GPSTS Event

Last night I attended a panel discussion hosted by Harvard Law School’s newly formed Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society. I hadn’t realized this at the time, but the discussion was actually part of a class taught by Professor Charles Nesson, so seating was at a premium. I was able to get a chair in the back, but later arrivals, including Greg (FunkiiMunkii from 2+2), had to stand or find some impromptu seating.

There is a telecast of the event, so I’ve tried to give more of my perspective in this retelling, since an objective account is available to those who are interested. Also, for background reading, I’ve reported on two other meetings with this group: First HLS Meeting and Lunch with Lederer.

Professor Nesson kicked off the event by introducing an internet application called Question Tools that enabled audience members (in the future, to include those watching such an event over the internet- Nesson is a big proponent of Second Life) to submit questions online. These questions were instantly viewable by other audience members, who could rank the ones they most wanted to see answered. In this way, the moderator could steer the discussion towards the topics most interesting to the audience.

Unfortunately, Professor Nesson, for all his good qualities, is not the first man I would put at the helm of a ship, and panelist Crandall Addington was not to be steered. The result was an entertaining but rather scattershot event that never really reached its objective of exploring the debate over the legitimacy of poker.

Addington introduced himself as one of the Texas road gamblers who played with the likes of Doyle Brunson and Amarillo Slim in the early days of Texas Hold ‘Em, from the 1950’s-1970’s. At Nesson’s request, he did share an interesting account of the origins of the game and how it spread to Las Vegas. Like many of us who play today, he first encountered poker while in college. One of his fraternity brothers at Southwestern University had learned the game in Robstown, TX, a town that has since been credited by the Texas State Legislature as the birthplace of Texas Hold ‘Em.

Addington was drawn to the game because, unlike the draw poker games played in that era, Hold ‘Em offered four opportunities to influence the action and outcome of the hand. As he mastered the game, he became increasingly fascinated by it, and soon he had make poker his career. Along with the other Texas road gamblers, he brought the game to the Louisiana and Mississippi casinos, where 2-7 single draw lowball was the game of choice, and then to Las Vegas, where Stud games had reigned supreme.

Addington credited a St. Louis mobster named Sid Weinman with popularizing the game in Vegas. Sid worked at the Dunes Casino (where the Bellagio now stands) and set up a table in a prominent location on the casino floor, a spot that attracted quite a few “seals” (seemingly archaic poker slang for what are now called “fish”) who lost some valuable commodities, including, he insinuated, a controlling interest in the Dunes, in that game. Later, the same mob allowed Johnny Moss to spread No Limit Texas Hold ‘Em at the Aladdin.

So far, we’ve got young college graduates wasting their education and gangsters spreading presumably crooked games in Las Vegas. What was that about the legitimacy of the game?

Howard Lederer, the other guest, took over the story from here. It was the mid-1970’s, and just as Addington was getting out of the game, Lederer was getting in. He was a regular at New York’s Mayfair Club, where some of the best Bridge and Backgammon players in the world plied their trades. Lederer was fortunate enough to fall in with them around the time that they took an interest in poker, and together these bright young games players taught themselves the ins and outs of Texas Hold ‘Em.

They would travel to Vegas twice a year for the Poker Hall of Fame and World Series of Poker tournaments, initially getting fleeced by Addington and company but eventually making a name for themselves. Lederer spoke of satellite poker communities in New York and California but indicated that anyone looking to make a living at the game eventually moved to Las Vegas, as he did.

Lederer credits television and later the internet for the explosion of poker and specifically No Limit Texas Hold ‘Em, which in the 1990’s was a dying game.

Both Addington, now an entrepreneur with credentials in both the pharmaceutical and precious metals industries, and Lederer, still a professional poker player but also an internet entrepeneur with Full Tilt Poker, point to poker as a crucial training ground for business and negotiation skills. Both say that the ability to recognize profitable opportunities and learn from mistakes, initially learned at the poker table, have made them their fortunes in the business world. Now we’re getting somewhere.

Nesson now introduced himself as “eon, dean of cyberspace“and told us that he had taken “the assignment, as my avatar’s mission, to represent the game of poker against legal persecution, both criminal and civil.” It was a suitably eccentric introduction, but his mission is a noble one. He went on to frame the question in just the right way, asking not about legal minutiae but about a question of public policy: should a society permit and/or encourage its members to play games of skill? Why did Mohammad say that his people ought to play games of skill but not games of chance?

It is fairly well-known that the distinction between games of skill and games of chance is important in many legal jurisdictions. Specifically, the question often asked is whether skill predominates over chance in the game of poker. The problem that poker’s proponents have run into is that there is no clear definition of what that entails.

Before meeting Professon Nesson, I had assumed that this was just some arcane legal term that the lawyers would need to wrangle over. But his take on the legal process, which I quite like, is that these vague terms provide judges appropriate leeway to make cost-benefit analyses. Thus, the prerequisite for legal legitimacy of poker is convincing society and its judges and legislators that there is a social benefit to be derived from the game of poker.

Nesson then asked his guests to imagine a poker table at which “the game of poker is itself a player” and to “populate the table with poker’s adversaries.”

“Baptists” was the first word out of Addington’s mouth. He’d testified last year before Texas’ state legislature towards legalizing the game of Texas Hold ‘Em in the state and was surprised to see that only the Baptists, and not vested gaming interests such as the state lottery of the Louisiana casinos, had shown up to argue against the game’s legalization.

Lederer took this opportunity to share his insight that the fundamentalist objection is not just a moral but a religious one. That is, those Christians who are offended by gambling feel that gamblers are playing God, for He alone knows how the die will fall or deck will cut, and those who presume to such knowledge are blaspheming.

Lederer went on to say almost by definition, games played between people, rather than between a person and the house, were games of skill. “Do people get together in large groups to flip coins against each other?” he asked.

“He’s never met Adam Junglen,” I whispered to Greg.

Addington went off on a tangent about the difference between fixed limit and no limit games, and Nesson eventually interrupted to reiterate the central question: “What do our people get out of playing games of skill?”

Andrew Woods, Nesson’s accomplice in the GPSTS, made a comparison to the Olympics. The ancient Greeks encouraged competitive javelin tossing because they wanted their young men to know how to throw spears. Nowadays, the ability to make good decisions under pressure was a prized skill and something we ought to foster through games and contests.

“With incomplete information,” Lederer added. “That’s really what life is: a series of decisions made under pressure and with incomplete information. There is no game that mimics life more than poker.”

“Poker is a microcosm of life,” Addington added. He went on to initiate an excruciating guessing game with the audience, asking who could figure out the best argument for poker being a game of chance. After summarily rejecting several reasonable and interesting suggestions, he confirmed my fears by insinuating that it was something seen on TV every week, and in fact that it came down to the play of one particular hand. “You see these guys racing off all their chips with AK vs a pair of 9’s. You can do nothing to influence the outcome of that. Tournament poker is an aberration of the No Limit Hold ‘Em.”

Ugh. Greg tried in vain to argue the point with him, but he wasn’t going to hear it. He began his next anecdote with the promise that, “This is not a bad beat story, but…,” and went on to talk about a hand where he got all in with KK versus 97 and lost.

The player then told him, “I know how to beat pros like you. I just go all in. Then you can’t outplay me.”

Lederer diplomatically suggested that, “If you were still playing today, Crandall, you’d probably play a different style. The average player is much more knowledgeable these days. You can’t just wait to trap someone with a big hand.”

Addington dismissed him with a roll of his eyes and continued, “People used to think it was this big advantage to act last.” He went on to explain why it is better to act first because No Limit Hold ‘Em is a game of aggression and you want to be the one who bluffs first. Apparently, Puggy Pearson used to straddle all the time because he wanted to act last, and Addington thought that was stupid.

“He was putting in an extra $300, though, right?” Lederer pointed out the obvious reason why this was a losing strategy. “That doesn’t sound, uhm, like a very wise…” he trailed off as he realized the futility of attempting to explain this.

Nesson finally interjected to move the discussion back to questions of law and policy. “You have to give the judge a reason why she wants you to win,” he said. According to him, you can go through life believing you are at the whim of fate and chance or believe in free will and your ability to affect the world around you and your own life. Obviously, a good leader would want his people to hold the latter sentiment, and so in this view games of skill ought to be encouraged and games of luck discouraged.

Lederer drew an interesting distinction between poker and other card games with regard to the role of skill. In a game like gin, a player uses skill to give himself the best hand, but only the best hand can win. In poker, he uses skill to control the outcome, including both which hand wins and how much is won or lost. In fact, the most skillful bet is the fold, and the people who win the most pots are usually the biggest losers.

He cited a recent UK study of gambling prevalence that actually found a slight decrease in the prevalence of gambling addiction between 1999 and 2007 despite the introduction of online gambling, which is legal in Britain.

There was a good question from the audience about whether poker was really a game of skill for most players, or whether the “fish” and “seals” weren’t treating it as a luck-based game. There was a lot of high rhetoric in the room suggesting that poker was a game of equals competing to see who was the best, but that in fact a predator model was better suited to the game than an analogy to the Olympics.

Lederer responded that a game of skill is a game of skill no matter what, and that even at the smallest stakes most players are making some effort to play skillfully. That is, even at penny games, many pots do not go to showdown, so players are making decisions to fold.

I don’t find this particularly convincing, since players make decisions in blackjack as well, and that’s the kind of game we want to distinguish from poker. In general, I think that poker’s proponents are too dismissive of the perspective of the great many losers in the game, when in fact it is primarily concern for the losers that motivates the more reasonable of their opponents.

Lederer did conclude by saying, however, that the value of poker as a recreational activity is certainly greater than more passive pursuits such as television. Even casual players making no particular effort can learn something from playing.

On the whole, it was kind of entertaining, and more interesting now that I look over my notes than I thought immediately afterwards. The thing is that I’ve had the opportunity to discuss this issue with both Lederer and Nesson before, and neither of them had much new to say. Meanwhile, Addington, whom I was hoping would bring a new perspective, told some kind of interesting stories but didn’t really address the panel’s purpose particularly well.