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    Poker and Philosophy: Pocket Rockets and Philosopher Kings
    Poker and Philosophy: Pocket Rockets and Philosopher Kings
    Poker and Philosophy: Pocket Rockets and Philosopher Kings
    Ebook324 pages4 hours

    Poker and Philosophy: Pocket Rockets and Philosopher Kings

    By Open Court

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    Does God play cards with the universe? Do women have better poker faces than men? What’s the most existential poker movie ever made? Is life more meaningful when you go all-in? Is online poker really still poker? Poker and Philosophy ponders these questions and more, pitting young lions against old masters as the brashness of Phil Hellmuth meets the arrogance of Socrates, the recklessness of Doyle Brunson challenges the desperation of Dostoyevsky, and the coolness of Chris Moneymaker takes on the American tradition of capitalist ingenuity. This witty collection of essays demonstrates what serious card sharks have long known: winning big takes more than a good hand and a straight face. Stacking the metaphorical deck with a serious grounding in philosophy is the key to raking it in, because as Machiavelli proved long ago, it’s a lot better to be feared than loved, and lying is not the same as cheating.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Court
    Release dateMar 30, 2012
    ISBN9780812698107
    Poker and Philosophy: Pocket Rockets and Philosopher Kings

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      Book preview

      Poker and Philosophy - Open Court

      PART I

      Poker’s Life

      Lessons

      1

      Seven Lessons in Philosophy You Already Learned Playing Texas Hold’Em

      MICHAEL VENTIMIGLIA

      Poker is Life. Life is poker. You’ve seen the T-shirts.

      It’s a bit of an overstatement, but maybe less so than one might think. Poker is a beautiful game, an inexhaustibly interesting game. To be a better poker player than someone else means more than being better at playing scrabble or basketball. It means more than just being smarter or stronger. And this is because poker broadly draws on so many of the skills that are necessary for living well. Poker is Life: not because there’s no life outside of poker, but because so much of life can be found within it.

      If much of life can somehow be captured in this game played with fifty-two small pieces of plastic, then we should expect to find that the lessons that poker teaches us are similar to lessons taught to us by philosophers. Philosophy teaches us how to live well. It tries to capture the big picture, and it offers advice about how to live within the context of the big picture. What I would like to share with you is seven lessons about life, seven lessons from philosophy that you can learn from playing poker. Since the best poker players in the world decide who is the best of the best by playing No-Limit Texas Hold’em, we’ll focus on this finest variation of the game.

      Lesson One: As Human Beings, We Lack Certain

      Knowledge

      It might seem, at first glance, that philosophy teaches us a very different lesson about uncertainty than poker does. Poker players seem to revel in the unknown; philosophers seem to be terrified by it. Poker teaches us to embrace uncertainty. Philosophy teaches us to explain it away. There’s some truth to this, but at the bottom of my poker playing and philosophical heart, I’m convinced that it is too simple. It’s not fair to either philosophers or poker players.

      We’re drawn to poker, in part, because we see the beauty of taking risks, of operating within a context of uncertainty. It remains exciting precisely because we almost always lack certain knowledge. And yet, poker cannot be reduced to a celebration of the unknown. Poker is not about mindless risk. It’s not roulette. It’s not craps. There is a difference between the poker player and the sort of gambler who likes to watch a ball bounce around a roulette wheel. Poker players accept the context of uncertainty, but they make the best decisions they can based on what they believe is true. And, as every Texas Hold’em player knows, there are moments of perfect clarity, of beautiful, glorious certainty that can’t be denied. Think back over your best hands, those few plays that for whatever reason still stand out amongst the thousands of hands you have played. I’ll bet at least one of them is when you knew you couldn’t lose, when you knew you had the nuts. This is one of the best features of Texas Hold’em. Every once in a while you get something you can hang onto and know for sure, at least for one hand. Poker players accept uncertainty—they learn to become comfortable within it—but they never turn down a sure thing.

      Just as poker is not merely about mindless chance, philosophy is not just about finding absolute truths. It’s true that the quest for certainty, for some Truth that is foundational and indubitable, has been central to Western philosophy since its inception. René Descartes (1596–1650) is generally taken to be the poster boy for this quest. His cogito—I think, therefore I am—stands as the most famous articulation of the philosophical desire for something absolute, something rock solid that we can know for sure. Philosophers have sought to establish certainty based on everything from reason to the five senses, from mystical experience to physics. But there are at least a few good reasons for thinking that philosophy, as a whole, does not teach us to reject the uncertainty that seems to be part of the human condition.

      First of all, even most philosophers who have claimed to find the foundation of certain truth have left room for uncertainty and risk. St. Augustine, for example, believed the ground of all certain knowledge to be in the Christian God, but he also acknowledged that we have the freedom to accept or deny God’s truths at our own peril. And the stakes were high: our eternal happiness (or misery) hung in the balance. Other philosophers, like John Dewey, William James, and Friedrich Nietzsche, have urged us to acknowledge that a lack of certainty (or, in Nietzsche’s case, the lack of Truth at all) is just part of the human condition. If Truth exists at all, they insist, we can never be sure that we’ve got it. But the most convincing evidence for the claim that philosophy does not teach us to reject uncertainty is the history of philosophy itself. When we look back at the history of philosophy as a whole, and at the very different and contradictory ways that philosophers have sought to establish some certainty, we cannot help but think that the history of philosophy itself teaches us that nothing is certain. Since philosophers seem to disagree about most everything, philosophy can be reasonably understood to teach us that uncertainty is simply part of the human condition. Really, the most general and broad lesson of philosophy is the most general and broad lesson of poker: Our environment is one of uncertainty. We must learn to operate within it.

      Lesson Two: Within a Context of Uncertainty,

      We Must Still Believe and Act

      You’re sitting on pocket Q’s. The flop is harmless, no flush or straight possibilities after the turn. The River is a K. How hard do you press? You can’t be sure you will win, but you have everything you need to know about the odds, the other players, and your own instincts to make a decision. You must decide, you must act, without knowing for sure what is right. You are in a very human situation: you must commit without certain knowledge.

      In The Will to Believe, William James (1842–1910) takes on an influential thinker of his generation, William Clifford (1845–1879). Clifford had claimed that It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.¹ Imagine this guy at a poker table, waiting for his pocket A’s and a harmless flop, sitting on his chips waiting for a moment of certainty, watching his stack dwindle down to nothing one blind at a time. It doesn’t work—in poker or in life—and that’s why nobody today reads Clifford.

      James has stood the test of time because he understood that usually we have to make decisions without having the nuts. James is still with us because what he offered was truer: I myself find it impossible to go with Clifford . . . It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained.² Within a context of uncertainty, we must still make choices and commitments. Does God exist? You don’t know, but you still have to make a choice—one way or another—if you want to live a committed meaningful life. Are you willing to fight for goodness or will you resign yourself to the status quo? You can’t be sure if you can make a difference, or even what goodness is, but you can be sure that if you do not take a stand one way or another, you will have taken yourself out of the game.

      Certainty is as rare in poker as it is in life. But we must act if we want to enjoy the game. Otherwise, we’re relegated to the sidelines, to irrelevance, watching other people fail and succeed. The lyrics to the Rush song, Freewill, go: if you choose not to decide you still have made a choice. James said it first. If you give in to the fear of making a wrong decision, you have already made a decision that cuts you off from a whole host of possibilities. You’ll get muscled around by the people who are willing to take risks and eventually you will drop out, barely noticed. Poker players understand this. To win, sometimes you have to commit without the nuts.

      Lesson Three: Sometimes to Get What You Want,

      You Have to Risk All You’ve Got

      We know that poker requires risk. This is such a basic premise of poker that it hardly needs mention. To get from A to B, you need to risk A. But No-Limit Texas Hold’em takes this to another level, and this is why it is the game that is played by the best. The best poker players do more than just calculate the odds. No-Limit Hold’em reduces your fate to a single moment of chance—one hand, one flop, one card—the situation in which the odds mean the least. This is something that the textbook player cannot tolerate. The mathematician needs to grind it out. The best players will take the risks that can’t be meaningfully quantified, that can’t be reduced to prudence. They take the big chances.

      Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) made a similar point in Walden. Aware that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,³ he teaches that we must forgo all the half-measures of security that can be bought or purchased in order to have the freedom for a spiritual life. Without letting go of material security, we are not free for a spiritual awakening. And James teaches that there are times when believing in a mere possibility is necessary for making that possibility a reality. Is this person I am about to marry trustworthy? I can’t be sure, but if I wait for proof positive, she’ll be gone and I will have missed out on the possibility of something I wanted. For James, the person who gets ahead in life is the one who sacrifices other things for their sake before they have come, and takes risks for them in advance (p. 213). The risk is required for the reward. We are like trapeze artists who can’t make it to the next trapeze without letting go of the first one. To get where you want to go, you have to spend some time in midair, and for those moments you have nothing. You’re all-in, without a chip in front of you. Real risk is more than just playing the odds for the long haul. It’s throwing it all out there for the sake of something better. This is true both in No Limit Texas Hold’em and in life.

      Lesson Four: Trust Your Instincts

      You’re sitting on an inside straight draw after the flop. All the books say that this is a bad play.⁴ But that’s not what you feel. And now you have to decide whether or not to play by the numbers or play this one by your gut.

      I’ve never kept a close count of how these hands turn out, but I’m convinced that the plays I’ve made based on instinct have proven to be right more often than the statistics predict. We’ve all had moments when we let our mathematical side talk us out of a hand that we would have won and moments when we stuck it out on pure instinct. This isn’t to say that instincts are necessarily magical. Sometimes they have to do with how another player wears his baseball cap or how she plays with her chips. Sometimes they have to do with your unconscious awareness of other players’ tells. But sometimes they’re just about which way the wind is blowing, about how the cards are going to fall. I am continually amazed by how often they are right.

      Philosophers are generally taken to be more mathematicians than touchy-feely types. There is truth to this. In the history of philosophy we find a consistent fascination with mathematics and the sort of certainty that it seems to offer. The Pythagoreans, a school of Greek philosophers who influenced Plato, thought that numbers had mystical qualities. Descartes, whose synthesis of geometry and algebra is still studied by most high school students, modeled his philosophy on the deductive method of geometry. Spinoza (1632–1677) took this to its extreme, drawing conclusions about God, freedom and the self as if they were truths of Euclidian geometry. Philosophy in general has surely preferred reason to feeling, often demonizing feelings and emotions as obstacles to the truth.

      But there are important exceptions. Thoreau and Charles Peirce (1839–1914), two American philosophers, both argued for the importance of feeling and instinct. Thoreau claimed that our instincts are our surest guide to the truth. If we have the courage to free ourselves from the laws of convention, the ways of thinking and acting in society that people take for granted, we become candidates for intuiting Higher Laws. And these Higher Laws are known primarily through feeling. They are our point of contact with the divine. No one, Thoreau teaches, has ever followed her instincts until they lead her astray. Peirce made a similar case, which he referred to as his Sentimentalism. What is most interesting about Peirce’s respect for feeling is that he was an expert in logic and science. In fact, Peirce argued that scientists are actually guided by their feelings as they form hypotheses. Reason itself, Peirce teaches, eventually realizes that feelings are important, both in science and in practical matters.

      So while philosophers have tended to discount the role of feelings or instincts in attaining knowledge, there are some philosophers who beg to differ. Most philosophers that I have met who also play poker are excellent mathematicians. But they are not excellent poker players. The best know when to play the numbers and when to play their hunches. If Thoreau is right, that river card that feels right will be your friend more often than not.⁵

      Lesson Five: Life Is Competition—Life Is

      Co-operation

      Poker is about the survival of the fittest. Each player wants what the other players have. Victory comes when all the weaker players have been weeded out, and the best player stands alone. There is an obvious sense in which poker is about competition.

      But there is a less obvious way in which poker is also about co-operation. Remember, poker depends entirely upon a stated or assumed agreement, a social contract of sorts, that each player will play by the rules. If someone gets caught cheating in a local, neighborhood game with friends, he’s going to need a new neighborhood or at least some new friends. If someone gets caught in Vegas, he’s going to need plastic surgery. If you want to be able to take advantage of the benefits of competition, you first have to agree to co-operate. If you are unwilling to play by the rules, there is a good chance you are going to get kicked out of the game.

      Some political philosophers have said roughly the same thing regarding society at large. Although they may disagree about the details, many social contract thinkers see society as a collection of self-interested individuals who are willing to co-operate for the sake of their mutual self-interest. Maybe the most convincing explanation of this dynamic comes from a thinker who was not a philosopher, but who has influenced philosophy and every other academic discipline for the last one hundred and fifty years: Charles Darwin.

      According to Darwin (1809–1882), survival in the competition of life itself is a badge of honor. The fit survive and reproduce. The unfit are swept away. It’s easy to see why so many philosophers, most notably Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), adapted Darwin’s theory of organic evolution into a theory of social evolution. In almost any environment where there is competition to the death, survival itself is a sign of merit. This is why you can’t get a bad slice of pizza in New York City. And this is also why sitting at the final table in a poker tournament is itself an accomplishment. Tournament poker is a competition to the death. It mimics what Darwin thought was our natural predicament. There is some luck or chance involved, just as there is in nature, but the individuals who can use what they’ve got to compete successfully survive. The losers do not. Poker captures this in a way that most other casino games don’t.

      But Darwin was also aware that life involves co-operation. Darwin understood that there are many contexts in which cooperation benefits the individual more than outright selfishness or competition. Since Darwin, biologists, sociologists, economists, and others have worked to explain this phenomenon. Most biologists today would argue that people co-operate because it serves their individual or genetic self-interest. Even though individuals are often in competition, they also need each other for the sake of goods that can only be attained or protected by groups. And the individual who has a reputation for dishonesty will find that others are unwilling to co-operate with him. The individual who breaks the rules no longer gets to enjoy the benefits of society.

      Here too, then, we find that an important feature of our human predicament is captured in poker. The competition that we take for granted depends on a deeper level of co-operation. Without the rules, it is impossible to play the game. In poker and in life, if you break the rules—and you get caught—you don’t get to play the game.

      Lesson Six: Success Depends on a Mastery of

      Both Appearances and Reality

      Great players don’t need great cards. The cards they have in the hole are only important if they have to show them. And the best players usually only show them when they want to. Most of us have had at least small stretches in which we have approximated this sort of mastery, stretches where the other players were scared off by the bluffs but stayed in for the good beatings. We’ve intentionally gotten caught bluffing just to set ourselves up for a big hand later in the game. We’ve scared people away before the flop when we needed to protect a mediocre pair. We’ve mastered both appearance and reality. There are no cameras there for our games, but we are sure that if the video was running, it would belong in the Smithsonian.

      Life, claims Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), is surface, and the art of life involves skating on it well. Life too is often about appearances. Mastering the art of appearances takes you a long way. You need to appear trustworthy and capable to get a job. You need to appear loving and attractive to find a mate. If you are miserable at appearances, the reality is almost insignificant. Nobody will put the time in to uncover that reality.

      But, of course, if the reality is awful, then appearances will get you only so far. Knowing which contexts call for superficiality and which contexts call for reality is essential for success in life. Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) ethical theory implies that lying is always wrong. This is why almost all Philosophy 101 students understand that Kant’s theory can’t be right. There are times when lying is simply the right thing to do; there are times when full disclosure of the truth is uncalled for; and there are times when perfect sincerity is perfectly appropriate. Knowing when the truth needs to be told and how it needs to be said is part of the art of living.

      Lesson Seven: Perfection Involves a Mastery

      of the Four Classic Virtues

      In the Republic, Plato asks the question, What is the good life? By this Plato means, "What sort of life is the most fulfilling, the happiest? What sort of life produces eudaimonia, or human flourishing? What sort of life brings us closest to perfection? His answer is a life of virtue." The happiest person is the person who possesses all four classic Greek virtues and whose soul is, consequently, in perfect balance and proportion. So convinced is Plato that this is the best sort of life that he argues it is preferable even when one is punished for it.

      Wisdom, Plato claims, is the primary virtue. It applies primarily to our intellectual side, and, for Plato, it involves knowledge of what is true. Courage is needed for perfection of the spirited side of the human being. Courage involves having the will to do what we know is best, even when we are afraid or we desire what is less than ideal. Moderation, the third virtue, is most important for our desires. It involves letting our intellectual and spirited side, rule over our desires. When our intellect, our spirited side and our desires are all properly balanced and virtuous, the result is justice, a balance and proportionality in the soul. Plato claims that the just person likes herself, has confidence and self-respect. To the extent that we are capable of incorporating these four virtues into our character, we live the best, happiest, most flourishing human life.

      The best poker players have learned to incorporate these four classic virtues into their poker game. They are wise, which is to say that they have knowledge of the eternal truths of poker. Some of these eternal truths, as Plato himself thought, are mathematical. Poker players need to know the numbers. But perfection at poker also involves knowledge that is beyond the mathematical. Plato may not have agreed, but, if Thoreau was right, perfect knowledge also involves instinct, a gut sense of what to do in any given situation.

      Perfection at poker, as we have seen, requires courage. In Plato’s terms this means a willingness to make the move that you know is right despite the fear of losing. How many times have we avoided going all-in because of the thought of having nothing, of having to walk away from the tables while others carried on? How many times have we avoided strong players or folded strong hands because we were intimidated? This is fear. To possess the faculty of courage is to do what we know to be best, consequences be damned.

      Perfection at poker requires moderation, which means, essentially, that our desires shouldn’t be making the calls. Revenge, greed, pride—all of these desires interfere with our capacity for choosing well. The virtuous poker player does not think about revenge. He doesn’t salivate over a big pot, staying in with a weak hand when he knows he shouldn’t. He puts these distractions aside. He does what is right.

      Finally, the result of all of this is justice. And let’s just say that justice, in this context, means two things. It means perfection in the art of poker because all of our faculties are working well and working together, and, more often than not, it means success. Usually, the best player wins.

      Life Is Poker—Poker Is Life

      We have to admit that poker players are not necessarily good people, and there are, perhaps, some good people who aren’t poker players. This is because poker presents challenges that are analogous to, rather than identical to, life’s challenges.

      But I am convinced the lessons we learn from playing poker are similar to the lessons of life, the lessons of philosophy. To accept our lack of certain knowledge, to be willing to act in the face of uncertainty, to be willing to risk what we have for what we want, to trust our instincts, to acknowledge the necessity of both competition and co-operation, to understand the difference between the time for bluffing and the time for sincerity, and to strive for perfect virtue: these are seven of the most important lessons I have learned from poker and read about in philosophy. I don’t think I would have been able to articulate them when I started playing poker as a teenager, but the lessons were there, in the game, waiting to be uncovered.

      At the

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