especially when considering that both were made well before online poker had surfaced much at all, never mind the subsequent and sudden “boom” fueled by televised that began around 2003 and which very few saw coming -- a development that directly spurred tremendous interest in both NLHE and tournaments.

Found a 2+2 thread from 2008 in which someone brought up the NLHE prediction and Malmuth responded, pointing out that “It did die as a side game. There were virtually no no-limit poker games for many years. It came back due to the interest in the TV shows and the fact that a cap was put on almost all games, something which was not done before.”

In other words, context matters. Thus when you alter the context -- say by reading predictions made long ago, or having former U.S. presidents absurdly dash around a baseball field to the delight of cheering fans -- a few grins (including unintended ones) are sometimes gonna result.

Poker’s Not-So-Square Deal

President Barack Obama yesterday delivered an address on the economy in Osawatomie, Kansas. Or campaign speech, if you like. We are, after all, already amid another presidential campaign, even if the election is nearly a year away.

This isn’t a political blog and so I’m not alluding to Obama’s speech for any reason other than to evoke an idea about poker -- specifically about the “skill-vs.-luck” argument that often comes up in discussions about legislating the game.

Much of the reporting on the speech today is pointing to parallels between a few of Obama’s talking points and ideas advanced by Theodore Roosevelt in a famous speech also delivered in Osawatomie in 1910.

Roosevelt became president when William McKinley was assassinated in September 1901, just a few months into McKinley’s second term. TR was reelected in 1904, then chose not to run again in 1908. However, TR came back to compete for the 1912 election, and the Osawatomie speech was part of that effort. (TR would not be elected again, as Woodrow Wilson became the nation’s 28th president.)

This was the speech in which TR argued that government needed first and foremost to protect American workers’ ability to earn a living and make their own way without being exploited by corrupt business practices. The speech is known especially for introducing TR’s “New Nationalism” idea which dovetailed with the “Square Deal” agenda he had pursued when president.

It was that assurance of a “Square Deal” -- a term borrowed from poker -- that most commenting on Obama’s speech are highlighting today. One sound bite from Obama’s speech getting a lot of play goes as follows:

“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. These aren’t Democratic values or Republican values. These aren’t 1 percent values or 99 percent values. They’re American values. And we have to reclaim them.”

There are a lot of ways we could talk about this idea of everyone getting “a fair shot” and “play[ing] by the same rules” in the context of poker. But I have just one thought in mind I wanted to throw out that kind of connects with this “square deal” talk.

Many of those who defend poker do so by highlighting its skill component, something that is said to distinguish the game in a meaningful way from other purely chance-based gambles like the lottery or roulette or what have you. For some, this makes poker worthy of being legalized as a game not unlike sports or other competitions in which players test their skills against one another.

A few who make this argument get carried away and try to minimize or ignore entirely the fact that chance does play a role in poker. Poker is certainly a form of gambling, but one in which various skills can be employed which often help one overcome the game’s chance element and promote the more-skilled players ahead of those with less ability.

It occurred to me recently how the very fact that poker does reward the skillful -- that it isn’t like just picking a number and hoping it hits -- might make some people less comfortable with it than they are with pure chance games like the lottery.

With the lottery, there’s no disputing that everyone has a “fair shot” (relative to one another, anyway). And unless the operation of the lottery is crooked, everyone “plays by the same rules,” too. But in poker, some really are better equipped than others to succeed. It’s a game that divides us, that highlights our differences. The fact is, whenever we sit down at a table it is very likely some are going to have an advantage over others.

Those of us who play poker understand how players come to gain that advantage -- i.e., by study, by experience, by work. Sure, you could say we all had a “fair shot” at some previous point, but once we’ve taken a seat it soon becomes clear that some have an edge over others.

That’s never the case with the lottery. We’re all equally equipped there.

I wonder if perhaps some percentage of non-players who are made uncomfortable by poker dislike it even more because it requires skill -- that it isn’t a game in which anyone can play and have a “fair shot.” And since it involves money and players betting on themselves and against others -- and, well, that chance element in there complicating things, too -- poker thus becomes all the more difficult for some to tolerate.

I’ve probably unnecessarily complicated my point with the Obama/Roosevelt references, but I hope the idea is coming through. Obviously some oppose poker because they view it as gambling -- they object to poker just as they object to roulette or slots or other gambling games (on moral grounds, or for other reasons).

But could it be there are others who object to poker because it isn’t enough like those other games? People to whom talk of poker’s skill component in fact makes them less comfortable with the idea of legally allowing the game? People who fear poker because, well, they realize it isn’t necessarily a “square deal” in the way the lottery is (even if the “deal” the lottery offers is equally bad to all)?

Seems like this could be an issue -- not the biggest one, but an issue -- with which proponents of poker might have to... erm... deal.