The Second Game of Dice

This is the 25th installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

The Mahabharata is an amazing piece of storytelling. It was written at least 2400 years ago and it still resonates today in India. One story that speaks to me strongly is of the time when Duryodhana and Shakuni invited Yudhishthira to a game of dice.

Accepting an invitation to play dice with an opponent, using his dice, surely has negative expected value. (One version has it that the dice were made out of the bones of Shakuni’s father, whose spirit resided in the dice and did as he wished. That’s a marked deck if there ever was one.) Yudhishthira gave some spiel about how it was the dharma of a Kshatriya to accept all challenges, but this sounds like rationalisation to me. I think he had a gambling problem. He craved dopamine.

Dopamine is the neurotransmitter that the brain releases every time an addict gets a dose of anything he’s addicted to: a hit of cocaine, a peg of alcohol, a throw of the dice. This makes gambling addiction similar to drug addiction or alcohol addiction. Basically, you become a slave to brain chemistry. You might know, at a rational level, that you should get up and leave, but you can’t stop yourself. And so it was for Yudhishthira. He lost his kingdom, his brothers, his own self, and finally he lost Draupadi. (The misogyny in the Mahabharata is staggering, but leave that aside for now.) He must have been devastated at this point, and you’d expect him to lose all respect for himself.

Somehow, in a turn of events that involved a never-ending saree, a blind king and no dice, Yudhishthira got lucky, and everything he lost was returned to him. At this point you’d imagine that this man, held up as a paragon of wisdom and virtue, would realise that he had a weakness for the game, which was his strategic vulnerability, and resolve never to play again. But no. Duryodhana, upset by the reprieve his father Dhritarashtra had given the Pandavas, invited Yudhishthira for another game. Yudhishithira accepted the invitation. The stakes were that the losers would go into exile, and so off went the Pandavas.

It is that second game of dice that astonishes me. Yudhishthira’s behaviour during the first game was appalling, but understandable: he was a slave to dopamine, and too weak to stop the unravelling. But when that session was over, you’d expect him to introspect and never play again. However, rationalising furiously, he went for that second game. The force of his addiction took his family down with him and, eventually, in the events that unfolded,  all the characters of the Mahabharata. (The bloodshed in that book makes Game of Thrones seem like a Rajshri production.)

I see Yudhishthira every day at the poker table. On one hand, poker is a complex game that requires analytical rigour and psychological acuity; on the other, it is a game of dice that can destroy lives. Most players I meet lose money over the long run; but most of them are recreational players who can take the hit, and can control their losses. Many, however, are addicts. I’ve seen fortunes wiped out, marriages destroyed, once-proud men become shadows of themselves, helpless, needy, pathetic. Even as you sit across the table trying to take their money, you sometimes grow to like them. I have, at different times, counselled a couple of them over breakfast and coffee to give up the game, stop throwing good money after bad, to put their lives together. ‘You are addicted,’ I say. ‘Go cold turkey. Give your wife all control of finances, your ATM cards, your cheque books, so even if you want to play, you can’t.’

Both of them agreed with me and nodded their heads. They knew they were addicts. But they could not fight it, and they have both gone back to gambling, for that second game of dice. I feel helpless writing this, but there’s only one way this story can end: as it did with Yudhishthira, in epic sadness.

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Also read:

The Dark Game
The Game Outside the Game
Sweet Dopamine

The Interpreter

This is the 24th installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

If there is one quality that distinguishes humans from other species, it is our arrogance. We think we are masters of the universe – but really, we are not even masters of our own selves.

In the 1960s and ‘70s, the cognitive neuroscientists Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry carried out a series of studies on split-brain patients that are now legendary in the field. One of the treatments for severe epilepsy is to cut the corpus callosum, the collection of neural fibres that connects the two hemispheres of the brain. This results in what is known as a split brain, when the two halves of the brain cannot communicate with each other. (In popular psychology, the left brain is considered to control rational thought while the right brain is more intuitive and creative. This is a simplification, but a useful one.) Gazzaniga and Sperry’s experiments aimed to find out what consequence this had on behaviour, and what it revealed about the brain.

The good doctors separated the visual fields of the two hemispheres, and flashed an instruction to the right hemisphere. In one example: “Walk”. The subject got up and started walking. When asked why he suddenly got up and started walking, he replied, “To get a Coke,” – and here’s the remarkable thing: he actually believed that was the reason. Time after time, across instructions, across split-brain subjects, the docs found that the right hemisphere responded to one thing and the left hemisphere, having no way of knowing what the right brain was responding to, would rationalise the actions the person took.

Steven Pinker, in his influential book The Blank Slate, referred to these experiments and called the conscious mind “a spin doctor, not the commander in chief.” Gazzaniga himself referred to the left brain as merely “the interpreter.” VS Ramachandran wrote in Phantoms in the Brain, “[t]he left hemisphere’s job is to create a belief system or model and to fold new experiences into that belief system. If confronted with some new information that doesn’t fit the model, it relies on Freudian defence mechanisms to deny, repress or confabulate – anything to preserve the status quo.”

Consider this possibility: we do many things, some would even argue all things, driven by forces we can’t control. We are slaves of our wiring, our brain chemistry, of impulses and drives we may not even be aware of. Our left brain, our ‘spin doctor’, our ‘interpreter’, neatly rationalises all this and comes up with reasons for everything we do. Why are we walking? Because we want a Coke. There’s a reason for everything we do; but it’s not necessarily the real reason, even if we believe it to be so.

This brings up the obvious question of the existence of free will, and Gazzaniga actually wrote a fascinating book about this, Who’s in Charge: Free Will and the Science of the Brain. (Contrary to what you might expect, he actually makes a case for free will.) But that is a complex philosophical subject that is beyond the ambit of this column, which, after all, is about poker.

All the time, on the poker table, I see players articulate reasons for actions that sound just like the bullshitting of the left hemisphere. I see addicts, chasing one more dopamine rush, playing every hand, but rationalising any particular call. (“I was in position.” “I thought I’ll outplay him postflop.” “What if I hit?”) I see them making terrible calls because they’ve gotten attached to their hands and can’t let go, and give silly reasons after the fact. (“He was polarised there.” “He often bluffs, I have history with him.”) I see them unable to get up from sessions when they should book their hefty profits, and ditto when they should just book their losses. (“The table was so juicy, I thought I will clean it up/recover.”) I see players not in control of themselves, and with reasons for everything.

So when you play poker, or do anything at all in your life for that matter, watch out for the interpreter at work. Always ask yourself hard questions, and remember, the easy answers are usually wrong.

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For more of my poker columns, do check out the Range Rover archives.

Magnus Carlsen’s Weakness

This is the 23rd installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

Last week was an extraordinary one in the world of chess. The strongest tournament of all time, the Sinquefield Cup, the first ever with an average rating of 2800, came to an end. Six of the top ten players in the world, including the top 3, played each other in a double round robin. The young Italian-American Fabiano Caruana destroyed the field with an incredible score of 8.5 out of 10 rounds, including wins in his first seven games, which is a ridiculous streak in a tournament of this strength.  He finished three whole points ahead of second-placed Magnus Carlsen, the World Champion.

Carlsen, still World No. 1 and the highest ranked player of all time, didn’t take it well. Through the tournament, whenever he was asked about Caruana’s streak, he made the requisite graceful noises but added caveats. For example: “What he’s done here is absolutely incredible. But we shouldn’t completely forget what’s happened the last four years.” When asked before their round 8 encounter if he now felt he was the underdog – Caruana was 7 out of 7 at that pointCarlsen said he didn’t see himself as an underdog, “because I’m a better player.” Caruana’s streak came to an end in that game, but Carlsen just about managed to hold on to a draw.

To add to this, Carlsen played well below his usual clinical best, which augurs well for Viswanathan Anand, who plays him in a World Championship rematch in November. Carlsen is an impeccable technician, in terms of ability probably the greatest chess player who has ever lived, and certainly the favourite in the rematch. But Anand’s greatest opportunity lies not in Carlsen faltering on the board, but in disintegrating inside his own head. I think we saw Carlsen’s weak spot during the Sinquefield Cup. To use poker terminology, he has tilt issues.

In his landmark book, The Mental Game of Poker, sports psychologist Jared Tendler defines ‘tilt’ as “anger + bad play.” In short, you lose your mental equilibrium and start playing below your best, often making big mistakes. Tilt is caused by many different factors, and Tendler defines seven types of tilt. The one that I believe Carlsen suffers from is called ‘Entitlement Tilt.’

Entitlement tilt comes about when you believe that you should be winning more than you are, and you start tilting because you are being denied your due. In Tendler’s words, “Winning is a possession and you tilt when someone undeserving takes it from you.” So you could be at a game where you are clearly the best player, but the run of the cards leaves you five buyins down while the two biggest donkeys at the table are up 10 buyins each, and even though you know, rationally, that in the long run you will all get what you deserve, you are still upset about the situation. So you tilt, start playing badly, and suddenly you are the fish at the table.

My sense, from watching Carlsen over the last week, is that he’s been hit by entitlement tilt. It was hard for him to watch Caruana dominate the field in a manner that Carlsen believes only he should, and this affected both his emotional equilibrium and his play. This is where Anand’s opportunity lies in November. If he can hit Carlsen early and take the lead, Carlsen might go on entitlement tilt. Rather than stay calm and just play every game optimally, he might let his emotions affect his play. Poker players, when on tilt, move from their A-game to their C-game. Anand cannot match Carlsen’s A-game – but he can crush his C-game.

So come November, you might just see Anand, unlike in the first match, eschew the kind of quiet positional lines that Carlsen thrives in and go for high-risk-high-reward tactical lines to get Carlsen out of his comfort zone. If he manages to strike the opening blow, the gap in ratings and ability will not matter. In the normal course of things, Anand is unlikely to beat Carlsen. But he can help Carlsen beat himself.

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For more of my poker columns, do check out the Range Rover archives.

Keep Calm and Carry On

This is the 22nd installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

Writers like watching other people – part of our job description is to understand human nature – and there are few better places to do that than at a poker table. We have captive subjects, sitting in one place for many hours at a time, subject to massive emotional swings, and mostly with their guard down except, once in a while, when they are in a big hand and try to be stoic and impenetrable. Watching a poker game is like watching a reality show, except that the participants don’t display the occasional self-consciousness that a camera might provoke.

One of the things that most fascinates me in long sessions is how people behave differently depending on their stack sizes. If they’re winning and stacked up, they tend to be talkative and cocky and in a generally merry mood. When they’re losing, they can be upset, irritable, silent, sometimes even angry. Although short-term swings in poker are largely determined by luck, winners can be arrogant and advise others on how to play hands, as if their immediate good fortune is related to their skills, and losers can be sullen, diffident and negative. Comically, all this can be inverted within seconds. You could have a 4000bb pot at the end of which the guy who was winning is suddenly stuck for the day, and the erstwhile loser has recovered and made a profit. And snap, their demeanour changes as well, and the arrogant prick from a few minutes ago is now sitting with his shoulders slumped and his lips pouted, and you almost want to ruffle his hair and give him a bone.

This is how it is in the real world as well, for the poker table is a microcosm of life. The psychologist Paul Piff from UC Berkeley recently gave a TEDx talk about a number of social experiments he and his colleagues carried out. In one, they got 100 participants in their lab to play a rigged game of monopoly. Players were randomly assigned the roles of ‘rich player’ and ‘poor player’, and the rich player got “two times as much money,” “twice the salary” when they passed Go, and “got to roll two dice instead of one.” As you’d expect, the rich players started crushing the poor ones, purely due to the luck of the draw at the start. And their behaviour changed.

In Piff’s words, “One person clearly has a lot more money than the other person, and yet, as the game unfolded, we saw very notable differences and dramatic differences begin to emerge between the two players. The rich player started to move around the board louder, literally smacking the board with their piece as he went around. We were more likely to see signs of dominance and nonverbal signs, displays of power and celebration among the rich players. […] One of the really interesting and dramatic patterns that we observed begin to emerge was that the rich players actually started to become ruder toward the other person, less and less sensitive to the plight of those poor, poor players, and more and more demonstrative of their material success.”

At the end of the game, when interviewed, these rich players “talked about what they’d done to buy those different properties and earn their success in the game, and they became far less attuned to all those different features of the situation, including that flip of a coin that had randomly gotten them into that privileged position in the first place.”

Déjà vu, some? This is exactly how people behave in the real world, allowing privilege to give them a sense of superiority and entitlement. The consummate poker professional is immune to this, and does not allow himself to be affected by temporary swings, whether they last a few hours or a few sessions. He is always in the moment, trying to simply do the right thing. This is how he gets the most out of poker. And this is how we can get the most out of life. Don’t let success get to your head or failure get you down. Keep calm and carry on.

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For more of my poker columns, do check out the Range Rover archives.

The Five Commandments of Pot Limit Omaha

This is the 21st installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

Four years ago, when I started playing poker seriously, the games in India were incredibly soft. If I knew then what I know now, I would have made a fortune. Most players had either discovered poker on Zynga, or transitioned from teen patti. They either gambled it up, or played ABC poker. If you knew just the fundamentals, you could beat the game. I’m talking about No Limit Hold ‘Em (NLHE), of course.  That game has moved on a bit since then—but the new NLHE in India is PLO, or Pot Limit Omaha. Everyone’s just learning this variant of poker, the standard of play is low, and you can crush the tables by getting the basics right.

Last week, I spoke about the first key insight I learnt about PLO: that you need to be selective about the hands you play, keeping in mind their post-flop playability. This week, I bring you five essential tips that should help you beat the easy PLO games spread in India, where most pots are multiway and many players play 70% to 100% of hands. (Yum yum.) Here are the Five Commandments of Pot Limit Omaha.

One: Draw to the nuts. The biggest pots in PLO are nut full house vs smaller fullhouse. You have A987ds, the board comes K997A, and you stack off to KKxx. Similarly, set-over-set, flush-over-flush and nut straight vs sucker straight are also common situations where you can win and lose big pots. Therefore, it is foolish to play small pairs for their own sake, and smaller rundowns also make sucker straights too often. And when you draw, be aware of how many of your outs are to the nuts. You don’t want to chase a draw, hit the draw, and get stacked. So understand hand structures: T986, with a gap at the bottom, will have far more nut wraps than T876, with the gap at the top. And JT98 will hit six times as many wraps as JT92, with a dangler. Do some homework, study these structures and play accordingly. (I recommend Jeff Hwang’s books and Vanessa Selbst’s videos on Deuces Cracked.)

Two: Respect Position. People play way more straightforward in PLO than in NLHE, and lead out for protection much more, so the information you get in position is more reliable. Even when you bet after being checked to and get check-raised, you are far less likely to get check-raised in PLO with air. This is a post-flop game, and position is paramount. Respect it, and be super-tight out of position (OOP). An illustration: if you have 76xx rainbow and hit the nuts on a two-tone flop of 985, you are in deep trouble OOP. Opponents who continue will have wraps to higher straights, flush draws and sets. Most turn and river cards are bad for you, with offsuit A to 4 being the only bricks, and you need runner-runner brick. In position, you could pot control, and value-bet thin on the river even when the nuts change. Out of position, you’re all set up to make a mistake on a future street.

Three: Respect suitedness. PLO is all about redraws, and even backdoor flush draws add important equity to your hand. For example, let’s say on a board of QJTr, you have AK98ds with two backdoor flush draws. Your opponent also holds AK98, but he’s offsuit. You will win the pot 9% of the time, and the rest of the time it will be chopped. That’s a huge edge in the long run. Every backdoor flush adds around 4% equity to your hand, and in a game where one often sees set vs wrap-and-flush-draw all in on the flop, suitedness matters. On the same note, avoid offsuit hands, and don’t stack off with wraps on two-tone boards without a flush draw.

Four: Be aggressive. There are two ways to win in poker: by reaching showdown and letting your equity manifest itself; and by making the other guy fold and avoiding showdown. The key to winning big in PLO is being aggressive. Every time you jam a draw and make two pair or bottom set fold, you make money. Add fold equity to your pot equity, and your profits will shoot up, as long as you don’t overestimate either. Don’t go buckwild and raise-reraise every hand – you need significant pot equity to begin with, in PLO, and the first commandment about nut draws applies.

Five: Manage your bankroll. PLO is a high-variance game, and downswings, which are statistically inevitable, can be much more brutal than in NLHE. You’re playing a long-term game of percentages, so don’t enter a game you’re not adequately rolled for. There’s no point being the best player at a game where a downswing can wipe you out, leaving you without the funds to re-enter the game. You’ll just be banging your head on the sidelines, moaning about bad beats as donkeys gamble it up with each other.

These fundamental principles apply to easy games filled with beginners, which is what you’ll get in India right now. Keep doing your homework, and you’ll find yourself falling in love with this elegant, complex game. As a Chinese friend once told me, “Two cards good. Four cards better.”

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For more of my poker columns, do check out the Range Rover archives.

The Four-Card Game

This is the 20th installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

A marriage with two people can be complicated enough. Imagine then a marriage involving four, all of them bisexual. Instead of one couple, you don’t have two couples, but six, for each of them makes a pair with each of the others. The possibilities for drama are endless. It is a big difference, not a small one. It is the difference between Texas Hold ‘Em and Pot Limit Omaha (PLO).

In PLO, you get four cards dealt to you, not two. So basically, you get dealt the equivalent of six Texas hands, not two, and the possibilities grow exponentially. It’s an action game, and for that reason, is slowly picking up in India. And most newcomers to the game play it badly, because they play it like Texas when it it is hugely different, another game entirely, like baseball and cricket. Imagine if every ball Virat Kohli played was a full toss.

So if you happen to get into a home game where people are playing PLO, because it’s so much fun and ‘chaar patte milte hai, haha,’ what should you do to make money in that game? Well, given the state of Omaha games in India, there is exactly one thing you need to do to immediately give yourself a huge advantage. I will reveal that at the end of this column: first, here’s something fundamental about Omaha you need to understand.

The first thing newcomers learn about Omaha is that there isn’t much difference in preflop equity between the best and worst Omaha hands. (AA is an 88% favourite over KQo in Texas, but AA98ds is only 60% against 6543ds.) Inspired by this, they decide that any four cards can make a good hand on the flop, and they play nearly every hand. But this is the wrong way to think about the game. PLO is a postflop game, and the most important factor thing about any hand you have is not it’s preflop all-in equity, but its postflop playability.

Much more so than in Texas, every hand you play can call for the commitment of your entire stack. And when you choose a hand to play preflop, you want to pick one with which you are comfortable playing for stacks. You need to consider which hands connect with flops well enough that when you have a hand, you don’t mind putting in 300bb with it. Specifically, therefore, you want hands that can a) make the nuts and b) have redraws to the nuts.

Common ways in which people lose big pots is by hitting a lower set, straight or flush than their opponents. For this reason, hands like 77xx and 6543ds are basically garbage. Hands that win you big pots or lose you small ones in Texas – small pairs and medium suited connectors – do the exact opposite in PLO. Plus, subtle structural differences make a huge difference to hands: JT98ds is better than 9876ds, which will make sucker straights and wraps more often, and JT97ds is better than J987ds, because it will flop more nutted straights and wraps. Also, AAxx and KKxx hands are over-rated, as are offsuit hands like AKQJr. Getting a handle on the postflop playability of different types of hands is key, because they affect equities and profits and your bankroll.

I’ll write more about the structure of hands in next week’s column, where I’ll also give you a few specific tips on how to beat the kind of soft games you are likely to encounter. Until then, here’s the one thing you can do to make yourself an immediate favourite in your games: play tight preflop. Most beginners play too many hands, and by playing tight, choosing hands with good structures, you ensure that you have a stronger range in every postflop situation, more nutted and with more redraws. If your cards lie in happy matrimony with each other, all will be well.

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For more of my poker columns, do check out the Range Rover archives.

The Game Outside the Game

This is the 19th installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

I am in Macau as I write this column, indulging myself with a few days of recreational tournament poker. This is a welcome change from the live cash games in Mumbai, for a couple of reasons. One, I enjoy playing tournaments, which are a very different format to cash games, and a good way to recharge oneself. Two, I like the fact that I can just sit down at a tournament table and play poker, without having to worry about the game outside the game.

What is the game outside the game? Well, you know how poker works: you get cards, figure out ranges and probabilities and equities and all that other technical stuff, and use your chips to accumulate chips from others. You also set up what I call the game within the game, the metagame: you manipulate table image, set up different dynamics with different players, and try and win the levelling wars that ensue. All this is quite thrilling.

But there is a game beyond this that sometimes makes me uncomfortable. It is not talked about much in training videos and instructional books, and applies mainly to live cash games. It involves not the technical skills I’ve been writing about in earlier editions of this column, but the kind of soft skills a politician might require or a psychopath might have. You could, euphemistically, also refer to it as fish management.

In poker terminology, good players are ‘sharks’, who gobble up ‘fish’, the disparaging term used for worse players. Being a game of self-deception as much as deception, all the fish naturally think they are sharks. And everything is relative: every shark is a fish somewhere or the other. Every shark wants to play as much as possible with fish, and the game outside the game has two central aims: Making sure that a) Fish remain fish and b) Fish remain available to you.

To this effect, there are a number of essential fish-management rules. Some of them are sensible and seem like good etiquette – for example, ‘Never berate a fish for bad play.’ But there is nothing nice about the intent behind it: to make sure the fish keeps playing badly and gives you his money later. This intent is made explicit by other rules such as ‘Never give a fish your honest opinion about a hand.’

You’re supposed to validate every bad decision a fish makes. If he donks off 400bb with top-pair-no-kicker on a wet board, you’re supposed to sympathise, say ‘What a cooler’, and pretend he just got unlucky. If he asks your opinion about a hand, you’re supposed to always lie and confirm his faulty instincts rather than share your thoughts on the correct way to play it. When he plays badly and has a losing session, you comment on his bad luck; when he wins you comment on his excellent play. Basically, you fatten him up, and marinate the poor sod (or cod, as it were).

The other side of fish management is ensuring that they want to play with you, and you have access to their games. The cash game ecosystem in India, outside Goa and Sikkim, consists entirely of underground home games, and you want to get invited to the juicy games of the recreational players. You do this by pretending to be friends with them, showing a greater interest in their lives than you otherwise feel, even socialising with them after hours: basically, by faking it and being a hypocrite.

I find it hard to play this game outside the game. (You could say I’m a fish at it.) I value straightforwardness, and find it hard to lie to someone who asks for advice, or my opinion on a hand. And I cannot feign friendship with people I otherwise have no warm feelings towards. I love the deception that is an inherent part of every sport, but not the deceit at the heart of the game outside the game. In tournaments, thankfully, it is not required. You simply sit at the table and play poker. And that’s a relief.

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For more of my poker columns, do check out the Range Rover archives.

The Dark Game

This is the 18th installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

A few months ago, a friend of mine, J, wondered aloud how he would tell his prospective in-laws what he did for a living. An MBA by training, J was now a professional poker player. ‘Tell them you’re a game theorist,’ I said, ‘and are now engaged in the financially optimal application of your skills.’ My suggestion was glib and facetious: The skill involved in winning at poker is just half the story. The other half is disturbing and unpalatable.

J and I frequently play a game in New Bombay where we’re the only two long-term winners. The last time we played there, this is how the session ended: an affluent builder, many whiskeys down and possibly coked up as well, was raising and reraising every hand without looking at his cards. Stacks were 2000bb deep, the table was five-handed, and the rest of us were just waiting for hands with which to take the rest of his money. There wasn’t much mathematical calculation to be done, no equities to be worked out, no ranges to construct. Just wait to get a hand against the drunk guy. He did eventually stack himself, and J and I left big winners for the session.

I didn’t feel elated after my score, though. ‘We pride ourselves on studying the game, cracking the math, all that other shit,’ I said to J as we drove away, ‘but in the end this is what it comes down to. Sitting in a dark room waiting for a drunk builder to give his money away. Where is the nobility in this?’ J replied, ‘Yeah, we’re like drug dealers exploiting people’s addictions.’

I can give you all the counter-arguments to that, considering that I use them to rationalise what I do all the time. We play poker as an intellectual challenge; they are grown adults acting of their own free will; if we didn’t take their money someone else would. All this is the truth, but it’s not the whole truth. Poker is a unique game in the sense that it inhabits a twilight zone between sport and gambling. When J enters a hand against a drunk builder, they’re actually in parallel universes playing two different games. J approaches the game like a science and a competitive sport; the builder is basically gambling, like it’s teen patti or roulette, and he’s doing it because he is addicted to it. He’s a slave to dopamine. (This duality is within us as well, and J and the builder could easily switch universes once in a while.)

I have seen this addiction destroy lives around me. Businessmen have been ruined and gotten into heavy debt; marriages have broken down; previously respectable bankers have begged hosts of games, ‘Please give me one more buyin, just one more, I’ll pay you next week, promise.’ Sounds just like ‘one more hit’ or ‘one last peg’, doesn’t it?

The effects of rake make poker a negative-sum game. As the poker player Dan Colman put it in a post a month ago, ‘The losers lose way more money at this game than winners are winning. A lot of this is money they can’t afford to lose.’ Colman wrote this after winning US$15.3 million in a million-dollar tournament at the World Series of Poker this year. He refused to give interviews after his win, saying he didn’t want to promote poker. ‘I capitalize off this game that targets people’s weaknesses,’ he wrote. ‘I do enjoy it, I love the strategy part of it, but I do see it as a very dark game.’

The vast majority of players are long-term losers, but they are not the only victims of this addiction. Poker has a corrosive impact on the lives of even the winners. You achieve excellence at the game by playing a lot; and then need to put in volume for your edge to manifest itself in profits. As a result, your life can get consumed by the game, with everything else in it a backdrop for your obsession with poker. It isn’t healthy, and in at least one sense, the consummate professional and the drunk builder are in the same boat.

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Also Read:

Colman’s post after his WSOP win.
Daniel Negreanu’s response to Colman.
‘Helping People Through Poker’ by Igor Kurganov and Adriano Mannino.
‘A solution to Dan Colman’s dilemma’ by Phil Gruissem.

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For more of my poker columns, do check out the Range Rover archives.

Luck is All Around

This is the seventh installment of Lighthouse, my monthly column for BLink, a supplement of the Hindu Business Line.

You are lucky to be reading this. When your father ejaculated into your mother, somewhere between 300 to 500 million spermatozoa were released. One of them held the blueprint for you. That one sperm cell made it through the acidic furnace of the vagina, the graveyard for most sperms, and then outlasted the survivors to somehow become a person. Taking into account the fact that this was almost certainly not the sole sexual encounter between your parents at the time, your chances of coming into existence were probably a few billion to one. Given that your parents were born of similar odds, and somehow managed to meet and hook up and produce you, it is even more of a miracle that you exist. Indeed, consider that our specific species should itself evolve and survive through the ages, on this one out of trillions of planets (yes, trillions), and you get a true idea of how remarkable your existence is. Don’t be under the illusion, though, that this makes you special: everything around you is there despite similar odds against it. However unlikely it is for a specific something to exist, it is inevitable that some things will, indeed, be there. Congratulations.

While everything else pales into insignificance beyond the spectacular fact of our existence, we’re still not satisfied. We spend our days striving for this or that trivial little thing, and stressing out over small matters like the maid coming late or the scratch on the car or the tax returns or the in-laws or getting laid. (We are programmed to worry specifically about that last one, but we are again uniquely fortunate, among species, to be able to ignore our programming. Be a rebel, don’t fuck today.) Honestly, just the fact that we are here should keep us in a constant state of elation and wonder. But we get tripped up by vanity. We believe that we are special (as a species and as individuals), and that we possess the intelligence to make sense of the world, and to rule it. This vanity, in the cosmic scale of things, is either comic or tragic, depending on how seriously you take yourself. And me, I find it hard to take myself too seriously when I’m sitting in a dark room in New Bombay playing cards with a drunk builder who’s snorting cocaine as he asks me, “Kya laga liya, sirjee?

Four years ago I became a serious poker player. I did it to make money, but ended up learning how little I knew about life. The most important thing I learnt from poker was about the role of luck in the world. Poker is essentially a game of skill, but only in the long run (which can be longer than you imagine). In the short run, luck dominates. Every action has associated probabilities, and you try to manouver your way through a poker game in such a way that the probabilities are on your side. Keep getting your money in as a 51% favourite, and in the long run, all the money is yours. In the short run, you could get hammered again and again and again. For that reason, poker players are constantly told not to be ‘results-oriented’. As Lord Krishna recommended in the Bhagawad Gita, just keep doing the right thing, and all will be well. Eventually.

While I am an atheist, the Lord was on to something. In life, too, luck plays a far bigger role than we realise. And as in poker, the management of that luck is the key skill we need to learn. Let me turn to sports to illustrate what I mean. In the last installment of Lighthouse, I had written about how luck plays a huge role in football, which is also a game of probabilities. For example, Lionel Messi scores from a direct free kick 1 in 12.5 times. This is the bare number, over a sufficiently significant sample size of free kicks. And yet, we cheer madly when he curls one in, and groan and go ‘WTF is he doing’ when he flips one way over – even though, in the larger scheme of things, they’re the same shot. While fans and even most reporters don’t get this, managers do, working furiously to maximise the probabilities in their favour. (Every action on a football field has a probability associated with it.) But fans go by results, and while those may even out in a league over a season, they never do in knockout tournaments, much to the bemusement and frustration of the men in charge. Maradona has won a World Cup, Messi hasn’t, what does that say to me? Nothing at all. It’s luck.

I was a cricket journalist for a few years, and in retrospect it amazes me how seriously we took results. Every action on a field has a number associated with it. A full delivery outside off in the 40th over has X% chance of reverse-swinging into the batsman, Y% chance of being cover-driven if it doesn’t, and Z% chance of beating the field when that happens. Through a day, as the overs go by, thousands of events of different probabilities intersect as we arrive at a result that is determined partly by skill and partly by luck. And yet, we cheer the slog that goes for six and boo the batsman holing out in the deep with a majestic lofted off-drive. Chance can determine careers: MS Dhoni blundered by leaving the last over of the first T20 World Cup final to Joginder Sharma, but it was hailed as a masterstroke when it happened to work. After Sharma conceded a wide and a six, what if Misbah-ul-Haq hadn’t played that one false stroke? Would Dhoni be Dhoni?

Life, like sport, consists of millions of intersecting events with varying probabilities, and Luck is a lead character in the drama of every person’s life. The lesson here is to not sweat what we cannot control, to take nothing in our lives for granted, and to make each moment count. And also, to be humble, because humility is the only appropriate response to the awesome complexity of this world.

Meanwhile, in that dark New Bombay room, my builder friend asks me again, “Kya hai bhai? Gutty laga li kya?” I stare at the table and show no emotion. He calls. I show him my cards, reflecting on my good fortune, and on billions and billions of spermatozoa.

Miller’s Pyramid

This is the 17th installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

“So what is the worst thing you do when you go on tilt?” I asked a couple of my fellow pros the other day. It turned out that all of us had the same answer to that question: we call too much. We become fish when we play at our worst, unable to fold preflop or postflop, falling for hands like lovesick teenagers. And when we’re on our A-game, this is exactly the flaw we exploit in others.

And yet, and yet. I recently read the latest book by one of my favourite poker writers, Ed Miller, Poker’s 1%: The One Big Secret That Keeps Elite Players on Top. Early on in the book, Miller states that most poker players fold too much. He writes: “In today’s game, the vast majority of regular no-limit players have folding frequencies on the turn and river that are too high.” The other big leak that regulars have, he says, is that they don’t bet enough. In other words, they give up on hands too often.

Let me illustrate this. Someone raises from middle position and you call on the button, and it’s a heads-up pot. On the flop villain bets half the pot. How often are you folding here? Note that I haven’t specified either villain’s range or your range, or the cards that came on the flop. What matters is the bet size. By betting half-pot, villain has given himself 2-1 on his bet. In other words, he needs to win the pot right away better than 1 in 3 times to show an immediate profit. If you don’t continue in the hand at least 66% of the time, therefore, you are basically giving money away.

This logic applies all the way to the river. Miller says that in a heads-up pot, given bet sizes of between half to two-thirds of the pot, you need to continue with 70% of your range on each street. If you don’t,  you are exploitable, and are burning money. Equally, if you are the aggressor, you need to bet 70% of your range on each street as well, for similar mathematical reasons. (You are exploitable if you bet 70% on the flop but give up, say, half the time on the turn.)

A visual illustration of this rule is the pyramid below. The base is the range of hands you enter a pot with preflop. You discard 30% of it on each street. Miller asserts that the sides of this pyramid should be smooth. Where the pyramid goes out of whack is where a player has a leak. If a player calls too wide preflop and then plays fit or fold, you exploit him on the flop. Some players fold too much on the turn; double-barrel against them. Some preflop agressors give up too often after one c-bet; float against them with any two. And so on. (Note that the pyramid is a guide in heads-up pots, not multiway ones.)

image

What you need to do to play optimally is to constuct this pyramid for yourself. First, you need to be tight preflop. This way, it will actually be feasable to follow the 70-70-70 rule. For example, if you play 22% of all hands in a full-ring game, by the time you get to the river you will be left with 7.5% (.22 x .7 x .7 x .7), of which 5% will be value and 2.5% will be air. But you will continue with different parts of this preflop range on different flops, such as A33r or QT6 two-tone. You need to construct your ranges accordingly, which takes tons of homework.

Miller’s book is partly inspired by Matthew Janda’s Applications of No-Limit Hold ‘em, and while he lays out what seems to be a framework towards game-theory optimal (GTO) play, as Janda explicitly does, Miller oddly doesn’t mention that term anywhere in the book. The thing with GTO poker is this: even if you don’t intend to play that way, merely understanding what it is can help you identify and exploit other people’s leaks, while eliminating your own. In that context, you might find Miller’s Pyramid to be quite the wonder.

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For more, do check out the Range Rover archives.