Liz L.
03-31-2003, 12:16 PM
The poker of war
How military strategy was born at the gaming tables
By James McManus, 3/30/2003
GOD MAY PLAY DICE with the universe, as Einstein once feared, but serious gamblers, scorning metaphysical crapshoots and the casino's house edge, prefer no-limit Texas hold'em poker. Light years removed from the alcohol-soaked nickel-dime-quarter games of kitchen and dorm room, where the most you can lose is your beer money and who walks away with it depends less on skill than on luck, no-limit tournament action is always a ruthlessly disciplined fight to the death. The beverage of choice at these tables is mineral water, and the aces primly quaffing it have worked long and hard to make luck as tiny a factor as possible.
In limit poker, where the size of each bet is strictly determined in advance, the winner is almost always determined by the dealer: Whoever gets dealt the best hand takes the money. No-limit poker, however, gives stronger players the leverage to win pots with cunning and force while holding unpromising hands. In the famous words of Crandall Addington, a Texas oilman of majestic hold'em facility, ''Limit poker is a science, but no-limit is an art. In limit, you are shooting at a target. In no-limit, the target comes alive and shoots back.''
The shooting isn't always a metaphor. In the early years of the Cold War, the study of poker helped give rise to game theory, an unplayful branch of mathematics with powerful applications in military decision-making. When presidents and generals weren't figuring out their next moves on the battlefield, they were often thinking them through at the poker table.
Like jujitsu and asymmetrical warfare, poker is about transferring leverage and wiping out bad guys efficiently. One Republican senator, in the run-up to the assault on Iraq, approvingly called George Bush's gamble ''Texas poker,'' since so much seemed to be riding on a single showdown.
These days, a few game-theory researchers are taking their insights not just to the Pentagon but back to high-stakes gaming tables, with impressive results. In May 2000, a few days after being awarded a doctorate from UCLA for a thesis on game theory, probability, and artificial intelligence, Chris ''Jesus'' Ferguson took home over $1.6 million for winning two World Series of Poker events at Binion's Horseshoe in downtown Las Vegas, including the no-limit hold'em championship. Serendipity? Probably not.
Choice nicknames appear to help, too.
The godfather of the scientific study of cards is the Renaissance Venetian Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576). This well-named physician was also a palm-reader, a student of occult dreams, an astrologer, an algebraist, and a gentleman notorious for his mala fortuna. He was prone to toppling sideways into fetid canals, being struck by falling masonry, attacked by mad dogs. His bad luck at cards landed him briefly in a Milanese debtors prison. Signor Jerome Cardplayer was even stripped of his lectureship at the University of Pavia after his son was convicted of, and executed for, wife poisoning, events described in his uproarious memoir, ''The Book of My Life'' (recently republished by New York Review Books).
Cardano's bad luck at cards did become less pronounced once he invented a method for combining probabilities; this, in turn, helped him calculate the exact odds of drawing certain hands at primero, an early version of poker wildly popular in Renaissance Europe. He eventually set down his ideas in the treatise ''Liber De Ludo Aleae'' (Handbook of Games of Chance), although during his lifetime only he and a few of his friends were able to benefit from its radical new principles. Finally published in 17th-century Florence, the book provided page after page of advice on how to make logic and probability work in a gambler's favor.
Cardano's book also laid the groundwork for a new branch of science: statistics. Its most famous calculation, however, turned out to be this one: ''The greatest advantage in gambling lies in not playing at all.'' Cardano thus anticipates the words, if not the spirit, of Amarillo Slim Preston, the 1972 World Series of Poker champion, on how to thrive in turn-of-the-millennium Vegas: ''Get yourself a six-pack of young blondes, have yourself a good time, and don't do no gamblin'.''
A more recent imaginative virtuoso, John von Neumann, reached different conclusions about wagering. Tutored in Budapest as a 13-year-old math prodigy by a fellow with the Pynchonian name of Laszlo Ratz, von Neumann eventually ushered the planet into both the computer and nuclear ages, both of which sprang from the Manhattan Project.
Between stints in the lab at Los Alamos, von Neumann relaxed with his colleagues by playing stud poker, although as a scientist he never stopped paying attention. Peering in at the cards lying face down in front of him, he noticed that his brain continued to function as it had in the lab: solving mathematical problems, making educated guesses, devising optimal strategy and tactics based on incomplete information and human psychology. Above his broad, freckled forehead, more than one lightbulb went on.
Unlike most of his fellow scientists, von Neumann got along famously with military men, especially the poker players among them. One of his regular opponents was General Leslie R. Groves, the no-nonsense administrative head of the Manhattan Project. Von Neumann soon became a member of the inner circle advising Groves on the choice of a target for the first military use of the atomic bomb.
Farther up the chain of command, President Harry Truman played pot-limit five-card stud with journalists almost 12 hours a day in the North Atlantic aboard the cruiser USS. Augusta. Truman was returning from the Potsdam Conference, where he, Churchill, and Stalin had reapportioned Europe, and now he was trying to decompress while finalizing the decision about which Japanese city to evaporate.
Kyoto had been high on the list, but Secretary of War Henry Stimson, a poker player himself, persuaded Truman that its religious and cultural significance would be crucial to rebuilding Japan. We needed to make that nation our trading partner, Stimson argued, as well as a buffer against the Soviet Union. Secretary of State James Byrnes vigorously opposed Truman on a number of issues, but the president, already leaning toward a detonation above Hiroshima, used the daylong poker sessions to reduce Byrnes's access to him. A UPI reporter onboard the Augusta wrote that Truman ''was running a straight stud filibuster against his own Secretary of State.''
Meanwhile, back out in the Pacific, Lieutenant Richard Nixon was winning almost $8,000-a genuinely whopping haul in the `40s-in shipboard poker games against his fellow naval officers. Once, while holding the ace of diamonds in the hole, he drew four cards to make a royal flush, a 650,000-to-1 shot. ''I was naturally excited,'' he wrote in his 1978 memoir ''RN.'' ''But I played it with a true poker face, and won a substantial pot.''
Tricky Dick (or Nick, as he was known at the time) ''was as good a poker player as, if not better than, anyone we had ever seen,'' a fellow officer recalls. ''I once saw him bluff a lieutenant commander out of $1,500 with a pair of deuces.'' Upon discharge, Nixon used this money to finance his first congressional campaign. As Eisenhower's running mate in 1952, he stopped playing poker for political reasons, fearing voters might think it unsavory. One of his professors at Whittier College, however, was moved to declare with some foresight: ''A man who couldn't hold a hand in a first-class poker game is not fit to be President of the United States.''
Having settled the war in the Pacific, von Neumann and company turned their attention to the Cold War, and this time it was personal. Inspired by his poker and military experiences, the Soviet-loathing Hungarian proceeded to help invent game theory as a model of how potentially deceitful countries or groups interact when they have opposing interests. In spite of its fun-sounding moniker, game theory is a discipline in which naked self-interest dominates every decision: how much to spend on conventional forces vs. ICBMs, which city to nuke in retaliation for a blitz of West Berlin, whether to bomb Cuban missile sites or blockade the whole island.
Game theory's ruthless utility made it the perfect tool for understanding poker strategy, and vice versa. Zero-sum games of complete information, such as checkers and chess, failed to interest von Neumann, mainly because everyone can see where all the pieces lie and the best moves are equally discernible by both players. He found poker more lifelike, its bluffing tactics gratifyingly similar to those deployed by generals and presidents. Indeed, this was probably what gave the six-tenths-of-a-gram plastic cards their uncanny weight in the first place-not unlike plutonium 239, the royal flush of cold warfare elements and the one we may still have to answer for.
What von Neumann and others were on to was that poker is distilled competition, a less deadly version of combat, and therefore a good way to practice for it. The best strategy involves probability, psychology, pluck, and budgetary acumen but is never transparent; it depends on the counter-strategies deployed by the enemy. Expert players misrepresent their hands, simulate irrational behavior, use surprise to intimidate, and deploy other mind games to confuse their opponents. Think of Nixon's carefully crafted ''Mad Bomber'' persona during the war in Vietnam, or of Truman's avuncular presence with reporters during the days leading up to Hiroshima. Like von Neumann and Cardano before them, they knew both probability and people. They also were willing to force their opponent to risk all his chips in the ultimate no-limit staredown.
There's a downside to aggression and warfare, of course, which is why we need responsible leaders. Anti-social urges like hitting and lying and thievery need outlets in games, but even in games we need limits.
Or do we? No-limit hold'em rarely is favored in friendly home poker, since it tends to make for less than convivial evenings. For one thing, it routinely forces your houseguests to risk all their chips; when they lose them, buy more, then go broke, their feelings get hurt. They generally prefer more approachable varietals, with wild cards and limited bet sizes, which tend to make luck the most dominant flavor-or aftertaste. Anyone can win at these games, since whoever is dealt the best hand takes the pot. The shuffler has all the power, in fact, though he doesn't have any control.
Serious players are at war with the shuffle. They tend to prefer no-limit poker because it gives them the leverage to win pots without the best hand. The most talented among them don't even need a lowly small pair to take down a pot; one large, well-timed raise, in response to some flicker of doubt in the bettor's retina or a twinge along the side of his neck, does the trick. Maestros like Johnny Chan and Erik Seidel, the poker pros whose famous 1988 World Series showdown is featured in the 1998 movie ''Rounders,'' can deduce with mind-bending precision from your facial tics and body language, and from how you played earlier hands, what cards you hold now. They play you and the size of your stack as much as they play their own cards, ruthlessly taking advantage of whatever anxiety you betray about your hand. If you've raised them with anything short of a literally unbeatable hand, sometimes known as ''the mortal nuts,'' they can feel your level of confidence drip...drip... drip a quarter-notch below 100 percent; and the meek won't inherit this pot.
Extortionate reraises are called ''coming over the top'' of the initial raiser, often abbreviated to, simply, ''coming.'' To come at most stages of a no-limit tournament requires shoving in all of your chips. Should your opponent have the nerve to call your huge bet, it's all over for one of you. Since the raiser has already expressed the strength of his hand with some confidence, to insist with your reraise that your own hand is ''nuttier'' takes major-league chutzpah. It's precisely by this hair-raising process that hundreds of players compete until one of them has all the chips.
Here's another way to think about it. In ''The Godfather II,'' after Michael Corleone gets back to Nevada from Washington, where he'd fraternally intimidated Frankie Five Angels into recanting his testimony before the Senate, he begins plotting at once to assassinate both his big brother Fredo and their father's old friend Hyman Roth. Even the news of his wife's apparent miscarriage fails to daunt Michael's single-minded blood-lust. Exasperated, the Corleone family's attorney Tom Hagen pleads, ''You've won. Do you want to wipe everybody out?'' In what is regarded as the clinching evidence of Michael's absolute ruthlessness, he tells his adoptive brother, ''Just my enemies, that's all.''
A no-limit tournament player's answer would be, ''Yes.''
James McManus is a novelist and poet. His book ''Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion's World Series of Poker'' (Farrar Straus Giroux), from which this essay is adapted, will be published next month.
How military strategy was born at the gaming tables
By James McManus, 3/30/2003
GOD MAY PLAY DICE with the universe, as Einstein once feared, but serious gamblers, scorning metaphysical crapshoots and the casino's house edge, prefer no-limit Texas hold'em poker. Light years removed from the alcohol-soaked nickel-dime-quarter games of kitchen and dorm room, where the most you can lose is your beer money and who walks away with it depends less on skill than on luck, no-limit tournament action is always a ruthlessly disciplined fight to the death. The beverage of choice at these tables is mineral water, and the aces primly quaffing it have worked long and hard to make luck as tiny a factor as possible.
In limit poker, where the size of each bet is strictly determined in advance, the winner is almost always determined by the dealer: Whoever gets dealt the best hand takes the money. No-limit poker, however, gives stronger players the leverage to win pots with cunning and force while holding unpromising hands. In the famous words of Crandall Addington, a Texas oilman of majestic hold'em facility, ''Limit poker is a science, but no-limit is an art. In limit, you are shooting at a target. In no-limit, the target comes alive and shoots back.''
The shooting isn't always a metaphor. In the early years of the Cold War, the study of poker helped give rise to game theory, an unplayful branch of mathematics with powerful applications in military decision-making. When presidents and generals weren't figuring out their next moves on the battlefield, they were often thinking them through at the poker table.
Like jujitsu and asymmetrical warfare, poker is about transferring leverage and wiping out bad guys efficiently. One Republican senator, in the run-up to the assault on Iraq, approvingly called George Bush's gamble ''Texas poker,'' since so much seemed to be riding on a single showdown.
These days, a few game-theory researchers are taking their insights not just to the Pentagon but back to high-stakes gaming tables, with impressive results. In May 2000, a few days after being awarded a doctorate from UCLA for a thesis on game theory, probability, and artificial intelligence, Chris ''Jesus'' Ferguson took home over $1.6 million for winning two World Series of Poker events at Binion's Horseshoe in downtown Las Vegas, including the no-limit hold'em championship. Serendipity? Probably not.
Choice nicknames appear to help, too.
The godfather of the scientific study of cards is the Renaissance Venetian Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576). This well-named physician was also a palm-reader, a student of occult dreams, an astrologer, an algebraist, and a gentleman notorious for his mala fortuna. He was prone to toppling sideways into fetid canals, being struck by falling masonry, attacked by mad dogs. His bad luck at cards landed him briefly in a Milanese debtors prison. Signor Jerome Cardplayer was even stripped of his lectureship at the University of Pavia after his son was convicted of, and executed for, wife poisoning, events described in his uproarious memoir, ''The Book of My Life'' (recently republished by New York Review Books).
Cardano's bad luck at cards did become less pronounced once he invented a method for combining probabilities; this, in turn, helped him calculate the exact odds of drawing certain hands at primero, an early version of poker wildly popular in Renaissance Europe. He eventually set down his ideas in the treatise ''Liber De Ludo Aleae'' (Handbook of Games of Chance), although during his lifetime only he and a few of his friends were able to benefit from its radical new principles. Finally published in 17th-century Florence, the book provided page after page of advice on how to make logic and probability work in a gambler's favor.
Cardano's book also laid the groundwork for a new branch of science: statistics. Its most famous calculation, however, turned out to be this one: ''The greatest advantage in gambling lies in not playing at all.'' Cardano thus anticipates the words, if not the spirit, of Amarillo Slim Preston, the 1972 World Series of Poker champion, on how to thrive in turn-of-the-millennium Vegas: ''Get yourself a six-pack of young blondes, have yourself a good time, and don't do no gamblin'.''
A more recent imaginative virtuoso, John von Neumann, reached different conclusions about wagering. Tutored in Budapest as a 13-year-old math prodigy by a fellow with the Pynchonian name of Laszlo Ratz, von Neumann eventually ushered the planet into both the computer and nuclear ages, both of which sprang from the Manhattan Project.
Between stints in the lab at Los Alamos, von Neumann relaxed with his colleagues by playing stud poker, although as a scientist he never stopped paying attention. Peering in at the cards lying face down in front of him, he noticed that his brain continued to function as it had in the lab: solving mathematical problems, making educated guesses, devising optimal strategy and tactics based on incomplete information and human psychology. Above his broad, freckled forehead, more than one lightbulb went on.
Unlike most of his fellow scientists, von Neumann got along famously with military men, especially the poker players among them. One of his regular opponents was General Leslie R. Groves, the no-nonsense administrative head of the Manhattan Project. Von Neumann soon became a member of the inner circle advising Groves on the choice of a target for the first military use of the atomic bomb.
Farther up the chain of command, President Harry Truman played pot-limit five-card stud with journalists almost 12 hours a day in the North Atlantic aboard the cruiser USS. Augusta. Truman was returning from the Potsdam Conference, where he, Churchill, and Stalin had reapportioned Europe, and now he was trying to decompress while finalizing the decision about which Japanese city to evaporate.
Kyoto had been high on the list, but Secretary of War Henry Stimson, a poker player himself, persuaded Truman that its religious and cultural significance would be crucial to rebuilding Japan. We needed to make that nation our trading partner, Stimson argued, as well as a buffer against the Soviet Union. Secretary of State James Byrnes vigorously opposed Truman on a number of issues, but the president, already leaning toward a detonation above Hiroshima, used the daylong poker sessions to reduce Byrnes's access to him. A UPI reporter onboard the Augusta wrote that Truman ''was running a straight stud filibuster against his own Secretary of State.''
Meanwhile, back out in the Pacific, Lieutenant Richard Nixon was winning almost $8,000-a genuinely whopping haul in the `40s-in shipboard poker games against his fellow naval officers. Once, while holding the ace of diamonds in the hole, he drew four cards to make a royal flush, a 650,000-to-1 shot. ''I was naturally excited,'' he wrote in his 1978 memoir ''RN.'' ''But I played it with a true poker face, and won a substantial pot.''
Tricky Dick (or Nick, as he was known at the time) ''was as good a poker player as, if not better than, anyone we had ever seen,'' a fellow officer recalls. ''I once saw him bluff a lieutenant commander out of $1,500 with a pair of deuces.'' Upon discharge, Nixon used this money to finance his first congressional campaign. As Eisenhower's running mate in 1952, he stopped playing poker for political reasons, fearing voters might think it unsavory. One of his professors at Whittier College, however, was moved to declare with some foresight: ''A man who couldn't hold a hand in a first-class poker game is not fit to be President of the United States.''
Having settled the war in the Pacific, von Neumann and company turned their attention to the Cold War, and this time it was personal. Inspired by his poker and military experiences, the Soviet-loathing Hungarian proceeded to help invent game theory as a model of how potentially deceitful countries or groups interact when they have opposing interests. In spite of its fun-sounding moniker, game theory is a discipline in which naked self-interest dominates every decision: how much to spend on conventional forces vs. ICBMs, which city to nuke in retaliation for a blitz of West Berlin, whether to bomb Cuban missile sites or blockade the whole island.
Game theory's ruthless utility made it the perfect tool for understanding poker strategy, and vice versa. Zero-sum games of complete information, such as checkers and chess, failed to interest von Neumann, mainly because everyone can see where all the pieces lie and the best moves are equally discernible by both players. He found poker more lifelike, its bluffing tactics gratifyingly similar to those deployed by generals and presidents. Indeed, this was probably what gave the six-tenths-of-a-gram plastic cards their uncanny weight in the first place-not unlike plutonium 239, the royal flush of cold warfare elements and the one we may still have to answer for.
What von Neumann and others were on to was that poker is distilled competition, a less deadly version of combat, and therefore a good way to practice for it. The best strategy involves probability, psychology, pluck, and budgetary acumen but is never transparent; it depends on the counter-strategies deployed by the enemy. Expert players misrepresent their hands, simulate irrational behavior, use surprise to intimidate, and deploy other mind games to confuse their opponents. Think of Nixon's carefully crafted ''Mad Bomber'' persona during the war in Vietnam, or of Truman's avuncular presence with reporters during the days leading up to Hiroshima. Like von Neumann and Cardano before them, they knew both probability and people. They also were willing to force their opponent to risk all his chips in the ultimate no-limit staredown.
There's a downside to aggression and warfare, of course, which is why we need responsible leaders. Anti-social urges like hitting and lying and thievery need outlets in games, but even in games we need limits.
Or do we? No-limit hold'em rarely is favored in friendly home poker, since it tends to make for less than convivial evenings. For one thing, it routinely forces your houseguests to risk all their chips; when they lose them, buy more, then go broke, their feelings get hurt. They generally prefer more approachable varietals, with wild cards and limited bet sizes, which tend to make luck the most dominant flavor-or aftertaste. Anyone can win at these games, since whoever is dealt the best hand takes the pot. The shuffler has all the power, in fact, though he doesn't have any control.
Serious players are at war with the shuffle. They tend to prefer no-limit poker because it gives them the leverage to win pots without the best hand. The most talented among them don't even need a lowly small pair to take down a pot; one large, well-timed raise, in response to some flicker of doubt in the bettor's retina or a twinge along the side of his neck, does the trick. Maestros like Johnny Chan and Erik Seidel, the poker pros whose famous 1988 World Series showdown is featured in the 1998 movie ''Rounders,'' can deduce with mind-bending precision from your facial tics and body language, and from how you played earlier hands, what cards you hold now. They play you and the size of your stack as much as they play their own cards, ruthlessly taking advantage of whatever anxiety you betray about your hand. If you've raised them with anything short of a literally unbeatable hand, sometimes known as ''the mortal nuts,'' they can feel your level of confidence drip...drip... drip a quarter-notch below 100 percent; and the meek won't inherit this pot.
Extortionate reraises are called ''coming over the top'' of the initial raiser, often abbreviated to, simply, ''coming.'' To come at most stages of a no-limit tournament requires shoving in all of your chips. Should your opponent have the nerve to call your huge bet, it's all over for one of you. Since the raiser has already expressed the strength of his hand with some confidence, to insist with your reraise that your own hand is ''nuttier'' takes major-league chutzpah. It's precisely by this hair-raising process that hundreds of players compete until one of them has all the chips.
Here's another way to think about it. In ''The Godfather II,'' after Michael Corleone gets back to Nevada from Washington, where he'd fraternally intimidated Frankie Five Angels into recanting his testimony before the Senate, he begins plotting at once to assassinate both his big brother Fredo and their father's old friend Hyman Roth. Even the news of his wife's apparent miscarriage fails to daunt Michael's single-minded blood-lust. Exasperated, the Corleone family's attorney Tom Hagen pleads, ''You've won. Do you want to wipe everybody out?'' In what is regarded as the clinching evidence of Michael's absolute ruthlessness, he tells his adoptive brother, ''Just my enemies, that's all.''
A no-limit tournament player's answer would be, ''Yes.''
James McManus is a novelist and poet. His book ''Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion's World Series of Poker'' (Farrar Straus Giroux), from which this essay is adapted, will be published next month.