31.01.2012
By Caspar Berry
That’s not fair” I cried as my friend completed his set of Vine St, Marlborough St and Bow St that would eventually lead to victory that evening.
I would not have minded of course had he completed the transaction fairly and squarely but the deal was sealed with the offer of both four hundred pounds of Monopoly currency and twenty pounds of actual sterling! “That’s cheating,” I shouted again. And thus began an argument which still rages to this day, twenty years on. To me, there is no debate; what he did was outside of the rules of the game. It was cheating.
I was reminded of this experience recently when, in April of this year, the FBI seized the URL addresses of the two biggest online poker sites, Poker Stars and Full Tilt. The action finally brought an end to their US operations five years after the uncertainty initially created by the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006.
Some have viewed this definitive action to be a good thing, but the
unacceptable sting for many players active on the sites at the time is that whilst Full Tilt had a reported $400 million (£256 million) in players’ funds it only had $60 million in the bank – apparently placing its faith in a kind of fractional reserve system of deposits that is likely to leave thousands of players nearly bankrupt.
“That’s not fair” they have understandably cried as two of the site’s founders - erstwhile poker heroes Howard Lederer and Chris ‘Jesus’ Ferguson – are alleged to have taken dividends of tens of millions from the site leaving the vast majority with almost nothing to show for years of play/work!
Interestingly, while what has happened is almost certainly illegal, and therefore obviously much more serious and profound than a bit of cheating at Monopoly, the central problem is very similar: what happened took place outside the basic rules of the game. It still happened, however, and no amount of shouting or complaining is likely to change that fact.
The common perception of poker is that it is broadly a game of epistemic risk. Complete novices sometimes think that it is a game of deductive logic, like blackjack, that starts and ends with the likelihood of a particular card coming down. After playing the game for even just a few hours, however, it is clear that this is only a very small part of the story and that in practice playing the game involves making a series of inductive assessments about our opponents – assessments which get better with experience that leads to greater accomplishment and expertise. In this respect, the decision-making process of poker is very like that of any other realm of life.
Where poker is unlike life is that often you are forced to make such a decision every 90 seconds or so. Given that you cannot abdicate, delegate or procrastinate during the process of making them, they are even less like a lot of the decisions we make in life, which are often left unaddressed for as long as possible. Similarly, the decisions we make in poker are often very one-dimensional, focusing merely on the allocation of money, in the form of poker chips, for the purposes of accumulating more in the long term.
There is rarely any consideration of society or the greater good of those around you, which ultimately is why I stopped playing professionally.
But where poker is exactly the same as life is that – despite a recognised set of rules by which the game can be played reasonably and fairly on a daily basis – from time to time those rules will be breached. Often, such a contravention will be unfair to one or more parties: people may lose money; in the real world they may lose things much more valuable and precious.
In The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb defines the ‘Ludic Fallacy’ as the misuse of games to model real-life situations, but in actual fact both are a perfect metaphor for the other and Taleb goes on to say as much. Each has a set of rules which – if and when adhered to – make their play relatively straightforward and enjoyable. In games, however, people cheat and poker sites go under and in real life governments default and whole currencies collapse.
He creates the hypothetical situation of a “fair” coin being flipped ninety nine times and coming up heads every time. Two fictitious creations of the author – Fat Tony and Dr John – are asked for the chances that the next flip will also bring up heads.
Dr John answers: “Obviously fifty-fifty, independent events have no bearing on each other.” Fat Tony says: “Near enough one hundred percent heads” on the grounds that any coin that flips heads ninety nine times straight is obviously biased. In other words, just because a game appears to have rules, doesn’t mean that they are – or always will be – adhered to.
The outcome of such a consideration in the game of poker has the interesting effect of making it much more a game of aleatory or unpredictable - some might say unquantifiable - risk. The probability that the next card is an ace is arguably far less significant in our overall calculations than the chances that the game we are playing is somehow rigged, or the likelihood of being robbed on our way to the carpark or the probability that the website on which we are playing does not actually have our money in it, or who knows what?
When such breaches occur we may feel aggrieved; we may be moved to
protest; we may seek revenge and we may be justified in any and all such
responses. But, hopefully, there is one thing we know for sure above all else: from time to time such things will happen. They will. Life is unfair. And any long-term strategy that does not account for such possibility must surely be inherently flawed in some respect. If we play the game assuming that nothing unfair and outside the rules of the game will ever happen then we are not playing the game particularly well.
The only question is what will we do in response? Will we have factored such events into our analysis and strategy? Or will the memory of such events still hurt twenty years on?
