I’ve been wanting to write about poker for a while. I played it for the first time in a long time while snowed out in Buffalo. Someone told me that beating young men at poker is easy: you just don’t be a dumbass. Gambling hijacks a part of the male brain. Thoughts like “How many Queens are left in the deck?” and “What hands are better than my hand?” turn into “All in? All in? Should I go all in? I should go all in. All in. I’m all in.”
Hope Poker is of the same genre as Hope Chess, in which you try and outwit your opponent rather than just playing the game that’s in front of you. That’s literally a line in Casino Royale. Bond says to Vesper,
“Then you’ll know that in poker you never play your hand…you play the man across from you.”
Which, that’s just silly. The only person you play in poker is the one sitting in your seat. Good poker players beat bad poker players because they actually know if their hand wins in most cases, and because they see far enough in the future to bail before making a stupid bet.
I’m not a great poker player. I’m not even a good one. But I did watch Casino Royale recently, and I just started reading Colson Whitehead’s The Noble Hustle. One is a poker movie, the other is a poker memoir.
Actually, that’s not even true. Casino Royale is a spy movie with poker themes. (And I guess, The Noble Hustle is a memoir with poker themes.)
The differences between the poker scenes in these two works are actually really instructive, particularly because one is fiction and the other is nonfiction.
Take hand probabilities. In Noble Hustle poker, we’re stuck with Wikipedia probabilities. 2.6% for a full house, 4.83% for trips, 0.0032% for a royal flush. So take a full house. In a five-player hand (and I’m taxing my memory of probability math here), the chances you don’t see a full house are 88%. Ish. In ten hands, odds are you’ll see one full house.
In the final hand of Casino Royale, something like three of the players at the table all show increasingly high full houses. Probability-wise, it’s more of kaiju movie than a poker movie.
Oh no, spy movies aren’t realistic. One detail, which I sort of love the filmmakers for including, is how each player’s stacks change dramatically between shots, implying that we’re cutting a lot of hands. Presumably the high card hands (17.4%) and the one pair hands (43.8%) just aren’t worth our time. Which, you know, it’s also not worth our time to watch James Bond get a good night’s rest, put on his deodorant, price shop for fresh produce.
Half of the difference between James Bond and Colson Whitehead is odds. The other half is that Colson, like the rest of us, has to live moment-to-moment, while Bond only has to live jump cut-to-jump cut.
Remember that next time you find yourself dazzled by a friend’s Snapchat story.
One other parting thought: On the morning I played poker in Buffalo, we also watched Moneyball. A friend of mine, a marrow-of-his-bones football guy, told me that the conflict of that movie — “sports are a number game” versus “sports have an ineffable, artistic quality” — is still very much at large. You figure poker players must feel this, too, behind their dark sunglasses. On the other hand, I think all chess is Billy Beane chess.
The difference is that a football or a baseball game could be decided by a rainstorm, by cheers, by elevation. Bluffs are always on the table in poker. Chess is surgically methodicalized. It’s a game of perfect information, and minimal chaos.
What does it tell us that chess is robotic, while poker and football are “intuitive” or “art forms?” It tells us that most people like to believe they can ride chaos upward.