On poker, competition, freedom, and America

Happy 250th to the greatest country in the world!

If Unreported Truths has seemed light this week, I apologize. I was in Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker, the world’s largest poker tournament.

Even if you have never touched a card, you may have heard of the WSOP “Main Event,” the $10,000 buy-in tourney that’s drawn fortune-seekers to the desert since 1970. Other tournaments now have higher entry fees, but the Main remains poker’s championship, with the biggest prize pool. Last year it had 9,735 entrants — and paid its winner, Michael Mizrachi, $10 million.

I wasn’t in Vegas for the Main, though. It is fantastic, but it takes time¹ I couldn’t afford this year. The World Series now includes 100 events with different games and entry fees — up to $250,000. I had come out for two smaller, faster events, each lasting three days at most.

Note I haven’t used the word gambling once so far.

That’s because poker is not gambling. Not really.

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(Don’t gamble with the truth!)

Or support my hard work at the tables with a one-time donation!

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These big tourneys offer the best proof. In them, most entrants lose all their money. Payouts start when 15 percent of players remain. (The long footnote below explains how tournaments are structured, if you are interested.²)

By tourney’s end, the last player has all the chips and gets 10 to 20 percent of the total initial prize pool — sometimes up to 1,000 times the buy-in. In other words, pay $1,000 to enter, sit on your rear playing cards for a couple of days, win $1,000,000.

Easy, right? That’s why these big “multi-table tournaments” are so appealing.

Yet.

Despite the huge entry fields, the same few hundred people wind up finishing high up or winning them over and over, in a way that randomness cannot begin to explain.

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(All-in on ‘Merica!)

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Mizrachi is one.

Before winning the Main Event, he had won seven other “bracelets” — World Series events. Other players have won even more. Phil Ivey, sometimes considered the greatest living poker player, has taken home 11.

These guys are not poker players. They are professional poker players, and they have an enormous edge over amateurs like me.

Of course, poker is not entirely skill. Like Scrabble, it features an element of luck, which is why weaker players can beat stronger ones, briefly. I would have no chance, none at all, to beat Garry Kasparov in chess, which is a game of perfect information where luck plays no role. But in a WSOP tournament last year, I played next to Ivey for a while (fortunately, he was on my right, better for me). I walked away with my chips and pride intact.

In time, though, the better players win.

And time does not mean years. Days or weeks will separate the strong and the weak, the skilled from the lucky. Luck evens out. Luck does not exist in the long run.

The professional player who seems to run perfectly, who always has the winning cards, doesn’t really. He just knows how to bluff with his losers — and when to fold them and hide them away.

The truth is that most people who enter these tournaments have no real chance of winning them. Many recreational players will never even reach the “min cash,” the 15 percent stage where they receive their entry fee back, plus a small payout.

A 2015 study that examined results from 456 million hands played online for real money confirmed that skill plays a large role in poker — players who did well in one period tended to do well in later periods. This study probably underestimated the element of skill at big cash tournaments, which attract both the world’s best players and a lot of recreational players looking for a million-dollar payout. In other words, the gap between the best and worst player is probably higher at the World Series than anywhere else.

But you don’t have to read papers to know that poker is a game of skill, not luck.

You don’t even have to know how to play.

Just sit at a table for an hour or two and the bad players will announce themselves. I mean that word literally. They will lose. They will tell stories about how good they are and then make bad plays and whine while other players nod or encourage them.

Don’t tap the tank, an old poker saying goes. The tank is a fish tank. The bad players are the fish. And the good players eat them.

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One reason I have realized I prefer playing tournaments to cash games: to make significant money in cash games you have to take advantage of real, obvious desperation.

People who barely know how to play or are drunk or high or addicted to gambling or all of the above will show up and buy in for the maximum allowed at the table — $1,000 or $2,000, maybe — and lose quickly. They’ll throw in all their money in completely nonsensical ways, buy in again and lose again.

Sometimes they will lose five or 10 buy-ins in a night before they give up and walk away. Then the better players will nod and get back to playing with each other.

Sometimes they’ll lose their cars, or houses, or businesses, or spouses in a few weeks or months before they give up and walk away. Sometimes they’ll kill themselves before they give up and walk away.

Tournaments do not have that dynamic.

That’s not to say they don’t attract their share of degenerate gamblers. But they require a patience desperate players don’t have. And while they have plenty of bad players, picking on the bad players alone will not get you far. By the time the cash is in sight, those players are gone.

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(Phil Ivey, one of the world’s best poker players. He’s not the one who belongs to Jesus.)

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Tournaments are also fairer than cash games.

Because seat assignments are random and cannot be changed, players cannot collude with each other, or outright cheat, or simply move tables to find weaker players, as they do at cash games.

So: tournaments are the way.

Except they require a lot of luck (luck may not exist in the long run, but in any single hand it is very real); and a lot of patience. To fold hand after hand as the tournament clock is ticking and your stack is slowly shrinking is hard; to have the strength not to play a marginal hand when one finally shows up is harder. To stay focused after 10 hours of play, knowing that a single mistake can end your tournament when you are just short of the cash, is exhausting.

The truest words ever said about poker: Poker’s a hard way to make an easy living.

Why, then?

Why am I writing about poker on this Fourth of July, on the 250th anniversary of this great country?

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Because tournament poker — not baseball, not football, not even basketball — is the truest American game.

It is open to all. No licenses or degrees required. Anyone who can get to Las Vegas is allowed to enter the World Series (including some I wish wouldn’t be, guys who use annoying other players as an intentional strategy). On Thursday a 34-year-old named Biao Ding was two seats from me. I hadn’t heard of him. Probably I should have. He’s considered the best player in China.

The rules are defined in advance and the same for everyone. The casino and dealers are state-regulated and impartial — fairer than any judge, they have no politics, no reason to pick one side over another.

And so the fight is fair and honest. You put up your capital and compete.

Poker is the not the American dream.

It is the American ideal at a nine-handed table, a chance to win or lose in open competition, to test one’s skills in real time. At the end of each hand, the chips move one way or another. At the end of the tournament, one player still stands. The game can be cruel, but it is never a lie.

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(Unreported Truths. Never a lie. Stand with me.)

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I played two events this week, both Texas Hold ‘em no-limit, the simplest and purest form of poker. About 30 hours of poker over three days. I hardly left the hotel.

I finished 993rd in the $1,000 “mini-main” (better than it sounds, there were 5,908 players) and 37th in the $3,000 out of 1,792 players, a $17,240 cash. That’s the second straight year I have cashed in the $3,000.

I put Biao Ding on tilt, too. I took a big stack of his chips when an aggressive play I’d made paid off (I was behind, sure, but sometimes fortune favors the bold), and shortly thereafter he busted. He shook his head as he walked off.

America 1, China 0.

Next year I’m not going to finish 37th. I’m going to finish first.

Not in the $3,000. In the Main.

There’s no point in getting in the ring if you don’t plan to win.

God bless you, your family, and the United States of America.

Have a fantastic Fourth of July.

1. To handle all its entrants, the Main Event includes four starting days and two “Day 2s.” Only in Day 3 are all the remaining players combined into a single field, and only on Day 4 — which is actually, at a minimum, the fifth calendar day for players who have entered on Day “1D” — do players begin to get paid. So winning money in the Main requires at least five calendar days, unless you choose to enter the tournament on “Day 2,” which is allowed and an increasingly popular strategy.

2. All tournaments have the same structure. All the money goes into a big pool, which will later be split among the players, after the casino takes 7 to 15 percent for running it, including tips for the dealers. (Tournaments with higher entry fees usually have lower administrative charges.)

Everyone starts with the same number of chips and plays at a randomly chosen table. Lose all your chips and you are eliminated. Some tournaments allow players to reentry, or “rebuy,” while others are “freezeouts,” allowing only one entry per tournament. If you rebuy, you get exactly the same number of chips you got for the first buy-in.

Sounds a lot like a regular poker game, right?

But tournaments have two big differences. Players cannot just scoop up their chips and leave if they’re ahead. They must play until they are eliminated. In other words, if you win a couple of big hands early, you have to keep playing.

And most players leave with nothing. The payouts start when about one in seven players remains, and rise until only one player remains. (The unfortunate player who is the last to be eliminated just before the payouts start is said to have “bubbled” or been “on the bubble.” I have bubbled. It is not fun.)

So why not just sit around, do nothing, and wait for the payouts to start?

Because the “blinds” and “antes” — forced bets players must make each time a new hand starts — rise every 20 to 60 minutes. When a tournament starts, a player may have 40,000 chips and have to put in 100 chips with each deal. (Tournament structures are actually a bit more complicated than this in reality, but this simplified version is accurate enough to make the point.) No big deal, if your cards aren’t good that first hand, he can just throw them away. He’ll have 39,900 chips left.

But a few hours later, he might be forced to bet 40,000 chips — the starting stack — per hand. The ever-rising forced bets mean players have to play and accumulate chips to stay ahead, or they will be forced to throw in their chips at the wrong time.

In other words, tournaments feel a lot like life. When they start, you have all the time in the world; then suddenly you look up and the hour is late.