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The New Yorker asked three professional poker players to give blow-by-blow accounts of their most memorable hands. Aside from the rules, I know almost nothing about poker and have played Texas Hold’em for about one total hour in my life — guess how I did! — so I actually learned a lot from this video. And the third player’s explanation of his hand and his thought process was fascinating.
Maria Konnikova is a writer for the New Yorker. Or she was until she went on sabbatical to play poker professionally. After immersing herself in the game while working on her third book, The Biggest Bluff, Konnikova discovered she was quite good at it, winning over $230,000 and a major tournament in a year.
Claudia Dreifus recently interviewed Konnikova for the New York Times and asked her about how she handles being one of the few women on the pro circuit.
When you see someone looking a certain way, you assume they play a certain way. So once I figure out how they view women, I can figure out how to play against them. They’re not seeing me as a poker player, they’re seeing me as a female poker player.
There are people who’d rather die than be bluffed by a woman. They’ll never fold to me because that’s an affront to their masculinity.
I never bluff them. I know that no matter how strong my hand, they are still going to call me because they just can’t fold to a girl.
Other people think women are incapable of bluffing. They think if I’m betting really aggressively, it means I have an incredibly strong hand. I bluff those people all the time.
There are people who think that women shouldn’t be at a poker table, and they try to bully me. So, what do I do? I let them. And I wait to be in a good position so that I can take their chips. Just like life, right?
In a 2015 NPR interview, pro player Annie Duke talked about getting her opponents to pay the stereotype tax.
VEDANTAM: She says she divided the men who had stereotypes about her into three categories.
DUKE: One was the flirting chauvinists, and that person was really viewing me in a way that was sexual.
VEDANTAM: With the guys who were like that, Annie could make nice.
DUKE: I never did go out on a date with any of them, but you know, it was kind of flirtatious at the table. And I could use that to my advantage.
VEDANTAM: And then there was the disrespecting chauvinist. Annie says these players thought women weren’t creative.
DUKE: There are strategies that you can use against them. Mainly, you can bluff those people a lot.
VEDANTAM: And then there’s a third kind of guy, perhaps the most reckless.
DUKE: The angry chauvinist.
VEDANTAM: This is a guy who would do anything to avoid being beaten by a woman. Annie says you can’t bluff an angry chauvinist. You just have to wait.
DUKE: What I say is, until they would impale themselves on your chips.
Update: In an episode of The Pay Check podcast, Duke and Konnikova “discuss power dynamics and sexism in the ultra male dominated field” of poker.
Poker is famously hard for machines to model because you have limited information, you have to iterate your strategies over time, and react to shifts in your interactions with multiple other agents. In short, poker’s too real. Sounds like fun! A couple of researchers at Carnegie Mellon found a way to win big:
Carnegie Mellon professor Tuomas Sandholm and grad student Noam Brown designed the AI, which they call Libratus, Latin for “balance.” Almost two years ago, the pair challenged some top human players with a similar AI and lost. But this time, they won handily: Across 20 days of play, Libratus topped its four human competitors by more than $1.7 million, and all four humans finished with a negative number of chips…
According to the human players that lost out to the machine, Libratus is aptly named. It does a little bit of everything well: knowing when to bluff and when to bet low with very good cards, as well as when to change its bets just to thrown off the competition. “It splits its bets into three, four, five different sizes,” says Daniel McAulay, 26, one of the players bested by the machine. “No human has the ability to do that.”
This makes me suspect that, as Garry Kasparov discovered with chess, and Clive Thompson’s documented in many other fields, a human player working with an AI like Libratus would perform even better than the best machines or best players on their own.
Update: Sam Pratt points out that while Libratus played against four human players simultaneously, each match was one-on-one. Libratus “was only created to play Heads-Up, No-Limit Texas Hold’em poker.” So managing that particular multidimensional aspect of the game (playing against players who are also playing against each other, with infinite possible bets) hasn’t been solved by the machines just yet.
Jeet Heer writing for The New Republic: Clinton Proved Trump Is a Man You Can Bait in a Debate.
In her acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, Hillary Clinton called out Donald Trump memorably, saying, “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.” The insight that Trump is easy to provoke formed the core of Clinton’s successful strategy in the first debate on Monday, as she repeatedly incited the Republican nominee to both adopt an off-putting aggressive tone and to make a series of damaging self-admissions.
This reminded me of poker player Annie Duke’s explanation of how she used the gender stereotypes of her male opponents against them.
I figured it was part of the game that if somebody was at the table who was so emotionally invested in the fact that I was a woman, that they could treat me that way, that probably, that person wasn’t going to make good decisions at the table against me. So I really tried to sort of separate that out and think about it from a strategic place of, how can I come up with the best strategy to take their money because I guess, in the end, isn’t that the best revenge?
Trump sounds like he’s a combination of the angry and disrespecting chauvinists:
VEDANTAM: She says she divided the men who had stereotypes about her into three categories.
DUKE: One was the flirting chauvinists, and that person was really viewing me in a way that was sexual.
VEDANTAM: With the guys who were like that, Annie could make nice.
DUKE: I never did go out on a date with any of them, but you know, it was kind of flirtatious at the table. And I could use that to my advantage.
VEDANTAM: And then there was the disrespecting chauvinist. Annie says these players thought women weren’t creative.
DUKE: There are strategies that you can use against them. Mainly, you can bluff those people a lot.
VEDANTAM: And then there’s a third kind of guy, perhaps the most reckless.
DUKE: The angry chauvinist.
VEDANTAM: This is a guy who would do anything to avoid being beaten by a woman. Annie says you can’t bluff an angry chauvinist. You just have to wait.
DUKE: What I say is, until they would impale themselves on your chips.
Although I suspect his chauvinism is only part of his poor debate showing…his insecurity is off the charts as well.
I love this piece from NPR about how poker player Annie Duke uses her male opponents’ stereotypical views of women against them.
I figured it was part of the game that if somebody was at the table who was so emotionally invested in the fact that I was a woman, that they could treat me that way, that probably, that person wasn’t going to make good decisions at the table against me. So I really tried to sort of separate that out and think about it from a strategic place of, how can I come up with the best strategy to take their money because I guess, in the end, isn’t that the best revenge?
She noticed there were three types of chauvinist players and approached each with a different strategy.
VEDANTAM: She says she divided the men who had stereotypes about her into three categories.
DUKE: One was the flirting chauvinists, and that person was really viewing me in a way that was sexual.
VEDANTAM: With the guys who were like that, Annie could make nice.
DUKE: I never did go out on a date with any of them, but you know, it was kind of flirtatious at the table. And I could use that to my advantage.
VEDANTAM: And then there was the disrespecting chauvinist. Annie says these players thought women weren’t creative.
DUKE: There are strategies that you can use against them. Mainly, you can bluff those people a lot.
VEDANTAM: And then there’s a third kind of guy, perhaps the most reckless.
DUKE: The angry chauvinist.
VEDANTAM: This is a guy who would do anything to avoid being beaten by a woman. Annie says you can’t bluff an angry chauvinist. You just have to wait.
DUKE: What I say is, until they would impale themselves on your chips.
I got this link from Andy Baio, who also linked to the video of the specific match referenced in the NPR piece and noted “Phil Hellmuth attributes all of Annie’s wins to luck, all of his own to skill”.
Jay Caspian Kang has a gambling problem.
Twelve thousand dollars lay wadded up in the glove compartment. I was trying to decide if I had what it took to drive home. To help delay a decision, I remember turning the radio to a Dodgers game. I don’t know how long I sat there listening to Vin Scully sing his nasally song of balls and strikes, which, even in the age of digital radio, still sounds as if it is being transmitted through a tin of victory cabbage. I remember thinking some nostalgic, self-pitying thoughts about my younger days. I forced myself to say out loud, “You are a degenerate gambler,” but doing so only made me giggle. I opened the glove box, pocketed the cash, and walked back through the sliding doors of the Commerce Casino, back to my table in the Crazy Asian 400 No-Limit Game and to the eight friends at my table who had kindly managed to save my seat.
Some time later, I drove home. All the money, of course, was gone. As I drove home through the network of highways that tie up a concrete bow just east of downtown Los Angeles, I felt no compulsion to slam the Outback into a guardrail. In fact, losing almost all the money I had in the world in six hours stirred up only a cold, scraped-out feeling of knowing-the calm that freezes out your brain when you watch someone younger make the same mistakes you made at their age. Staring out at the empty skyscrapers, I tried to figure out what might be the right reaction to losing $12,000. At the 7-Eleven on Venice and Sepulveda, I bought a bottle of Nyquil, drank half of it in the parking lot and drove the rest of the way home in a warm, creeping fog.
Poker, a game of “constant pricing and repricing of risk”, is fast becoming a younger and more lucrative game. To wit: a 19-yo Norwegian woman won the most recent World Series of Poker and $2 million (to add to her $800,000 in internet poker winnings). Also of interest: John Wayne once won Lassie at a poker game. (??!) The article mentioned 3-time poker champ Stu “The Kid” Ungar (most poker players seem to have nicknames); his Wikipedia page and NY Times profile are interesting reads.
Ungar won or finished high in so many gin tournaments that several casinos asked him to not play in them because many players said they would not enter if they knew Ungar was playing. Ungar later said in his biography that he loved seeing his opponent slowly break down over the course of a match, realizing he could not win and eventually get a look of desperation on his face. “It was fucking beautiful,” he noted.
Interesting story from Steven Levitt: stuck in a Vegas poker tournament with a $3000 first prize but needing to go to the airport to catch the last flight of the night, he starts playing very aggressively in order to win big or lose everything so that he can leave. (via gulfstream)
In 2005, 34 poker players earned $1 million playing tournaments, compared to 78 golfers earning the same playing their sport.
Looks like the popularity of poker might be fading. “It may be reducing down to the niche market, which would be people in their 20s, macho-man type of people”
Harnessing the power of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink to win at poker.
Pokernomics: Steven Levitt is researching the economics of poker. If you send him statistics from your online games, he’ll share the results with you.
The World Series of Poker……….Robots. Robots make anything cooler.
These SF entrepreneurs are funding their startup with online poker winnings.
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