The German Game of “Poch”

Continuing with this survey of “precursors” to poker, another European game dating way back to the mid-15th century called poch is another one often cited as an early version of the game. Also called pochspiel or sometimes pochen (or bockspiel or bocken), the name actually sounds a little like “poker,” and some argue it as the source for the name (although there are other candidates, too).

The game originated in Germany and is still played there and in other places. There’s another game called glic that was played in France about the same time and which has many of the same rules. It spread through Switzerland and elsewhere in Europe over the next couple of centuries, then underwent a couple of modifications more recently making the modern version a little different. There’s a game in the U.K. called Pope Joan and another in North America called Tripoli that resemble poch as well, or at least in part.

I’m going to try to summarize the rules for the original game of poch, as it has been described by several card game historians.

Like the Spanish game mus, poch employs a smaller deck than does poker, usually a 32-card one. There are four suits, with the ranks being ace (here a high card) through seven (i.e., toss the sixes through deuces). Also like mus, the rules for this game are kind of complicated, although my sense is poch would be easier for first-timers to pick up.

Poch requires a special round board that has has eight cups around the edge plus a ninth one in the middle. (That’s a picture up above of one from the late-19th century.) You could play it without such a board, but you’d need cups or some equivalent way of collecting chips during game play. The eight cups around the edge all have names (marked by those cards, if you can see) -- ace, king, queen, jack, ten, “marriage” (with a king and queen), “sequence” (the one with three cards, seven-eight-nine), and “poch” or “pocher” (designated by a joker, even though jokers aren’t used). The cup in the middle doesn’t have a name.

I’m seeing references to needing three-to-six players to play, although I imagine you could play with just two or even more than six. However many are playing, before every hand each player must put one chip into each of the nine cups.

The hand starts with the dealer dealing out the entire deck except for the last card which gets placed face up on top of the center cup. (The action goes clockwise in poch, as opposed to counter-clockwise in mus.) The suit of this last card designates the “trump” suit, also called the “pay suit.” By the way, this means some players might have one more card than others -- this doesn’t matter. The game is also played by just dealing a certain number of cards per player (e.g., five), with an additional card put in the middle.

The game then goes through three stages or phases. The first stage basically involves players getting rewarded for having been dealt certain cards -- it’s sometimes called the “sweepstakes” stage. The second stage involves players betting on their hands and is really the only one that resembles poker. Then for the third one I’ve seen a couple of different explanations (described below).

Okay, the first stage. Remember that card in the middle designating the trump suit? Any player holding the ace of that suit wins whatever is in the ace cup. Same goes for the king, queen, jack, and ten cups -- if you have that card in the trump suit, you get the chips in that cup. If anyone has both the king and the queen in the trump suit, that player gets what is in the “marriage” cup, and if anyone has 7-8-9 in the trump suit, that player gets what is in the “sequence” cup. (Never mind the “poch” cup or the center cup just now -- they come in later.)

Now if all of the cards have been dealt out, it’ll usually happen that the ace, king, queen, jack, and ten cups get claimed here (unless the trump card is one of those ranks), while often no one will win what is in the “marriage” or “sequence” cups. Whatever goes unclaimed in one hand gets carried over to the next one (at the beginning of which players again put one chip in each of the cups).

Moving onto the second stage in which players bet on their hands. The object is to have the highest-ranking hand here, and the only hands you can make are four of a kind, three of a kind (or a “triple”), and a pair. That’s it. Forget about straights or flushes or full houses. In fact, you can’t even have a two-pair hand -- if you have two pairs, you just count the highest of your pairs as a simple one-pair hand. If two players have quads or triples, the higher-ranked hand wins, and if two each have the same pair, the one with the trump suit wins.

Betting goes clockwise around the table starting with the player to the dealer’s left. To bet you say “Ich poche” followed by the number of chips you want to bet -- so, “Ich poche 2” or three or “sieben” (if you’re German and betting seven) or whatever -- while putting chips in the poch cup corresponding to your bet.

Subsequent players can call or raise or fold (as in poker), and players still in after the last bet is called show their hands and the highest hand wins. I’m not certain, but I think that the results of the first “sweepstakes” stage can potentially affect what happens here in the second stage since players earning chips in the first stage have to show cards to claim those winnings. Note that players can bluff with their bets as well.

As I mentioned, I’ve seen a couple of different ideas put forth to describe the third stage, with the winner in each case getting what’s in the center cup.

In one version, the winner of the second stage starts out playing a card face up on top of the center cup (whatever the card was designating the “pay suit” doesn’t figure). Then whoever has the next higher card of the same suit plays next, setting his or her card on top. That continues until no one has a higher card left in that suit, then whoever played the last card in that sequence plays another card (in another suit) and the process begins again. This goes on until someone plays his or her last card, and that’s the player who wins the third stage.

Another version has players taking turns laying out cards one by one until they total 31 or less. Once no one can play a card without going over 31, the last player to play a card wins. I'm not 100% sure what the values are for the cards, but I’m guessing it’s not as complicated as in mus -- i.e., face cards are 10, seven, eight, and nine are worth those amounts; aces are probably just one (or 11, I suppose).

Again, it’s really only that second stage with the betting and the rudimentary hand rankings that can be said to prefigure poker in a direct way. And in fact if you look into histories of rummy you see poch likewise listed there as an antecedent game, which makes sense.

Photo: Board for the card game ‘Poch’ with copper receptacles, catawiki.

The Spanish Game of “Mus”

The Spanish game of mus (pronounced like “moose”) is thought to have originated in the Basque Country near the border of Spain and France. References to the vying game first begin to appear during the mid-18th century, although the game itself was undoubtedly played earlier. It’s also still played today in Spain and France and turns up elsewhere in Europe as well as in Central and South America.

The game of mus strikes me as being more like bridge or spades than poker, mainly because it is played by a couple of two-player teams with partners sitting opposite one another. I’ve been reading through a few different explanations of how to play mus, and there are so many interesting and complicated rules and variants it’s almost overwhelming to try to summarize them all. In fact, I’m not going to, although I’ll see if I can at least give an idea here of how the game is played while highlighting a few of its more interesting details.

The game uses a 40-card Baraja Española or Spanish deck. The four suits are pretty cool in the Spanish deck -- swords, batons, cups, and coins -- although in mus the suits have no significance. The ranks (going from highest-to-lowest) are the rey (king), the caballo (knight or horse), the sota (knave or jack), then seven down to ace (always low). (You could play mus with a regular deck of cards, then, just by discarding the eights, nines, and tens.) As the first of many complications, the three is sometimes considered equal in rank to the rey -- i.e., tied for the highest.

The game is a race to 40 points, with matches usually involving teams playing best two games out of three. I’ll explain below how teams get their points. Play starts with each player being dealt four cards, dealt counterclockwise which is also the direction of all subsequent action. The player sitting to the dealer’s right who gets to act first is called the mano.

As in draw poker, players then have a chance to discard and draw to improve their hands, but only if all four agree to do so by saying “mus” in turn. A single “no hay mus” from anyone operates as a veto, meaning no one gets to discard and draw. Players can draw again if all four agree, and again and again with the discards reshuffled if they run out of cards. But the drawing stops as soon as one player puts a halt to it. Got it?

Okay, so now each player has his or her four-card hand. Now it’s time to start the “vying.” Here’s where things get really complicated.

You know how split-pot games work in which players compete for both the “high” and the “low” halves of the pot, right? In mus hands get compared against each not just one or two ways, but four different ways. There’s the Grande (the high) and the Chica (the low), but also the Pares (meaning “pairs”) and the Juego (which means “game”).

But it isn’t like you just draw your hands, bet on them, then see who wins each of the four categories and split the pot accordingly. Rather you bet separately on each of the four different categories, then at showdown figure out who has won what. In other words you go through the betting for the Grande, then when that is done you bet on the Chica, and so on. Then everyone shows their cards.

The procedure for betting is mostly similar to the way it goes in poker. The first player to act (the mano) either bets or passes, if the mano bets, the next player can either fold, call, or raise, and so on until the last bet is called. Remember, though, that you’re playing with a partner, so you’re betting with that other person and in the end whoever has the best hand wins the pot for the whole team. A team can win, say, the Grande right away if both players on the other team fold to bets. If there’s a call, though, the showdown will settle who wins for that category.

That actually describes how the betting goes for the Grande and the Chica. For the Pares and the Juego, players first have to make a declaration about their hands -- namely to say if they have a pair or not (in the first case) and if they have a Juego or not (in the second), the latter referring to the number of points their four cards total (explained below).

There’s also a special bet called the Órdago which is essentially a kind of “all-in” in which a player stakes the outcome of the entire game on a single category. If called, the team with a winning hand wins the entire game right then and there, but if no one calls, the team with a player who said “órdago” wins that category only.

This is getting ridiculous, right? But really we’re only getting started.

The best Grande hand is the one with the highest card or cards in it. Thus any hand with a rey (king) or three beats any hand without either of those two cards. If two players have a rey, the next-highest card determines the winner. And so on.

The best Chica hand is the lowest hand, determined kind of like you do in lowball or split-pot games. Somebody holding 4-5-7-R would beat someone else holding 5-7-S-R. And 2-6-7-7 would beat 2-6-7-S.

When it comes to the Pares, having two pairs or duples is best, and if you have quads that’s considered the same as having two pairs. Next best is to have three of a kind or medias (that’s right -- two pair beats trips here). Then comes one pair or par simple. If there’s a tie, the player acting first wins (i.e., kickers don’t matter). Thus being the mano is advantageous.

Finally, the winner of the Juego is the player with the highest-ranked hand as determined by the number points the four cards are worth, with the point values being as follows:

rey (R), caballo (C), sota (J), and three = each worth 10 points

seven = 7 points

six = 6 points

five = 5 points

four = 4 points

two and ace = each worth 1 point

To have a “Juego” you have to have at least 31 points in your hand (thus the need for the declaration described above). But 31 is also the highest-ranked Juego hand to have, followed by 32, then 40, 37, 36, 35, 34, and 33. Got all that? (Ha!) Again, if there’s a tie, the player acting first wins.

Also, if no one has at least 31 points and a “Juego,” you play for what is called the Punto which is simply the highest point total with 30 being the highest (and best), 29 the next-best, and so on. (Four would be the lowest you could possibly have.)

Now I referred to the betting above. You can bet and raise and call and fold like in poker, and the team winning each category wins whatever is bet. There are lots more specifics here -- including covering what is won if no one wants to bet in a given category -- but I’m going to skip over them and just refer you to this lengthy description of the rules if you want to sort it all out. Betting is done with stones, actually, with the first team to accumulate 40 stones winning the game.

There are lots of other variations allowed and even versions of the game for three or five players, but I’m going to skip all that, too. Let me mention one last fun element of the game -- the non-verbal signaling allowed between partners.

There are certain facial gestures that are permitted by which players can let their partners know more about their hands. Closing your eyes means you have a bad hand. Sticking your tongue out a little bit means you have two aces. Raising your eyebrows means you have two pairs (or duples). And there are many more of these gestures -- I’m not making this up -- with special names for all of them.

Again, you can search around online for more details about how to play mus. You can even play mus online at a few sites, although I’ve never tried it. In any event, hopefully it’s clear enough how the game could be called a precursor to poker, involving as it does a similar deck, as well as betting and the possibility of bluffing.

Just think, though, how easy it was to learn hold’em, and how long it would take you to learn mus.

Image: Spanish deck printed in Valencia in 1778, public domain.

Perusing Poker’s Precursors

Recently I’ve been spending time learning more about several games often referred to as “precursors” to poker. I’m talking about various card games -- most European -- that appeared just before poker emerged in the early 19th century and that have a lot of the same elements including using a similar deck, incorporating betting and (in some cases) bluffing, and having other common characteristics.

A couple of prompts caused me to go down this road. One has to do with a larger project I’ve begun -- one dovetailing on my “Poker in American Film and Culture” course -- that’s requiring me to do such research. The other came during a conversation from last month while at European Poker Tour Dublin with Howard Swains and Stephen Bartley regarding an idea they once had for the EPT.

Those who follow the EPT know they’ve been pretty open to adding all sorts of out-of-the-ordinary events to the festival schedules, especially since they began expanding those schedules in recent years. You know, events like those “Deuces Wild” or “Win the Button” tourneys and the like. At EPT Dublin they had both of those, plus a “Chess and NL” event, a “Quadruple Stud” (involving four different stud variants), a 5-Card PLO tourney, and other non-NLHE offerings.

Anyhow, the idea involved each EPT stop also featuring an event in which players would play one of these “precursor” games that had originated in the host country.

For example, at EPT Barcelona they could have a mus event, the 18th-century vying game that first turns up in the Basque country up in the northern part of Spain. At EPT Deauville (when the tour still went there) they could have a poque event, the French game often regarded as a direct antecedent to poker. At EPT Berlin they could play poch, at EPT Sanremo there could be a primiera event, EPT London could feature a brag tournament, and so on.

I thought it was a very cool idea, although the more I think about it the more I start to realize some the challenges that would cause it to be difficult to pull off. In some cases I assume local regulations might make it hard to introduce a game that otherwise wasn’t already played (and allowed). It also might be difficult simply to get players to play such events, or to find the appropriate buy-in level that would attract more than just a small handful of curiosity seekers.

Looking more closely at the rules for some of these games makes me realize another significant obstacle to such an idea. At least a couple of the games are so friggin’ complicated it would probably be too arduous for most to figure out how to play them, let alone for the EPT staff to figure out how to deal them and build tournaments around them.

Just for fun (and since I’ve involved myself in this stuff already), I’m going to use the next several posts to discuss some of these games one at a time. I’ll start tomorrow with the Spanish game of mus, for no other reason than that’s the one that seems the most complicated to me at first glance.

Image: “The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds” (1635), Georges de la Tour, public domain.

The Futures Is Now, Bro

Was listening today to the new episode of Chad Millman’s Behind the Bet$ podcast for ESPN, a show I tend to enjoy despite not being a huge sports bettor.

The focus of the episode is the upcoming Major League Baseball season, and the conversation between Millman and his guests ranged over several topics although mostly had to do with futures bets, including those “over/under” bets on total games won as well as bets on a team winning their division, league, or World Series.

The conversation began with the Chicago Cubs, who Millman pointed out had opened at 10-to-1 to win the World Series (following last year, I assume) and now had moved all of the way to a kind of ridiculous 4-to-1 (I’m not sure which sportsbook he’s using). As the group pointed out, that’s more of a favorite than the most favored team often tends to be going into the playoffs, let alone to start the season.

The Cubs talk was interesting enough, and I imagine might have disturbed my Cubs-hating uncle who wants nothing more than to see them miss the World Series for a 71st-straight year. But I was intrigued by a point made by Paul Bessire of PredictionMachine about how much these World Series bets tend to favor the house -- indeed by a margin much greater than lots of other bets, including other futures bets.

The example of the Cubs who no one is giving more than a 20% chance of winning the World Series right now (what you’d need to break even on a 4-to-1 bet) is obvious enough. Bessire said after crunching all his numbers he personally had the Cubs at about 15% to win, the best of any team but not close enough to the odds being offered to make that a worthwhile bet to make.

Really, though, there are no good World Series futures bets. “If you dig into the numbers,” Bissere explained, and “look at all the confidence that you would need or at least the break-even points for all of the individual teams on the World Series odds and add them altogether you would get almost 200%, meaning that there’s almost 100% juice built into that.”

Like I say, I’m not a big sports bettor, but the point Bissere is making is one I’ve noticed before when perusing these kinds of futures bets. Offering the Cubs at 4-to-1 suggests they are 20% to win the World Series, if the line weren’t overvaluing the Cubs (which it is). The next biggest favorite is the Los Angeles Dodgers at 9-to-1 (or 10%), followed by the Houston Astros at 10-to-1 (about 9%) and so on down the list. What Bissere is saying is that when you add all 30 teams’ odds up, the total is close to 200%, which means collectively the 30 teams are being overvalued by nearly 100%.

I found a list of World Series futures -- not exactly the ones they had on the show, but close (including having Chicago at 4-to-1) -- and just for fun decided to add up the percentages. They actually only totaled about 125%, so unless I’m missing something, which I could be, the futures list I saw (at VegasInsider) wasn’t as punishing as the one the guys were referencing on the show.

Something similar, actually, usually results from these odds on final tables in poker tournaments such as we’ve seen at the World Series of Poker now and then -- namely, the odds are way too short for everyone. I know I’ve written about this at least a couple of times here before, such as in 2012 when I discussed odds being offered at the Rio Race and Sportsbook on the nine players making that year’s WSOP Main Event final table.

That year you could place bet on chip leader Jesse Sylvia to win at 3-to-2 (no shinola), which if taken at face value would suggest he was 40% to win. The odds for eventual winner Greg Merson (third in chips heading into the final table) were 5-to-2 (about 28.5%). Adding up the nine players, the total was close to 175%, illustrating the same point being made on the show about the exorbitant juice in World Series futures.

The majority of those making these kinds of futures bets are more likely to be seeking entertainment than value, of course, although I know there are some sharps who manage to find bets worth risking among the offerings. If I remember correctly, before the season my Carolina Panthers were something like 40-to-1 to win Super Bowl 50, a game they managed to enter as a heavy favorite. Alas, those who made that bet, like the Panthers, were unable to cash in.

For me, listening to the talk about over/unders and futures works as a good preview of what expectations are for the coming year, something that for me can make watching the actual games a little more interesting -- even without having bet on them.

Photo: “race & sports book” (detail), fictures. CC BY 2.0.

A Heads-Up Couple

I’ve had the good fortune to have had the chance to cover poker tournaments in a variety of countries around the world, including having on both the European Poker Tour and the Latin American Poker Tour.

There isn’t usually too much overlap among players in the EPT and the LAPT -- not too surprising, of course, given that the festivals take place on different continents. The PokerStars Caribbean Adventure in the Bahamas is where the tours all collide, more or less, with the recent addition of the LAPT Bahamas event helping encourage further the mixing of players from Europe, Central and South America (and the U.S., too).

Ivan Luca of Argentina is one of the few who I’ll encounter turning up at both EPT and LAPT events, which means I’ve also grown accustomed to seeing his girlfriend, Maria Lampropoulos, often railing him. Luca’s been a consistent performer for a few years now, and currently sits inside the top 30 in the Global Poker Index overall rankings.

Lampropoulos also plays and has done well, too, occasionally going deep in events at festivals I have covered. Just recently she made it relatively deep in the EPT Dublin Main Event (finishing 58th), while Luca was final tabling both the €25K High Roller and another €5K side event.

It’s come up a few times, then, whenever Lampropoulos is in an event that someone will mention the fact that she and Luca are a couple, usually with an eye toward bringing that side story into the coverage somehow. And it usually does get mentioned, although my instinct often is not to make such a big deal out of poker couples unless there’s some compelling reason to do so.

For example, in 2011 you might remember how with just four tables left both Doc Sands and Erika Moutinho -- then a couple, later married -- were among those remaining, and in fact they were seated next to each other on the feature table for a time. That was an instance where it wouldn’t have made much sense not to draw attention to the pair’s relationship. (Sands ended up finishing 30th and Moutinho 29th.)

Was following the conclusion of the LAPT Chile Main Event today which ended with Rodrigo Strong of Brazil outlasting the Chilean Fabian Chauriye heads-up to win. Luca and Lampropoulos chose not to play in Viña del Mar, instead deciding to play in the Eureka Rozvadov Main Event over in the Czech Republic, and as it happened another one of those interesting situations happened making it impossible not to remark on the relationship status of a couple of poker players.

That’s because out of 682 entries, Luca and Lampropoulos both survived to make the final table, and then somewhat incredibly both made it to heads-up as well. At that point they struck a deal (natch), then Luca went on to win.

I watched a bit of the live stream on Twitch over on the PokerRoomKings channel this afternoon -- including the heads-up portion -- featuring one of the most unenthusiastic poker commentators I’ve ever heard. During the hour or so I watched his analysis seemed almost entirely limited to complaints about the pace of play. (I’ll quote a sample: “This is hardly bearable. Jesus Christ. God this has taken too long of our lives.”)

Too bad, because it seemed like a story worth having some fun with, especially when the pair got into some table talk regarding postflop decisions in one of the hands. (That was when we heard that bit quoted above, in fact.) Off the top of my head, can’t think of another instance of a couple getting to heads-up in a tournament as big as that one. Deserved a bit more excitement, I thought.

The tourney ended with a kind of cooler for Lampropoulos when a river card that filled a straight for her also made a flush for Luca. I suppose that wasn’t the appropriate outcome on this International Women’s Day, but it still made for a pretty cool story, one you can read more about over on the PokerStars blog and at PokerNews.

Image: Eureka Poker Tour logo.

When Nixon’s Ace in the Hole Turned Into a Blank

Following last night’s debate between Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, CNN aired what will be the first of a series of shows called Race to the White House looking at past elections, in this case focusing on the 1960 race between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon.

I’m currently teaching my course “Tricky Dick: Richard Nixon, Poker, and Politics,” and in fact we were just reading about and discussing the 1960 race, including watching lengthy excerpts from the first JFK-RMN debate. I made sure to let my students know about last night’s program, then, for a couple of reasons.

For one, since we had only just gotten through discussing the race I thought they’d find it interesting to compare what we’d learned with what was included in the hour-long show. Secondly, I like reminding them how even though we’re studying people and events from a half-century ago, many are still interested in these things and believe them to be relevant today -- as indicated by CNN giving an hour of prime time to the ’60 race.

The ads for last night’s show made it seem as though the focus would be on the historic first debate (of four) between Kennedy and Nixon that took place on September 26, 1960, a notion furthered by the fact that the show was being paired with the Dems’ debate. In truth, though, the debate only earned a tiny bit of attention during the hour, fleetingly discussed for just a few minutes during the latter half of the show.

The rest of the hour was spent covering the respective candidates’ campaigns via commentary from a few academics and others, the showing of numerous clips from 1960, and some fleeting reenactments employed to enhance the story. Kevin Spacey -- evoking his House of Cards role as U.S. president -- is the narrator for the series, and was heard at the start of the hour suggesting (somewhat misleadingly) that Nixon was hopelessly outmatched by Kennedy as a politician and campaigner.

“You think you know the rules,” he says as we watch an actor portraying Nixon in shadowy profile. “But what happens when you discover you don’t even know how to play the game?”

Following such a line, it isn’t surprising to see a lot of emphasis thereafter on Kennedy’s right moves and Nixon’s wrong ones during the campaign. That said, the show provides some balance as well, illustrating in a necessarily cursory way pros and cons for both candidates. Near the end it is emphasized that JFK was as adept as RMN was when it came to “dirty tricks,” although the show doesn’t really dwell on too many examples (other than alluding to possible voter fraud in Illinois and Texas tilting the election JFK’s way).

Nixon’s eagerness to debate Kennedy is correctly presented as a misstep. During the quick presentation of the first debate, Nixon’s five-o’clock shadow and flop sweat is of course highlighted, and in fact there’s even a quick pre-debate clip of Nixon saying “think I better shave.” The much-repeated line about those listening on radio thinking Nixon “won” the debate while TV viewers favored JFK is uncritically repeated again, something that started as a few anecdotes and got blown up into some sort of ultimate signifier of not just the debate but the entire campaign and election.

Other more meaningful moments from the 1960 campaign are highlighted, including JFK’s address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, Martin Luther King’s arrest in Georgia and JFK’s phone call to Coretta, and a couple of Nixon’s “bad luck” moments including being hospitalized for two full weeks at the end of August and beginning of September.

Nixon’s hospitalization resulted from an infection that resulted from his banging his knee on a car door during a stop in Greensboro, NC in mid-August, part of his foolhardy effort to visit all 50 states during the campaign -- something he insisted on doing even after his injury and hospitalization.

In his discussion of the 1960 campaign in Six Crises (written shortly afterwards), Nixon concludes with a list of 16 things he “should have” done, all decisions which in his mind likely contributed to costing him the election. He does not include campaigning in all 50 states among the list of items, though he does lead it off with “I should have refused to debate Kennedy.”

For the second item on the list, and perhaps the second-most important one in retrospect, Nixon says “I should have used Eisenhower more in the campaign.” There is brief reference to Ike having been largely absent from the campaign near the end of the CNN program. With less than a week to go before the election, Spacey’s narration suggests the Nixon campaign had been cleverly waiting to use Eisenhower at the very last to produce a greater effect.

“Nixon has one last card to play,” he says, “his old boss, ex-General and President Dwight D. Eisenhower.” Despite the card-playing metaphor, no indication is made to the fact that both Ike and Nixon were poker players.

We see shots from the ticker tape parade of November 2nd in which Ike finally appeared with Nixon, an event which is said to have given Nixon a late boost as Election Day drew near. I anticipated another turn in the story here -- one explaining how this “one last card” wasn’t nearly as effective as it might have been. But the program moved in a different direction.

This might have been the biggest omission from the show, actually. Not only was Eisenhower mostly absent from the campaign, but in late August 1960 (just a week after Nixon bumped his knee in Greensboro), Eisenhower infamously concluded his weekly press conference with a line that would greatly hurt RMN in the weeks leading up to the debate.

“We understand that the power of decision is entirely yours, Mr. President,” began a reporter, leading up to what would be the last question of the presser. “I just wondered if you could give us an example of a major idea of his [i.e., Nixon's] that you had adopted in that role, as the decider and final, uh....”

About to leave, Eisenhower said “If you give me a week, I might think of one. I don’t remember.”

Afterwards Eisenhower would say he didn’t mean to suggest he actually needed a week to come up with an idea of Nixon’s his administration had found useful. Rather he was just referring to the fact that he’d be giving another press conference a week later and they could continue the discussion then.

But the damage was done. In fact, in that first debate a month later Nixon would be asked early on about Eisenhower’s statement, putting RMN on the defensive right away. And not long after that, the Kennedy campaign built a television ad around Ike’s line -- take a look:

I was a little surprised CNN didn’t touch on this part of the story of the 1960 campaign, the moment when Nixon’s “ace in the hole” suddenly turned into a useless blank. Still, for those unfamiliar with the 1960 race there was enough in the program perhaps to whet your appetite to learn more.

Image: Graphic from CNN advertisement, Race for the White House, 3/6/16 episode.

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.

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).

Cards, Money, and Bluffing

Gonna get a little abstract both in this post and the one tomorrow. I had written something up for another purpose a while back and never used it, and so rather than leave it hidden in an old file on my computer I have decided to share it here.

The first part has to do with defining the game of poker according to its essential elements. It’s something I want to say was first inspired by a conversation with Tommy Angelo from many years back, although it could be I’m associating the author of Elements of Poker with this argument about the elements necessary to the game.

Wherever this started, the question with which we begin couldn’t be more broad in its scope: “What is poker?” And the answer is a list: “Cards, money, and bluffing.”

First, cards. Dating back as far back as the ninth century to imperial China, playing cards were employed in a wide variety of games over the next millennium while spreading throughout Asia and Europe, reflecting a host of cultural symbols and values in their changing designs along the way.

By the early 1800s, most features of the modern deck had been established, including the size and thickness of the cards as well as the four suits, with various games including bouillotte, mus, pochen, and poque having been introduced throughout Europe and carried to North America. Features borrowed from each of these games, including the building of five-card hands as well as discarding and drawing, would be incorporated into poker, a game initially played with 20 cards, then later with the full 52-card deck.

In the United States the game would grow and develop alongside the country itself, expanding to include a multitude of variants linked by the use of similar hand rankings and rules of play. Poker wouldn’t be poker without cards, but then the game has always been about much more than a flush beating a straight.

All of these precursor games offered opportunities for wagering, though it would be the amalgam of poker that would promote money to the status of being a required element of the game, as essential as the cards.

In an essay written about a half-century ago titled “Poker and American Character” (discussed here and here), historian John Lukacs maintains that “Money is the basis of poker: whereas bridge can be played for fun without money, poker becomes utterly senseless without it,” a position which many commentators on the game readily share.

Each hand of poker is like a complicated negotiation, with players forced both to invest in their own hands while weighing prices set by opponents on theirs. Entering into such transactions requires purchasing power -- one must bring money to the table to participate at all -- and just like in negotiations away from the poker table, each player’s personal idea of what money signifies directly affects the amounts set when selling, or the costs agreed to when buying.

“The money staked in poker represents not only our idea of the value of our cards, but our idea of what the other players’ idea of the value of our cards might be,” explains Lukacs, suggesting that money’s importance to the game is even greater than the cards. “Cards count in poker,” the historian acknowledges, “but they count less than in any other game.”

Of course, as anyone who has played even a single hand of poker well knows, such negotiations need not be entered into in good faith, thus making bluffing a third defining feature of the game.

Like the cards and the use of money, bluffing was likewise inherited by poker from most of its immediate precursors. For example, the British game of three-card brag -- one of the few antecedents of poker still played today -- bluffing is literally the name of the game, with players dealt a hand, then “bragging” their cards’ value with bets until just two remain.

“Bluff is the essence of poker,” argues David Spanier in Total Poker, articulating another sentiment with which many poker players would agree. “It is lurking in every single hand of the game,” he continues, alluding to the possibility of a bet or raise misrepresenting a hand’s value: “Has he or hasn’t he got what he says he’s got?” Every instance of a player backing cards with money presents the question to the next player to act, adding layers of complexity to the game that distinguish poker markedly from other card games and forms of gambling.

Poker needs cards, then, and money and bluffing. This argument might be used to exclude some card games that are often referred to as poker, such as liar’s poker (no cards) or HoldemX (no money) or Chinese poker (no bluffing), but to be honest I’m not that interested in drawing hard, angry lines around poker here. Rather I’d like merely to suggest cards and money and bluffing to be core elements of the game, perhaps forcing us to recognize that any variants that lack one of the three is better considered part-poker and part-something-else.

It’s not too complicated of an argument, saying poker is cards and money and bluffing. Of course, when these elements are combined, it is clear poker becomes much more than the sum of such parts, and, importantly, more complicated to describe. Doyle Brunson notes early start of Super/System that “poker is a game of people.” And because poker is a game of people -- and since people are inconsistent, flawed, and self-contradictory -- it perhaps isn’t surprising to find the game itself replete with several seeming incongruities.

These paradoxes of poker I’ll discuss tomorrow when I share the rest of this discussion.

Photo: “Cash Money,” Aaron Jacobs. CC BY-SA 2.0.

Hellmuth and Gold, Political Pundits

Today is Tuesday, which often makes me think of the “Super Tuesday” -- that is, the $1,050 buy-in weekly no-limit hold’em tournament on PokerStars. Of course today that phrase has a different meaning for many as both the Democrats and Republicans are holding primaries or caucuses in a number of states.

If I’m counting correctly, the Democrats are having primaries and caucuses in 11 different states with about a third of the total delegates up for grabs. Meanwhile the Republicans are holding primaries and caucuses in 13 states with about half of their delegates in play. In other words, after today both races will suddenly move from the early levels to the mid-to-late stages, with nominations perhaps even being all but locked up depending on how things go.

Speaking of poker and politics, I saw a couple of items pop up yesterday in which poker pros were being asked to weigh in on the ongoing presidential race.

First there was Phil Hellmuth tweeting about an article on the website The Street concerning Donald Trump running away with the GOP nomination and the efforts by some in the part to stop him. The article is titled “How Do You Beat Donald Trump? We Asked a Poker Champion,” and has Hellmuth characterizing Trump as a “loose-aggressive” (LAG) player and offering ideas for how to win versus such an opponent.

Nothing too unusual about seeing Hellmuth appear in such a context. I mean we all consistently go to Hellmuth for commentary on all sorts of things besides poker, seeking his thoughts about, say, Jay-Z’s latest joint, the Golden State Warriors, or Carl’s Jr. Texas BBQ Thickburgers.

In the article Hellmuth unsurprisingly advises patience and waiting for a strong hand with which to defeat the player getting involved in too many pots (and betting too much when he does). Of course, that strategy hasn’t worked very well for Trump’s opponents thus far, perhaps because they themselves are too weak as candidates to have much with which to play back against him.

To Hellmuth’s credit, he also outlines a Plan B which involves essentially being even more loose and aggressive in response. It’s a more interesting article than you might think, getting a bit more specific and going beyond that earlier attempt at casting Trump as a poker player appearing in Time a month ago.

The other item that came up yesterday was Jamie Gold (of all people) appearing on Fox News to talk about the presidential race. It was a short three-minute bit in which Gold, introduced as both a former “world poker champion” and an “expert odds analyst,” shared a few thoughts about betting on the election.

Gold talks a little about how betting odds perhaps provide more accurate indicators of what will happen than polls, then offers some ideas about how to bet the election, including explaining the idea of “middling” (here relevant if, as Gold suggests, “it’s about a 99% chance” Hillary Clinton and Trump will be the parties’ nominees).

Gold’s appearance predictably earned some funny and cynical responses yesterday, although it made me think back to his expressed desire after winning the 2006 WSOP Main Event -- on High Stakes Poker, I believe -- that he one day become known as the greatest bluffer ever. Have to say, his commenting on a major news network as an “expert odds analyst” is getting there, wouldn’t you say?

Gold was fine in the short segment (I thought), which you can watch here.

Photos: “Phil Hellmuth” & “Jamie Gold” (adapted), flipchip / LasVegasVegas.com, CC BY-SA 2.0.