Shuffle Up and Deal

An astounding mathematical fact: when you shuffle a deck of cards, it is almost certain that the particular order in which the cards are arrayed is unique. No other deck of cards will ever have been shuffled in that arrangement. Cool, huh? No two poker players are alike, either. Each of us brings our own strengths and liabilities to the game, each of us struggling to make sense of a world in which we have imperfect information. Your unique cards and your unique abilities, combined with those of the others are at the table, combined with luck, make poker – in my estimation – the greatest game ever created. I’m a poker player and I’m currently in Las Vegas with the opportunity of a lifetime.

My friend Joe Stapleton, one of the game’s best poker commentators, got me a seat in The Big Game, a high-stakes televised game of no-limit hold ‘em (the same game you’ve probably seen on TV during the Main Event of the World Series of Poker). When the show begins, I will have $50,000 in front of me, the most money I have sat down with at a poker table by a factor of twenty. It’s conceivable that, in a game of this size, I could win 10, 20, even 100 thousand dollars. It’s also more than conceivable that I could lose the entire amount. I will be playing against a table of poker professionals. There’s an old saying in poker: “If you look around the table and can’t find the sucker, you’re the sucker.” Friends, I have looked around the table and found the sucker. He’s sitting in my seat. At this point, the day before we actually play, I’m not sure whether to thank Joe or kick him in the head.

Unafraid to look like an idiot. Photo by Matthew Berglund.

People who do not play poker have many misconceptions about it. The most common one – and the reason that poker remains illegal in most states – is that they think it’s a game of luck instead of a game of skill. In other words, a lot of people believe poker is no different than blackjack of craps. Those games require a little bit of skill and a lot of luck. Poker is the opposite. It requires tremendous skill, with some luck. Moreover, unlike those other games, poker players are not playing against “the house.” They’re playing against other poker players; the casino takes a small amount out of each pot or charges the players a small fee to play. In other words, the casino has no advantage. Over the long run, the best craps players in the world will always lose their money to the casino. Over the long run, better poker players will always win money from worse poker players.

The reason I can sit down with a table of professional poker players, however, and have any shot of winning is because of the short term. In the short term, luck does play a more decisive role. In the short term, I have a chance because anybody can beat anybody on any given day, depending on, as they poker saying goes, the luck of the draw. I have a few other advantages as well.

First of all, I have a pretty good amount of information on the players against whom I will be playing while they have almost no information on me. They will sit down at the table with me, an actor and comedian, and assume that I do not know what I’m doing – or at least I do not know what I’m doing to the same extent as them. There are things I can do to further their impression of me: I can bet weird sizes, make unorthodox moves, feign confusion, and generally act like I’m dumber than I actually am. Don’t get me wrong – I am dumb, but maybe not as dumb as they think.

Also, I have a pretty good idea of how they will play against me: they will be relentless bullies. They’ll know that I’m playing the largest stakes I am ever likely to play and so they will use that information to try to push me out of pots. It’s what I would do if I were in their shoes. My job is to hang tough and, when appropriate, bully them back.

Finally, I have the advantage of not being afraid to look like an idiot. They’re supposed to beat me. If they do, well, that was just the expected outcome. On the other hand, they will not me – a rank amateur – to make them look foolish. For that reason, they may be willing to give me credit for having a better hand than I do; if I see an opportunity to bluff them, I cannot be afraid to take it. Even though if I get caught, I will look like the idiot they expect me to be. I can live with that.

I’ve been playing poker my whole life, beginning when I was a kid sitting around the kitchen table with my family playing for nothing more than the plastic poker chips my mom probably picked up at the local 7-11. I loved the game from the jump. Why? It took me years to understand.

The first professional poker player I ever met was a guy named Jason. Jason was a high-stakes pro who used to travel the world playing cards – in fact, I think he’s currently a professional gin rummy player whose only job is to travel the world with some billionaire and play cards with him whenever the dude wants. Nice work if you can get it.

Anyway, Jason once explained that playing cards is our futile effort to make order out of a disordered world. For the time we sit at the table, we maintain the illusion of control. In the simplified world of poker, our decision tree is reduced to four: check, bet, raise, or fold. Enormous complexity arises from those four actions but the fact that we can distill our options to just four is enormously appealing for people like me who look around this world and find so little within our control. Poker puts some of the power back in our hands. At the felt, with our decks of cards shuffled into their unique patterns, it feels as though we have it within our power to wrest at least some control back from our capricious gods. When we play well, we feel as if the turn of the cards matters less than our own ability to manipulate the game into our favor. We feel, in other words, like the gods we are trying to supplant. Playing poker is a way for people who often feel like everything is against them to win back control. The game is a tiny universe and every time we sit down to play, we try to become its masters. A lot of the time we fail, of course, but sometimes - sometimes - we succeed. 52 cards. $50,000. Shuffle up and deal.