Last night I watched The
Cincinnati Kid, which I first saw in the theater as long ago as 1965. The
cast is stellar, including Steve McQueen, Ann-Margret, Edward G. Robinson, and
Tuesday Weld. The core of the film is a high stakes game of 5-card stud poker. It
is a pretty good movie even though poker isn’t really my game.
from "The Cincinnati Kid"
I’ve played poker casually over the years – always with other
casual players, always 5-card draw, and never for high stakes. In that kind of
group I can hold my own, for I’m fairly disciplined at playing by the odds and not
by intuition. But I know my limits. I’m not the best bluffer or recognizer of
bluffs. My grasp of the odds is basic, not intimate. A seasoned amateur player,
never mind a professional, would clean out my stake in short order. There was a
poker game in my dorm at college every Saturday night, but I was sensible
enough not to participate. I heard much wailing on Sundays from residents who
had lost hundreds of dollars (in 1971 dollars). I didn’t want to be one of
them. I’ve continued to avoid serious games ever since. Playing cards date back to 1000 CE in China. They entered
Europe via Egypt sometime around 1360. The suits of the cards varied from place
to place and some of those variants still exist, but the current standard simplified
suits of clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades date to 1480 when French entrepreneurs
began producing them with stencils. Numerous games were invented for them, but
poker is surprisingly recent, dating back to 1829 in New Orleans. It (including
the name) apparently derives from the French poque, which was played in Louisiana during its French days. Other
than betting and bluffing, the two games are not very close, however, so
someone (we don’t know who) at some point must have sat down and deliberately invented
the distinct rules for poker. By 1834 the rules were tweaked into their current
form. There are numerous variants of the game, the most popular
being 5-card draw, 7-card draw, 5-card stud, 7-card stud, and Texas Hold’em.
Texas Hold’em is a version of 7-card stud that made it into the World Series of
Poker in 1971 and is currently the basis of the WSOP Main Event, last won by Daniel
Weinman who took home 12.1 million dollars. I don’t encourage gambling in a general way, since some
people find it addictive. But for non-addictive types who know and keep to
their limits, there are some valuable lessons in the game of poker. Primarily,
it attunes one’s sense of probabilities in a more realistic direction. Playing
odds is a long game for one thing, not a short term strategy. We tend to regard
intuitively 70% odds in our favor as pretty safe bets for example. If you correctly
calculate your odds of winning with a particular hand at 70%, however, you will
still lose a not inconsequential 30% of the time. You must judge and hedge your
bets accordingly in order to stay in the game. Thinking probabilistically
rather than with unwarranted certainty is a skill worth cultivating off the
poker table every bit as much as on it.
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