Nine men are hunched over a table in a smoked filled room. They are not distracted by the fact that the air conditioning isn’t working properly, or that chairs they are sitting on make the seating provided by a local politician for a re-election rally feel like the presidential suite of the Four Seasons. Their personal space is being invaded more often than on a train ride from Andheri to Churchgate, well, maybe not as bad. They have been there for seven hours, and they don’t plan to leave anytime soon. Cell phones are not answered, Blackberry messenger is ignored. Their ages range from twenty to forty, their professions from industrialists to shopkeepers. So what has these men so possessed that they are willing to devote so much time in an environment that is, to say the least, less than comfortable. Poker. Texas Hold’em No Limit Poker.
Now if you were to think that these are gambling addicts, they would do play any game of chance, anywhere, anytime, as long as their gambling fix is fulfilled- You would be half right. Half of them would play anywhere, half of them would play anytime and half of them are gambling addicts (not the same halves). But poker binds this motley crew together. The reason, I believe, is that poker has the right amount of luck. If luck played a lesser role like in chess, the bad players (a.k.a. fish) would go broke so fast, it would make their head spin. Their winning sessions would be few and far between, they would stop playing either because of monetary reasons or they would wake up to the fact that they aren’t built for the game. If luck played a stronger role a good player would be far less likely to become a long term winner. There wouldn’t be enough incentive to become a good player and this game would join the ranks of far less interesting games like Teen Patti. This right balance of luck and skill is the reason for the immense popularity of the game.
I have mentioned good and bad players i.e. there is skill involved in playing the game. Without going into the technicalities of the game at this time, instead I offer this explanation. A casino offers its patrons various games: Blackjack, Craps, Roulette, slot machines, etc. All these games are nothing but coin flips, with an edge. The edge is the unfair pay-off. Heads I pay the casino Rs. 100, Tails they pay me Rs. 99 (depending on the game my pay-off could be much less). That’s all there is to a casino, a high mathematical probability to win money as long as the sample size is big enough (more about sample size in a bit). All the bright lights, the fancy wheels, the gadgetry are just smoke and mirrors to keep you distracted from the fact that you are in a losing battle. You are banging your head against a mathematical wall. But, by no means am I condemning casinos, there is a reason for their existence. The edge is the price of entertainment. The edge pays for all those free drinks, the exotic decor and the rollercoaster on the roof.
In poker, at all times, you are the casino or the customer, giving up edge or getting edge. The skill in the game is to know which side of the table you are sitting on, and to have the discipline to act accordingly.
Sample size is extremely important. It is the nemesis of luck. In the short term, poker has a large luck component. Let me illustrate it this way; In one hand Phil Ivey could get the Hammer( a 7 and a 2, known as the worst pre-flop hand in poker) and you could get shiny pink shoe laces (them pocket Aces) and win the hand(most probably). That is what makes this game appealing to everyone. On any given day you could sit on a table with the best in world and walk away with their money. But if we play a thousand hands, the distribution of all the hands we get will tend towards equalising. Probabilities are a very ephemeral concept. But they are as rock solid as any mathematical concept, especially in a lucid situation where the variables are limited and well defined. In life, probabilities work much differently, refer to Nassim Taleb (Mathematical finance scholar who wrote the 2007 book ‘The Black Swan’) for more on that.
The more often you flip a coin the closer and closer the distribution will approach 50%. Yet each flip is independent of all the other flips. So even if you flip a heads thirty times in a row, the chances of the next flip being a heads are still 50%. The coin has no memory, neither do cards. Shouldn't the odds tilt back in favour of tails since it has fallen behind? Not at all. It doesn't tilt back, yet, over time the two outcomes will, for sure, equal out. Therefore, the game turns into one of who plays the various situations better i.e. minimize their losses and maximizes gains. The results are now essentially based on pure skill.
In life, there is nothing wrong with “getting lucky”, in every sense of the phrase. It is often a residue of design.
However, in poker, if you are trying to get lucky you are the customer to someone else’s casino.
The goal is to constantly put yourself in situations where the other guy has to get lucky, he is the customer, he is the fish. Thus, the luckier you are (trying to get) at poker, the worse you are playing. Unfortunately the converse is not true. You could play perfect poker all your life and never have a winning session. You would be on the tail end of the distribution curve. However, the probability would be similar to get struck by lightning every time you step outdoors. Also, you could play poor poker and keep winning forever. This uncertainty is what keeps those nine men playing till the wee hours of the morning. Some of them are trying to figure out where they stand, some are there to earn a living, some to beat the odds.
But the really smart ones are selling hope against hope. For, in this game, hope is a disease and “lucky” is a dog’s name.
By Karanbir Singh
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