Dan Luu writes that, as a newcomer to poker, something puzzles him about how the game is played:
Poker players have collectively decided it’s not possible to play the game without trolling unless you play for “serious” money. The reasoning is something like, “obviously, people will make stupid plays like going all in every hand unless there’s real money on the line”. Outside of the implicit collective agreement to do so, this is patently absurd — people play all sorts of games where there’s no money on the line and they don’t, in general, purposely make troll moves, so there shouldn’t be an inherent reason poker can’t be played seriously when there isn’t serious money on the line, but since people have agreed to buy into this collective delusion, it seems fairly difficult to find a poker game where people actually want to play well without putting an amount of money up that’s meaningful to the people playing.
As a poker player myself, this rings true to me. OK, I’ve never been serious about the game–in grad school we had a weekly nickel-dime-quarter dealer’s choice game, mostly seven-card stud (this was before the popularity of table stakes Texas hold ’em, and “going all in” wasn’t a possibility in our game), and in the decades since then I’ve only played a few times, most recently over ten years ago. That last game included some political scientists and also some actual politicos who fit the stereotype (they were cynical and cursed a lot). It was pretty stressy, not a pleasant experience. I won a couple hundred bucks, probably more from luck than anything else, and one of the politicos was annoyed at me about that. I still think about the game, though. It’s a point of reference for me, as here, for example.
Anyway, yeah, in grad school we weren’t broke, but throwing $4 into the pot counted for something; it’s not a move we’d do just for laughs. Playing for pennies wouldn’t have been enough. And playing just to win, in the way that you might play a game of Scrabble, or chess, or ping-pong, or Uno . . . Nah, that just doesn’t work in poker.
The question is, why? Luu argues that this is just a convention, just one of the unwritten rules of the game, just as players avoid strategies using grid positions in Codenames. There’s an implicit agreement in poker not to play seriously unless the stakes compel it, and without this convention, people could play happily for low or even zero stakes, just as they do with chess or bridge. Luu:
There’s often some specific argument like “it’s more fun to play than to fold”, but most people would say this about declaring vs. defending in bridge, and yet you don’t see people randomly bidding 7NT (the maximum bid) in bridge all the time so their team is declaring and not defending, the way you see people randomly going all in in poker when money isn’t on the line (or only a very small amount of money is on the line).
I don’t know about that. I mean, yeah, I think Luu is right about people being willing to play serious bridge or Scrabble or whatever for zero stakes but not doing so with poker, but I don’t think it’s just a convention.
Some possible reasons
So let me throw out a few reasons why it’s essentially impossible to play a fun and serious game of poker not for money, even though people have no problem doing this for many other board games:
1. There’s a historical relation between recreational game-playing and gambling. I’m not an expert here, but my impression is that if you went back a hundred years ago, when people played bridge, gin rummy, poker, cribbage pretty much any card game, it was usual to play for money. Not to mention dice games, which are only played for money. Nowadays I don’t think anyone plays gin rummy–it’s just too damn boring, and there are too many other competing leisure activities.
2. Low effort, high risk, high reward strategies (what Luu calls “trolling”) exist in poker more than in other games. What would be the equivalent in Scrabble, for example? Maybe trading in your letters more often in the hope of getting a seven-letter word? But that’s a lot of work, especially if you’re not a top player. (If you are a good player, then trading in can be a legitimate strategy, just as going all-in can be a serious play for a good poker player.) In chess, you can play more wildly, more offense and less defense, sacrificing pieces for a positional advantage—and players are more likely to do these fun plays in a home game with no stakes than in a tournament where rating points are on the line. There is some “trolling” in chess too–for example, goofy openings where you purposely block off your own pieces, just to get to an interesting position unlike anything your opponent is familiar with–but that’s not quite the same as going all-in; the poker equivalent would be more like a strategy of betting in a slightly irrational way to throw off the other players.
Or what about Uno? Uno’s a boring game but it has the pleasant feature that it requires no thought to play; it can be relaxing in the same way that it’s relaxing to watch a baseball game on a sunny afternoon. When you play Uno for no money, I guess you play with less focus than if you’re playing for money, but it’s pretty much the same game.
I guess my point is that, in any game, the lower the stakes, the more opportunity for silly play, but poker is one of the few games where trolling can be exciting. The closest analogy would be ping pong. Slamming it on every point is like going all-in in poker: it’s exciting, you’ll probably miss, but it’s very satisfying when you win.
3. Poker is a multi-player game. In ping-pong you can have a friendly game where both players are slamming every point, or a friendly game where both players are trying their hardest to win, or a friendly game where both players are just hitting it back and forth–any of these are possible. But in zero-stakes or low-stakes poker, it only takes one player to troll and it throws off the whole game.
4. Poker’s a skill game but not completely a skill game. Luu writes:
I would’ve thought that playing in the largest public cash games around would be the equivalent of joining a local open chess tournament, where anyone who started as an adult, let alone as a middle aged adult, will get demolished by IMs/FMs/NMs (I looked up one random local chess tournament, and there was an IM who placed 3rd). But you can play poker for two weeks and sit down at the biggest public games in town and do fine (there are, supposedly, some well-known private games that are a bit bigger than the largest casino games and I have no idea what the level of skill in those games is). Part of that may be down to variance, but part of that seems to be that the local level of play in poker isn’t all that high, at least in the largest public cash games around. . . .
I strongly suspect the best poker players are much better at poker than the best modern board game players. But, for some reason, you don’t see this difference expressed in local games in the same way that you would if you went down to the local chess club.
I just think the range of abilities, from beginner to intermediate to expert, is much wider in chess than in poker. I’ve played poker with some people who are clearly worse than me and some who are clearly better than me–but these differences are nothing like the difference between me and a really bad chess player, or the difference between me and a really good chess player.
5. The structure of the game. Poker’s much more interesting when you play it for money. An 8-hour poker session is commonplace, but people usually would not want to play a board game for 8 hours. And nobody would play 8 hours of poker if not for money (unless, say, you’re trying to get practice for a future money game)–it would just be too boring.
There a scene in Valis, I believe, where Dick is in a mental hospital and they’re playing games like Go Fish. There’s the opportunity to play poker, but not for money, and Dick says that poker is not a card game, it’s a money game. And he’s got a point. Money is central to poker in a way that it’s not in chess or Scrabble or even bridge. In poker, you’re not just playing for money; the game is built around betting. Money is involved at every stage of the game play.
6. In money poker, the goal is not to win; it’s to improve your bank balance. This makes a difference. For example, suppose it’s the end of the night, you’re down by a lot, and you’re in one last big hand. If your only goal was to end up a winner, you might be motivated to risk a big outlay even if it only gave you a small chance of winning that final pot. But it doesn’t work that way with money. Being down $100 is bad, but being down $300 is worse. It’s not like football where you might as well throw that Hail Mary pass because, if you don’t try, you’ll lose, and getting that pass intercepted won’t make things any worse.
All said and done, though, I think Luu is on to something when he talks about the culture of the game. I could imagine a version of poker that’s played for points, just like Scrabble, and the goal is to be the winner at the end of the game. I guess the point is that such a game would be kind of boring, closer to gin rummy than to Scrabble.
I agree with point 5, that playing with a pot of money changes the game in a fundamentally interesting way. However, you make the claim that “people usually would not want to play a board game for 8 hours”, but that ignores many categories of game. For example, tabletop strategy games; not even modern games, which can be quite involved, but classics like Diplomacy. I think the same principle is at play in those other games that people enjoy playing for long periods: There is a sense in which the consequences of prior rounds matter for future rounds. I agree that if each hand in a poker game were entirely independent, that would get pretty boring.
But then why not just play for tokens or points like you mention at the end? Why does it matter that the pot be made of real money? The structure of the game would be the same, so the phenomenon that you and Luu describe seems to depend less on the structure of the game than on the idea that it must be played for stakes. This led me to some speculation: Poker has attained a cultural/intellectual status similar to chess in that it is vie\wed as some kind of reflection of general reasoning, strategy, and social abilities. As a result, many people attach a lot of their egos to their perceived ability to play.
So I suggest possibility 7: The convention that poker should be played for stakes is the result of a kind of self-reinforcing feedback loop. Poker players want to believe that their performance in the game reflects something that “really matters” beyond the confines of the game, something about their general cognitive/social abilities. The idea that poker should be played for stakes and not just for fun is consistent with this perspective. But it also acts to select future poker players: the people who decide to keep playing are people who believe enough in the mythos of poker that they are willing to risk real money. People who would play, but would only do so for fun, are not invited to games and are ridiculed for “not taking [the game] seriously”. As a result, the population of poker players evolves to the point where it consists largely of people who genuinely believe that the game is only fun when played for money.
I’m not a good poker player, but have friends who are. I learned its very boring to play it correctly and the cards barely matter. It really is more like a job you wouldn’t do without getting paid.
A:
Why? Could you give at least one specific example of why this is true?
You robotically fold like 90% of the time and just watch what the other people are doing.
Eg, here’s a site with the slogan “Boring is winning”:
https://smartpokerstudy.com/folding-is-boring-and-boring-is-winning/
I’ve tried playing that way and its just not fun (but it works). If you’re having fun, you’re probably a fish.
A:
Huh, okay. Not the answer I was expecting. (I was expecting that what was boring was either memorizing probability tables, faithfully following them, and learning how to randomize one’s bets to one’s hands.)
I’d guess lots of people like the research/learning aspect but not the grinding implementation. Its not just the folding. Its also taking notes about how other people behaved and studying them later. It was pretty shocking to learn how much effort is involved.
Playing well can also be downright manipulative. The good players definitely want me to “have fun”:
https://www.reddit.com/r/poker/comments/1s5bb5c/playing_with_fish_101/
This! It also agrees with what Andrew said in the post, “nobody would play 8 hours of poker if not for money (unless, say, you’re trying to get practice for a future money game)–it would just be too boring.”
This is also what my friend said who came up with a blackjack counting system with his friends while an undergrad. They went to Atlantic City for a weekend and the system worked as intended. But they found it incredibly boring work and it wasn’t like they had enough stake to make millions.
I think the issue with fake money poker is that is relies on a fragile collective agreement that the chips are valuable. When a player eventually get bored and goes all in with nothing, it breaks the illusion of the game and ends it for everyone else.
Fake money poker is much more fun with tournament style play where you increase blinds and try to avoid being eliminated. I think this is good evidence for #6 being right.
I kept waiting for point 6, and you saved it until last. Poker not played for money is a different game with different strategies. You could have the equivalent in which everyone is handed a given stake and play continues until someone wins the entire combined stake. This game is, not coincidentally, the game that is actually played in poker tournaments except that there is a cost to enter the tournament which is small relative to the winner’s prize.
Why isn’t a casual poker game set up that way? Most people being eliminated early and having then nothing to do is the obviuous answer.
Right. You could make it into a pure game of chance. Everyone’s dealt cards and whoever has the best hand wins. The skill part of the game itself is in the betting on your hand, not on the cards being dealt.
Joanthan:
But nobody is proposing a game of poker without betting. The question Luu is asking is: What about a game of poker with betting but not for money, just for points. For example, people play bridge for money but they also play bridge just for fun. But just about nobody plays poker with betting just for fun. Everybody “knows” that poker needs real money to be a real game. Luu’s point is that it’s not obvious why this should be, why poker-with-betting seems to require real money to be fun to play.
People used to pay “Penny a point” bridge, but bridge is very different in that there are partners and also it’s about repeated play, not one hand. I guess poker is also about repeated play, but it seems different.
I think all of the explanations somewhat miss the point and I have a useful comparison to support a different take. In Czechia the most popular card game with money used to be “Licitovaný mariáš” (Auction Mariage), which is for almost all purposes just a less complex close relative of bridge.(it is a trick-taking game, there’s a bidding phase determining who is the “main” player, it has strong skill/strategy components). But mariáš is played almost exclusively for (low) money stakes. That makes it a counterexample to most of the points above.
I would instead argue that the reason mariáš is only meaningful with stakes is because – unlike bridge, but like poker – it lets players raise the stakes of a given game and this mechanic is important to keep the game entertaining. Raising the stakes does not work well when the stakes are some arbitrary points – if you double the number of arbitrary points awarded for each outcome in a game, the game will fundamentally feel the same to players. If you double the money that is at stake in a game, it becomes meaningfully different to players.
Yes! This is what I was trying to say about the difference between bridge and poker. In poker it is all about the betting strategy. Also if you fold there is no play. in bridge you always play.
Hearts is another trick taking game, and I think it is similar. I’ve never played it for money but I’m sure it would be similar.
I think it’s sort of #2, but I’d rephrase it differently.
I remember in high school 6th grade, we did the stock picking contest, and highest returns won. Obviously the strategy here is to not diversify, put it all on a single stock, because there is no distinction between being 2nd place and last place.
No real stakes means that your return structure looks a bit like that. It incentivizes people to goof off; being 7th or 3rd place at an 8 person table are basically the same. Getting 1st has a short burst of pride, last place maybe an extremely minor humiliation. If you’re 5th place, why not go all-in and go out in a blaze of glory if there are no stakes?
Not only does putting stakes on the line impact how people play in the first order sense, it impacts the game in the second order sense: you only bet big when you’re serious, and everyone in turn knows that your big bets are serious.
Basically, having stakes aligns the incentives for good gameplay.
I have a monthly game that’s been running for almost 30 years, and played in junior high and in grad school before that. Aside from the social aspect of getting together to play, there’s also a competitive aspect of paying attention to who’s doing well and how they play. For that to work there has to be money, not just “points”. We are all older and reasonably comfortable financially, so the $20 stakes for our hold’em tournament and the $1 max bet for our limit dealer’s choice make zero difference to anyone’s life (“serious money”), except insofar as they make the game interesting. (I don’t agree with Anoneuoid. Even when you fold a lot of hands it’s still fun, though that’s because of the social aspect which wouldn’t translate to casino play with strangers.)
Our game has lasted so long and has been so central to our group that I’ve wondered more or less the same thing. The game generally is very male, though there are some very good female pros. My half joking theory is that it substitutes in men for ritualized physical combat. My wife can tell when I won the previous night, and again half-jokingly, I tell her that now my testosterone levels are up. The same doesn’t happen when I win at backgammon.
As for the “trolling” style when playing for play money, where a player just “shoves” (the poker term for going all-in) on every hand, it doesn’t make sense in any context except a tournament where you can rebuy your initial stake during an initial phase of the tournament, with more play money. [I am not a paid-up subscriber so I can’t read Luu’s full post to see what he says about it.] This is how some games work on the play money corners of poker sites like pokerstars. Then indeed you do find players adopting that style – they shove & win or bust, and in the latter case just rebuy immediately. It is kind of annoying for the other players, but there’s a certain logic to it, which is that having a bigger stack – e.g., doubling up early – allows a more aggressive style of play and allows you to play types of hands that you’d have to fold pre-flop otherwise. (I’m talking here just about hold’em.) And if you see someone adopting this style you can wait for a big hand and then call and likely bust them. So it’s not necessarily effective.
Anyway, I’m personally convinced that our game is a contained outlet for aggression, and that it only works because we use money to keep score, even if the amounts are insignificant.
A good player prefers to play for real money because it’s easier to play more correctly without real money and this effect is more pronounced for the opponents.
Interesting! But that would also be true of chess, bridge, Scrabble, tennis, etc., no?
Which raises a related question: I get the impression that it’s common for people to play recreational golf for money, going out to the course and betting a bit on each hole. But I don’t associate this sort of betting with tennis. Why one and not the other?
> But that would also be true of […] tennis
> I don’t associate this sort of betting with tennis
It seems that you answered your own question. It wouldn’t be true of tennis because even if you were playing for real money it wouldn’t impact the course of events during the game.
More in general, it seems difficult to maintain that one cannot play poker without staking real money during the game while acknowledging that in tournaments the bets are done with notional chips (with the implicit assumption that they can also be fun and even serious, I guess).
Uno isn’t boring if you play it with skilled players. There is a lot of strategy and just like with all these games, skill at card counting counts. It’s boring if it is you against a 6 year old.
“What would be the equivalent in Scrabble, for example?”
When I’ve played Scramble with others, Ive prepared by trying to memorize a bunch of real, but fake sounding words from the scrabble dictionary. So I start using some of those and also fake words and dare people to constantly challenge my words. I essentially turn Scrabble into a bluffing game and well, a lot of people think thats trolling.