Sean Carroll, the UChicago physicist behind the delightful Preposterous Universe blog, linked to my post on the World Series of Poker and added some thoughts on the nature of poker from a theoretical perspective. It has never occured to me to combine, even in theory, my interests in poker and science, so what he has to say I found very interesting:
The secret of the allure (and challenge) of poker is that it's a game of incomplete information, the kind game theorists love to think about. You know the cards you already have, and you (should) know the probabilities of various further cards coming your way, but you have to infer your opponents' hands from tiny hints (their bets, their positions at the table, their personal styles, etc). Texas Hold-Em is so popular because it manages to accurately hit the mark between "enough information to devise a consistently winning strategy" and "not enough information to do much more than guess." The charm in such games is that there is no perfect strategy, in the sense that there is no algorithm guaranteed to win in the long run against any other algorithm. The best poker players (and there are a good number of people who earn their living from poker, so it's by no means "gambling") are able to use different algorithms against different opponents, as the situation warrants.
As we might say at a poker table, Sean just flopped the nuts (no, that's not nearly as naughty as it sounds, but take it from me, it's just as fun - when we say that a player as the nuts, it means he has the best hand possible). This is absolutely accurate. It's that constant mind game, the endless tinkering that is so much fun. And it's especially true when you play against the same people often, as I do. In our weekly poker game, we have a group of about 20 people total, with only around 10 playing every week, so there's a constant psychological game going on. Now that I think about it, it's akin to natural selection - the gazelles get a little faster through selection and the lions do the same, forcing the gazelles to get faster yet, and so forth.
In our game, there are really only 3 or 4 players who think on that level. Which, by the way, is fine by me. I like fish (bad players in poker are called fish). Best of all, there are several players who couldn't stop chasing (poker term: chasing is when someone keeps calling bets in the hope of hitting a big hand with the turn of an unlikely card or two) if they were in cement shoes. Chasers can and do get lucky, of course, and they will often take down big pots, but over the course of a night they will usually end up behind.
We have one guy in particular who shows up week after week and loses between $100 and $200 pretty much without fail (the game is .50/1.00 pot limit holdem, meaning the small blind is 50 cents, the big blind is $1 and you can bet as much as is in the pot at any given time). He plays the same way every week. He chases and chases and chases, rarely getting the card he needs to make his hand, then tries to bluff at pots on the river (the last card on the board is called the river card) at the wrong time. We laughed the other day because three hands in a row he folded, then was complaining because if he had stayed in, he would have won all three hands. I said, "See, that's why you should never fold. You never know what cards are coming next and it could make you a winner." Predictably, he virtually never folded the rest of the night and ended up losing over $200. In retrospect, I'd say that Sean is only partially correct. Part of the fun of poker is the constant need to adapt your strategy to others. The other part is playing against someone who is so bad that you don't have to. Easy money is always fun.
You play at a much higher stakes game than was played in the immigrant Italian house I grew up in in Brooklyn. You put so much emphasis in your posts on strategy and winning and poker-as-sport that I wonder if you miss the main appeal of the game I watched my grandfather and uncles play once a week on the kitchen table in Brooklyn. It was a social game. Poker was the reason to get together. [Dime and quarter bets.] For hours. To talk politics, family business, the news, etc. To drink wine, reminisce about "the old country." Winning or losing five or ten bucks hardly mattered. It was the game as social event that attracted me to it [until I fell among philistines at college who wanted nothing to do with poker, but played hearts... HEARTS for god's sake... by the hour. Yes, I joined them. It was the only game in town dorm....]
But no other game I can think of makes for good conversation as a part of it better than poker. [Five card draw or stud of course. None of these fancy cowboy game's like Hold 'Em.] People tell me bridge is like that, but most of them are Republicans and so I don't believe them.
I think it depends entirely on the setting. In our home game, the situation is both social and serious. We spend a good portion of the time making fun of each other and telling jokes the way any group of old friends would do. For me, thinking strategically about poker is just automatic. I've done it for too long to shut it off even if I wanted to. Even in the middle of joking and loud music, my brain is automatically tucking away little bits of information and compiling them - how someone reacts when they've got a good hand or when they're bluffing, what kind of bets they make when they're in the blinds or in middle position or late position, how they bet if there are 7 people in the pot rather than 2, and so forth. If I'm playing in a casino, I'm much more serious. But I'm far too competitive to just not care whether I win.