The Mathematics and Politics of Poker
Who is more suited to playing poker, an adept political scientist, or a mathematician?
That's a good question. To play poker, well you need to be extremely logical. You need to have a potent deductive facility. You need to have a level of math skills that corresponds roughly to fourth or fifth-grade math. You know, you are drawing to a flush, you have a four diamonds, you know that a nine diamonds remains in the deck. There are forty-five or forty-six unseen cards. Nine divided by 45 is the kind of mathematical problem that you are solving all day, all evening long at the poker table.
So a high-powered mathematician such as Christ Ferguson, the guy who won in 2000, they have advantages, but the ability to suss out when somebody else is bluffing and be able to bluff yourself. And unless you're playing online you need to be able to camouflage your nervousness, your level of affection for your hand. And you need to be able to pick up by watching your opponents' faces and body language and get a sense of how much they like their hand.
How did you become good at poker so quickly?
You know, I never became real good. I think that I'm fair to middling. I played a lot in high school. I worked as a caddy, and there's a lot of poker played in caddy shacks. Some of the professional caddies, much older than high school guys, trying to make $20, $30 a weekend, schooled us. Didn't play a lot in college because it was kind of a political period. I was in college in the late 60’s and early 70’s.
In my first marriage, I didn't have enough money to play serious poker. But I returned to the game in the nineties in a more serious way. And when Lewis Lapham offered me, he asked me after I had done a piece for Harper's that he liked, he said, well, what would you like to do next? And I said, I'd love to cover the World Series of Poker, mainly because one, it was a fantastic gig to be able to have an assignment like that from Harper's, but also I wanted it as an excuse to try to enter the event myself.
How long did you spend preparing for the event?
By that point, since I don't have years and years of experience playing high-stakes poker, especially no-limit hold 'em in tournaments, which is a very specific kind of poker, I was able to buy six or eight books that helped me catch up to what the pros know. And there were computer programs that simulate to a reasonable, it's a reasonable facsimile of what no-limit hold 'em is about, minus, you know, the pros sitting there staring at you and trying to pick up tells. And that ability that they have can be neutralized with a baseball cap pulled down low and sunglasses. So that by the time I got out there I felt that I had caught up much of the way to what the average professional his skill level. Since I had been playing poker by that point for forty years, I was not unfamiliar with the game's rhythms and tactics, and that the specifics of no-limit hold 'em tournaments. I became a book-learnt amateur.
How much did you win?
I won $250,000.00. I took my “Harper's” advance of $4000.00, played a satellite, and I won a $10,000.00 seat in that satellite. And meanwhile, I'm covering the murder trial of the host, who had been killed by his stripper girlfriend two years earlier. And that trial's going on a block away from the tournament, so in the early mornings I'm down at the courthouse, and then at noon the tournament begins. And it was a very full week of intense Vegas activity.
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