*This transcript is produced using transcription software and reviewed for quality. Despite our best efforts, some passages may be incomplete or contain errors due to audio quality or software limitations.*
Matthew
Hello, and welcome to this episode of Superhero Ethics. Fans, I have some exciting news for you today. I have a co-host. We’ve been going for almost a year now, I think, maybe more, maybe less. I have no idea how time works. We’ve been having weekly guests and lots of that, and we’re still going to have guests coming on from time to time. But Paul Christopher Hoppe, Zen Madman, giant Buddha, poker player extraordinaire, poker coach, poker writer, misanthrope extraordinaire, atheist, person of all pronouns, person of all sorts of socialistic libertarian ideas, Paul Hoppe, who was on the first podcast episode, though he didn’t know it was a podcast episode, has now graciously decided to join me as co-host. Paul, did you know you were joining me as co-host?
Paul
Yes, but only for about two or three minutes. So I love it, I love it. Thank you for that awesome introduction and all the things you wove through it. It felt very accurate. Usually I have complaints and nitpicks, but I think those are absent now. Huzzah, huzzah.
Matthew
As I keep going, I’ll try to give you a couple of nits we can pick. But let me give folks an update on what this means for the podcast. Paul and I, as I mentioned somewhat on the last episode and at various points, Paul is a professional poker player. Paul has also done some poker writing. They’ve recently published a book and have more to come soon. If you’re watching on YouTube, you can see Paul pointing to a copy of their first book, Zen Madman’s Friday Night Is My Monday Morning, Volume One, which you can find a link to with a significant discount in the show notes.
Click that link to buy the book and you get about 40% off. You help the podcast, we get a little bit of it back, everybody wins. Part of what we’ve been talking about is how we can start using a lot of what we talk about with poker to maybe make a third new podcast. I have this podcast, I have the Star Wars podcast, and we’ve really been trying to find what that lane would be. Paul and I, among other things, part of why we’re interested in it is because there’s so much about poker that informs how we think about the rest of the world. Certainly in terms of Superhero Ethics and Star Wars, but also in terms of everything from dating to jobs to understanding elections and polls and stuff like that.
There are a lot of ways it interacts with the topics we talk about here on Superhero Ethics. We also recently did the 400th episode, very proud of that one, and I put out a number of calls in that episode: hey, if you’re still listening, let us know, we’d love to hear from you.
None of you wrote in. So our idea is we’re going to treat this like the 3 a.m. radio show, where it’s entirely possible lots of you are listening. When we asked for positive feedback, you didn’t say anything, but now that we’re making some major changes, maybe you’ll write in and let us know you hate it.
Maybe you’ll write in and let us know you love it. Maybe we’re just going to talk to nobody at 3 a.m. in the morning and eventually build the audience some other way. The point is, we’re going to start shifting toward using poker more. This is not going to be a poker podcast; there are 8 million poker podcasts out there.
There may well be 8 million and one once Paul and I get our act together, and that’s of course going to be the best one. Of course. But this is going to be much more about, we’re going to keep talking about superhero ethics, but we’re also going to talk a lot about how poker can be a really good lens for understanding a lot of the issues that come up in superhero ethics, in real-world ethics, and in our world in general. So here we are, we’re going to see where this goes. We want your input, let us know what you think.
As we go along, certainly Paul and I can talk an awful lot about Batman. We can talk an awful lot about the Joker. We can talk about the movie Rounders and have a lot of fun with that. There are a lot of ways we can go.
Paul
We can talk about playing poker at two in the morning and me sitting there saying, “I’m Batman.” And I believe you said, I don’t remember your exact quote, but it was something penguin-related.
Matthew
Yeah, yeah, probably, probably. “Get in the duck,” probably.
Paul
Yes, yes, it was “get in the duck.” I must have lost to deuces or something. I think that sounds like juices are ducks, they go crack. Anyway, there’s all sorts of tie-ins.
Matthew
Paul, I hadn’t thought of this before, but we’re going to throw this question at you. You are one of the people I know who most wants to make the world a better place. Actually, that’s a stupid question. Okay, let me go with this.
You are a person who thinks so much about ethics that you have a very well thought out perspective on how to approach the world from a good position, without liking the word “ethics” itself.
Whatever you call it, ethics, morals, values, you have a fairly well-designed sense of them that you use to shape a lot of what you do in the world, and to evaluate how others do things in the world. How is poker a game that’s fundamentally about taking money from stupid people?
Paul
I’ll put an asterisk on nitpicking the word “stupid people,” but…
Matthew
We’ll get to that later, but yeah, yeah. People will think it’s a kind of gambling, it’s really not. I’m going to keep going with this and then get back to superhero ethics, I promise. But I think this is a good one. Talk to me about the ethics of being a poker player.
Paul
Yeah, so I mean, I think if you kidnapped a bunch of people and forced them to play poker with you, that would be not a very cool thing to do.
I might have a screenplay idea that involves this. But when people sit down at the poker table, ostensibly they’re doing it of their own volition. It’s a game that people play for money, and money is the way you keep score.
You can play it not for money, like we did at your one party, we played online on the app and it wasn’t for money, and somehow I ended up with all the chips, which I think was an overstatement of my poker skill. You can’t always win all the chips just because you play well, but it was kind of funny. But yeah, to me, I believe in agency and people’s right to choose what they want to do with their own money. I understand gambling addiction is a thing, and not everybody can afford to lose the money that they choose to lose in a poker game.
I mean, maybe they’re not choosing to lose it, they’re choosing to wager it and they’re making ill-advised wagers. But on a fundamental level, I believe that people have the right to do that. The primary purpose for most poker players is entertainment.
So if that’s what somebody thinks is fun and that’s what they want to do, and I can benefit off of that, to me that’s not deeply, inherently different from playing a concert and charging five hundred dollars for tickets. You can say it’s overpriced, but you can also say, well, that’s what somebody chose to spend, so how can it be overpriced? I do think there are, you know, I’ve seen people want to quit, and then people try to pressure them into staying, and I don’t really like that. But just in terms of it being a game that people choose to play, I think it’s sort of like fighting: in martial arts, you get in the ring and then kick someone in the face. If you remove the context, that’s not cool, right? But if they’ve chosen to get in the ring and said, okay, this is what I want to do, I want to compete, I want to fight, and the purpose of the sport is to hit each other, then in that context, I think it’s fine. So that would be my short-ish answer.
Matthew
I’m guessing in the same way that every time you’ve told me about fighting competitions, there’s safety gear you’re expected to wear. My guess is that if someone said, “Hey, you don’t want to come to this underground martial arts club, no helmets, no protections, and by the way, some of your opponents might be drunk, but you’ll get more money if you beat them,” that’s not something you’re going to feel very comfortable with, I’m guessing.
Paul
Yeah, I did actually have a taekwondo tournament where my opponent had a really bad fever and I might have given them a concussion, and I felt bad about it. It’s like, they still made the choice to get in the ring and to compete, but thinking back on it, I don’t know what I necessarily should have done differently in that context. I wasn’t as comfortable with it, in the same way that in poker, if somebody’s so drunk that they can barely function, it should be time to cut them off.
When I was a poker supervisor and a floor for a while, I had to kick out drunk people sometimes. Because there’s a point, and you kind of have to judge it. Other players will sometimes not be very happy, they’re like, “Oh, come on, let them stay and lose all their money.”
But there is a point at which it’s like, “Okay, we’re done for the day.” Poker games, at least in public venues, are going to have table stakes. Nobody’s betting the deed to their house, literally. Nobody’s putting the keys to their Aston Martin in the pot.
Brief aside: in Casino Royale, they did acknowledge that, they’re like, “Okay, we know this isn’t the way the game is played, but we’ve got to get Bond and an Aston Martin in there. So this is how we’re going to work around that.”
Matthew
Exactly, exactly. I think the taekwondo example is a good one, because I’m kind of horrified that someone who wasn’t maybe in the best mental state was fighting.
Paul
Of the three people who are kind of most involved in that, I think you’re the one with the lowest responsibility, because to me, it’s the person’s coach or manager.
Yeah, or ref or whatever. And also a tournament official or ref or something like that. Sure, yeah.
Matthew
And I think that’s also a good statement of, for me, a lot of where the ethics comes in: the idea that playing an underground game with no regulation feels very different than playing where there’s a room manager who’s able to step in and say, “Hey, wait a minute, should you really be at the table right now?” I think it’s something I’ve thought about a lot with the online apps, because I remember when I first started playing poker, you had to go to Atlantic City or Vegas or find something kind of underground in order to play.
Paul
And yeah, in New York, you just had to go to an underground club or play a home game or something.
Matthew
Or just find out about a game some other way. There’s a sense to me that when gambling is kind of a destination you have to go to, and I think this was somewhat intentional, yes, this is an activity that facilitates problematic behavior, but the easier alcohol is to get access to, the easier it is for people to abuse it, and somewhat vice versa. In the same way, if you fly to Vegas once a year and gamble in really unhealthy ways while you’re there, that’s not great, but you’re not going there every weekend. You might move to Vegas and then that’s really bad gambling problems, and it’s become much more ubiquitous. Here’s one of the key ethical questions I want to address: where do you see the line between poker and gambling?
This is a question that gets brought up a lot, and I think to many people on the surface, poker is definitely a kind of gambling. I think there’s some truth to that sentence. I think there are also a lot of falsehoods and misunderstandings in that sentence. And I think there’s a wide variety in how people approach poker. Talk to us about where you see poker in terms of whether it is or isn’t gambling.
Paul
So, we’ll set the legal argument aside, because there are a lot of court cases about what the definition of gambling is and whether a game is a game of skill or a game of chance, and we’ll set that aside as a legal argument, and just talk semantically about what gambling is.
You could say it’s basically wagering something on an outcome you do not have control over. Which then, I guess, could be an outcome you have some influence over, if you’re betting on pool and you’re playing against someone else. You have influence, but not control. A wager in poker is very different from a wager at the roulette table, or a sports bet, unless maybe you’re Pete Rose, where you have some influence over what happens, because a bet in poker, when you place the bet yourself, when you’re the one who raises or bets, it’s more like a dare than like being offered odds and taking the bet or not. It’s basically saying, “I dare you to match my wager, or I get everything in the middle.”
Because in poker we start with either antes or blinds. At any given point in a hand, there should be some money in the middle that doesn’t belong to anybody anymore.
Somebody put it in, but it’s not their money anymore, it’s in the middle now. So anytime I make a wager, I’m essentially asking you, “Do you want to match my wager?”
Or do you want to just give me what’s in the middle? It functions differently from how most bets work. If I bet two hundred dollars on my sports team, I’m not asking the other team, “Hey, do you want to bet two hundred or do you want to forfeit the game?” That’s not how most betting works. Having said that, there are spots in poker where, say you make an all-in bet, and then I’m faced with a decision where I say, “Okay, I’ve got these certain odds, I need to try to estimate how likely I am to win the pot,” and I put that investment in, hoping to get more than that investment back, or at least that investment back. In that sense, it’s basically the same as gambling on blackjack.
Not so much roulette, where the odds are always against you. This is more like blackjack, where you can keep count and say, “The odds are in my favor now, so I’m going to raise my wager,” or “The odds are against me, so I’m going to minimize my wager.” On a fundamental level, poker is heavily skill-based, but also heavily influenced by chance in the short run. If you and I play and I’m the better player at the given game, I’m probably going to win more often.
I’m definitely going to win more money in the long run on average, but in the short run, you’ve got a great chance of winning. The next thing I’d say is: what’s the relationship between investing in stocks and gambling? What’s the relationship between making any personal investment, not just an investment of money, but an investment of time, an investment of talking to somebody, and the payoff? To me, kind of everything’s gambling, not necessarily in such a literal way, but in the sense that you’re choosing to take an action and you don’t know what the results of that action will necessarily be.
Poker ends up serving as a metaphor for so much in life, it’s just that the variance aspect, the aspect of the things out of your control, plays a bit of an outsized role, so we have to learn to deal with it more directly. I think that can actually be very useful in understanding some things going on in the world that are out of our control.
Matthew
I think that’s really true. It’s funny, I have a very different definition of gambling versus poker that I want to get to.
But what you just said is a great way for me to bring in some superhero stuff, which I promised we’re going to keep talking about. Because I think, as you said, with gambling, a big part of what you’re doing is deciding how much you’re willing to risk versus what gives you the best chance of winning.
To me, an example of two different people or groups who are willing to gamble, but who have different ideas of the risk they want to take and the payoff, is: one who says, “I trust that these heroes are going to win the battle, so I’m not going to put anything more in the pot because I think this hand is going to win the pot as it is,” and someone else who says, “I want a much stronger chance of winning the hand, so I’m going to put all the people of New York on the table that I’m willing to risk in order to make sure I win.” It’s not a perfect analogy to poker, but on one hand you’ve got someone saying, “I’m going to play more of a long shot because I don’t want that collateral damage, I don’t want to put that additional risk in,” versus someone else who says, “No, I want a sure thing, even though it means I have to pay a lot more to get my chance of winning.”
Paul
Yeah, it’s funny, when you first started to bring up the analogy, before the details, that’s the first place my mind went.
Matthew
Yeah, I think it’s a good, obvious one.
Paul
Yeah, exactly. You can look at it another way too: are you willing to risk the population of Earth at the cost of trying to save the people of New York? Of course, if it’s a nuclear bomb and they’re blowing up New York with nukes, it’s more than just New York, there’s going to be fallout and so on. Also, you don’t necessarily know one hundred percent that you’ve got the nuts. Maybe that’s not going to work either.
Matthew
And here’s a fundamental concept of poker, and I think of a lot of gambling: you don’t do it once. If you’re going to get paid off ten to one, then it’s okay if you only have a twenty percent chance to win, because if you do it ten times, the two times you’re on average going to win easily make up for all the losses. When your table stakes are all the people of Manhattan or all the people of the world, that goes out the window.
Paul
Run it twice, right?
Matthew
Exactly.
Paul
I mean, I guess with the multiverse, you can run it twice.
Matthew
So much of superhero media often does feel like different people arguing over what is the acceptable risk to take, and to what extent can we or can we not control the outcome. Partly I bring that up because I don’t want to get into it too much now.
I want to rewatch the movie to make sure I get all the particulars, but part of me thinks Nick Fury is crazy when he does that. It is trust, and it’s a trust in the players, but part of me is like, I don’t know if trying to nuke New York to stop the destruction of the entire world is actually the worst thing in the world. It’s a choice.
Paul
I mean, you’re right, it’s risk and reward. How much does it cost to make this decision, what’s the payoff compared to, well, what if I take this other option? You could say Nick Fury is taking the bigger risk, but also wagering less, he has the higher payoff too, he gets to save more people.
Matthew
So let me get back to how I’d break down the “is poker gambling” question. There are going to be a couple of parts, jump in anytime you want to pick a nit or agree or whatever. To start, I’d say I agree with you that there’s a kind of gambling happening throughout everything. On the other hand, I think the word “gambling” can also mean something much more specific: when an organization, a company, an entity of some sort, a person, a corporation, a casino, whatever, makes a profit off of facilitating other people’s desire to engage in games that have a mix of skill and chance.
Writ large, to me, most of those games create a conflict of interest, because the person hosting the game also has a financial incentive in you losing the game. The person who is paying the blackjack dealer and paying for the building the blackjack table is in, if you’re bad at blackjack, they make more money. If you’re good at blackjack, they make less money.
So almost all the games in the casino, with the exception of something like blackjack, if you’re able to count cards and get away with it, and maybe some other weird things.
Paul
Which then they’re like, “Hey, you can’t do that, you’re beating our game.”
Matthew
Right, because the whole point is you’re supposed to be at a disadvantage. Here’s the other part of it that, to me, also makes it gambling as I see it, and why I think sometimes gambling isn’t a bad thing. You talked before about how the positive results of a bet can sometimes be more than just the money itself. I am someone who enjoys playing games of skill and chance where I know that statistically, if I spent a million hours playing it, I’m almost guaranteed to go bankrupt.
Unless, again, I’m counting or something like that. Take craps, you can get really close to fifty percent, but the house still has an edge. So why would you ever do it? Because I think what gambling lives off of is thrill. If I say I’m going to bet a hundred dollars on this one hand of blackjack, am I more likely to lose that hundred dollars than win?
Yes. I might win a hundred and fifty back if I actually hit blackjack, but most likely I’m going to lose it. But I’m also going to get a thrill. Every now and then when I’m playing blackjack and I think, “You know what, this hand just feels like a good hand,” I’m going to put all my chips in on this one hand. The thrill I get is an incredible feeling, I love that rush, and I am willing to consciously decide I am willing to risk this money for the chance of getting that rush. But still, I am risking money for the chance of a dopamine hit, for the chance of a big emotional payoff.
Guess what? That is real easy to get addicted to. It’s real easy to make riskier and riskier decisions about when you’re not getting good rushes in other parts of your life.
Certainly I’ve gambled in not the best way, when my life wasn’t going so well and I wanted that rush to stop thinking about my mother who was dying, or the mess I’d made of my life because of a bad relationship, whatever it was. All that, to me, falls under gambling, which I think can be, in a controlled way, a perfectly acceptable form of entertainment, but also can be potentially deeply addicting, and has to be carefully monitored. In poker, the casino is doing something when it’s a casino-run poker game, or even often a home game hopefully run by someone who’s not playing in the game, that’s the whole point. The people who are paying for the table, the dealer, the chips, the cards, the drinks, the food, and the air conditioning, especially in Vegas in the summer, thank God, don’t care whether I win money or lose money.
It doesn’t matter to them. They want someone to lose money so that someone else wins money, but as all that money shifts across the table, they’re taking a little bit out of each hand. They have no incentive in my losing specifically. For every dollar that one player wins, some other player loses eighty-five cents, ninety cents, whatever, and the rake comes in. So to me, that’s where I see poker as fundamentally different from what most people think of as gambling.
There’s another point I want to add on to that, but I think we’re kind of jumping around now. Does that fundamentally make sense? Do you see it differently?
Paul
I do see poker as fundamentally different from other casino games. Obviously, in a home game, pretty often the host is going to play, if it’s a real home game. If it’s not really a home game, it’s called a home game because it’s in someone’s home, but they’re operating the game and raking it, then really it’s just an underground game, in my opinion.
A true home game usually is going to be played for stakes that people are pretty comfortable with overall. Not always, some home games are enormous, but in those really high-stakes home games, usually the house is making something one way or another.
Matthew
I’d say the overwhelming majority of home games I’ve played in, at most I’m going to lose forty to sixty bucks. If I went out to dinner and a movie with a bunch of my friends, I’d probably pay forty to sixty dollars for four to eight hours of entertainment with my friends. That’s a perfectly fine cost of a night of entertainment, no problem there.
Paul
Yeah, exactly. In terms of how the casino views it, this is one of the reasons casinos don’t usually care that much about poker.
You’ll see a lot of casinos without poker, and you won’t see that many poker rooms without casinos, without some sort of game that the house has a hand in. Interestingly, you mentioned corporations earlier: in California, at least how it used to be set up, I don’t know if they’ve changed it, it’s set up so the house actually can’t make money off you directly, they’re called California games. They’re card games that aren’t against the house, but there has to be a separate corporation set up to make that money that way. But usually it’s like the brother of the owner of the big place, or something.
It’s not usually really a separate entity. But anyway, I do think it’s much easier for the house to be impartial when it comes to judgments, which is why there’s usually a gaming commission to regulate the non-poker games you play against the casino. They don’t need to rig anything in a cheating way, the game is rigged in the sense that the odds are against you by design, pretty much with the exception of blackjack and maybe a couple of other things, where in the long run you just won’t win. So there’s a difference between playing against an entity that’s running the game compared to playing against other individuals with somebody else overseeing it. It’s like the difference between, on Sundays we used to get together at the taekwondo school and just beat the crap out of each other, and one person would be keeping time. If that person was also fighting, it would be like, “Stop, okay, you have to stop doing this,” and then they could just referee their own fight, that wouldn’t make any sense. We didn’t really have refs there, but if you did, you’d want it to be a third party.
You’d want it to be someone impartial. Having that in a poker room, I think there’s something where it’s definitely easier to trust, though people still don’t. People are still like, “Oh, it’s rigged, they want big pots.”
They don’t care. It’s not that there’s literally never any cheating going on, but when it’s a company that’s just running poker, they basically just want you to play, and then you pay them the rake, that’s it. Or they want you to play because they’ve got a sportsbook or an online casino they want you to use, or in the casino, one of the reasons they have a poker room is: say you have a couple, or family, or friends, and one of them loves to play casino games and the other one’s like, “I’m not really into that, but I like poker.” They go and play poker, the other person goes and plays casino games. If they win, sometimes they come and sit down at the poker game, or the poker player joins their friend for a bit at the rail. Mostly it’s so groups of people can come and do different things. People who play blackjack are like, “Okay, I need to chill a bit, I’m going to play poker for a while, okay, now I’m going to go back and play blackjack.”
Matthew
I remember one time I was at a casino, and there were more people who wanted to play poker than they had poker tables available. There were like eight people waiting for a seat at no-limit hold ’em. Often that’s enough that you could say, “You have eight people, why don’t they just start a table?”
I went over to play blackjack, and someone came over and sat down next to me and said, “Hey, didn’t I see you waiting for the poker game?”
I said, “Yeah, I was waiting, I’m waiting to get in.” We were just chatting as we were playing blackjack, and we were both losing. He said, “I don’t get it, all of us here want to play poker, why don’t they give us a chance to play poker?” I looked at him and said, “Because you’re losing at blackjack.” It’s not a perfect example, but we were both spending money at the table. I remember when I ran a board game store, I ran events for the store.
There were a lot of events we knew we’d lose money on, but as you said, they’d bring people into the store, and then people would spend money there, they’d buy sodas and candy, or use their winnings on something. Certainly I’ve won money at poker at a casino and thought, “Cool, I’m going to go to a really nice restaurant that happens to be right here,” and go spend it on that. Good players probably don’t do that very often. I think that’s part of it too.
Paul
There are some famous good players who are famous for having done that. I think T.J. Cloutier, who used to be called the best poker player who never won the World Series, was famous for blowing off tons of money at craps.
Doyle Brunson wrote a book called Super System, subtitled How I Made a Million Dollars Playing Poker, but it could have been sub-subtitled How I Lost a Million Dollars Playing Golf.
Matthew
Well, I remember the casino we first went to play poker at, the Tropicana in Atlantic City, had a Hooters in it. I loved the chicken wings there, and I didn’t mind looking at things either. One of the things on their menu was the high roller special: a dozen wings and a bottle of Dom Pérignon for like two hundred bucks. No one in their right mind would say, “I’m going to spend two hundred dollars on that,” but if you’ve just won five hundred, it’s so easy to think, “This money isn’t real, it’s poker money, it’s chips.” So I guess that’s the one caveat I want to add: I wouldn’t say poker is never gambling. I think poker has the potential to not be gambling, because it’s still possible to get that thrill playing poker. There are times, especially playing low stakes, or at someone’s house, where I’ll put money in on the long-shot hand where, if I did that a thousand times, I’d lose more money than I’d win. But the look on my friends’ faces when I turn over a ridiculous hand that should never have gotten there, that’s positive EV.
Paul
I don’t know what you could possibly be talking about.
Matthew
I will say often it’s a look on Paul’s face.
Paul
I still remember that runner-runner two pair.
Matthew
So good. That’s the thing, if I did that a hundred times, would I lose money? Yes. But it’s worth that EV. My point being, when I say poker doesn’t have to be gambling, that’s the intention. It certainly can be. There are people who play poker because they want that rush and that thrill.
There are some who are pretty responsible about it, who say, “I’m going to give myself a budget of two hundred bucks a week, or five hundred a month,” and they’ve worked it into their budget as an entertainment budget. People who are better players make a lot of money off folks like that. It’s also very possible that it’s an addiction and problematic. So all that’s to say, to me, a lot of the ethics of it, and the viability of it, comes from the fact that poker is much more of a zero-sum game in a way that gambling is not. At a craps table, if you’ve got ten people, what’s most likely is that all ten of them are going to walk away with less money than they started with. At a poker table, every time someone loses, someone else wins.
Paul
So if we go with a few nitpicks: I’d say that specific definition of gambling you’re using, I think gambling is a word that’s imprecise, and a lot of what we’re talking about in this conversation, to me, is less about distinctions between gambling and not-gambling and more just distinctions in general. I don’t think we necessarily need a singular word for it, like a checkbox. I think all the ways we’ve explained how poker is different from casino gambling games.
It almost doesn’t matter, outside of a court of law, whether you say it therefore is or isn’t gambling, if that makes sense.
Matthew
I think it’s coming from a bit of a defensive place. I think when people criticize poker and say, “Isn’t that just gambling?” by which they mean, isn’t that one more of those things where if you do it long enough, your chances of winning money get smaller and smaller? I think poker is decidedly not that. So I guess that’s more of a clarification than anything else.
Paul
Yeah, for sure. I don’t feel defensive about it, because I’ve given it a lot of thought over the decades. Basically, if somebody says, “Isn’t it just gambling?” it’s like, well, no, it’s not just gambling, but also, what do you mean “just gambling”? Or, if you’ve got the Superhero Ethics logo with the scales of justice, maybe it is just gambling.
Not only gambling. It’s funny, on my other monitor I have the “…And Justice for All” Metallica album cover, because that’s what I listen to while playing poker. It’s actually kind of cool. Let me ask you this.
Matthew
Do you get that rush when you hit a gutshot?
Paul
Not really. I mean, I like winning hands more than losing hands, usually. When I win a hand in a really unlikely fashion, I’m more likely to laugh about it.
Here’s an example. I had a hand two days ago, maybe, where I raised somebody three bets and then four-bet all-in. I jammed, and we were a little deeper than normal, usually online you’ve got a hundred blinds, we had like a hundred and thirty or whatever, and I had ace-king offsuit. It’s a pretty standard play, but as soon as I made it, I thought, “Eh, maybe we’re a little too deep for this.” I just didn’t like my play. My first reaction was, I don’t love how I played this hand, not necessarily that it was a clear error, but I didn’t like how I thought about it. If I’d considered that factor and then decided this was the best play, I’d be happy with it. But my initial reaction was, “Eh.” I saw my opponent had queens, and we were about fifty-fifty, but really it’s more like maybe forty-three, fifty-seven, I forget, and they’re the favorite.
They have the better hand. I have to hit an ace, a king, or maybe queen-jack-ten or something. So what I do is I actually put my hand up in front of the table, because I don’t want to look at it, I’m just emotionally processing the decision as the board runs out.
I was like, okay, I don’t like how I played that hand, that’s fine, I’ll review it later, but the main thing is just to remember my process, take my time, act with confidence, and play like myself.
Just make the full decision, don’t skip over any factors. Then I moved my hand and I’d hit an ace or a king and won the hand. I thought, “Eh, okay.” There was a little bit of, well, I’m glad I have a few hundred more dollars than I would if I’d lost, but there was also almost a little bit of a negative feeling. I just won this pot, but I didn’t feel like I earned it.
It was just, either it’s a cooler and the chips went one way or the other, or I made a bad play and got kind of lucky. Either way, it didn’t have a big feeling. As a professional poker player, and even just as a serious poker player, I think there’s a need to get beyond that, to almost kill that dopamine hit a little bit. For me now, when I have that sort of positive feeling, it’s more like I made a big bluff and they tank, and I’m thinking, “Oh, come on, come on,” and then there’s a little bit of a thing there. Or I see that somebody had some ridiculous hand and I laugh, but sometimes somebody else does something and makes a big hand, and I’m on the opposite end of it, and I think, “That’s hilarious,” or, “Nice hand,” and I’ll actually say it out loud, partially just to normalize that when you play a lot of poker, you’re going to lose a lot of hands.
If you play a lot, though, you’re also going to win a lot of hands. That’s just what the long run is, a lot of wins and losses, and the more emotional swings you have attached to that, the more draining it can be. So I think it’s important to find the joy in the game, but when the joy in the game comes primarily from results, that’s when it’s closer to what you’re calling gambling.
When it’s more of the results that are the dominant factor, then, for me, the joy in the game comes from, like, on this particular texture, when they use this bet size, I think they’ve got kings or queens or jacks, and there’s an ace on board, and I have nines, so I don’t want to call, but what if I raise here? It comes from the nuances of trying to either outthink the opponent, or really being able to understand the situation in a way where maybe something new clicks for me that I didn’t see before. That’s where the joy in the game comes from for me, and I think that’s much more sustainable and healthier than having it be purely results-based.
Matthew
Yeah, I think you’ve unlocked a number of things we’re going to be able to talk about in future episodes. Again, this has been very much poker-specific, we’ll be connecting a lot more to the superhero stuff and things like that, but the results-orientedness, I’ve really been trying to shift myself much more toward process rather than results.
Again, it’s the kind of thing where the more you can apply that to life, life gets better. For me, a lot of that dopamine used to be the hit of, “Well, if I took a long shot to hit my flush, and my flush comes in, well, then clearly I took the right approach.” Whereas if it missed, I’d be mad at myself. I think that’s exactly the wrong kind of thinking.
That’s also where you’re chasing the rush. I think a lot of, not even as much villains, but, do you mind if I give a brief thematic spoiler for the TV show Spider-Noir?
Paul
Oh, no, no, no, that’s fine.
Matthew
Yeah, okay. One of the themes that Spider-Noir really explores, that I really enjoyed, we talked about this more in an episode a couple of weeks ago, is that he starts being a hero because he’s chasing the rush. He’s chasing the rush of, “I just did a good thing.”
Part of what that means is that when he isn’t successful in helping someone, it’s really crushing to him. I think that’s a great example of what we’re talking about here. It’s funny, because I’ve now identified the situation where I most allow myself to be like, “Awesome,” and cheer it on, which is where I think I’ve played somewhat well.
The Spider-Verse movie, I think the first one, is fundamentally about Kingpin wanting so desperately the victory of bringing back his wife and child that he’s willing to put the whole rest of the world at risk, on a pretty long-shot bet that maybe he’s drawing dead on, he has no outs. But the point is the risk he’s playing with there, there’s a lot of analysis to do. But the other thing, and this is the thing that has stuck with me the most, this is a conversation Paul and I have been having off and on for literal decades, for more than half of our lives at this point. I think one of the times it most came into focus for me was first in 1996, and then more so in 2024, when we were talking about the election and people’s responses to it, and to polling. Paul helped me understand a lot of what was happening in terms of public discourse, and the misunderstandings a lot of people had, by framing it in terms of one of the most fundamental ideas of poker and gambling: variance. The idea of what it means that there’s an eighty percent chance something will happen, because if there’s an eighty percent chance of something happening and it doesn’t happen on one instance, people often act like, “That’s impossible, it’s supposed to never happen.”
When the reality is, if there’s an eighty percent chance of something happening, and you do it a hundred times, or maybe more like a thousand or ten times, you get to a point where it becomes deeply statistically significant that it hasn’t happened.
Paul
Yeah, no, a hundred times would be incredibly unlikely. That would be like one in five, to the hundredth power, for it never to happen. That’s a very, very, very small number.
Matthew
So even if it’s eighty percent, even if you only do it ten times, or five times, there’s still a decent chance that it happens one of those five times.
The point being, with most of life, we don’t get to run it a hundred times, we just run it once. We forget that when we run it once, there’s still a deal: even twenty percent is still a lot.
Paul
Yeah, twenty is a lot, if it’s something you really don’t want to happen. If somebody says, “Oh yeah, but you have a twenty percent chance of something horrible happening to you,” that’s way too much, I don’t want that. If someone said to you, I’ll throw out a number here.
Matthew
Let’s say your net worth is a hundred thousand dollars, that includes your home, your car, all your clothes, everything, and someone says, “I’m going to give you a nine-in-ten chance to win a billion dollars, but you have to bet everything you own.”
I’m probably not taking that bet, even though it’s likely I’ll get it, because right now my life is perfectly livable with the net worth I have. If I win, my life becomes a million times better.
If I lose, I’m done. You can talk about privilege and how that would shift the likelihood of getting stuff back, but maybe a better example: it’s literally a gun to your head. Nine times out of ten you win a billion dollars, one time out of ten you get a bullet to the head.
Paul
Yeah. I mean, the half million, I’m like, yeah, no, let’s go. The bullet, I’m like, no thanks.
Matthew
Exactly, because it’s, what are you risking?
Paul
Some people would be the other way, though, because they’re like, “Well, I don’t want to live with having lost half a million dollars, but…”
Matthew
Some people, if your net worth is five dollars, you’re like, “Oh, what the heck, I’ll take the chance.” I say that in an offhand way, but that’s a lot of where criminal behavior comes from, and there’s a lot of value in helping people not be in situations where they think taking a big risk with a potential high payoff is the only way their life’s going to become livable. All right, well, for people who are into these thoughts, I hope they’ll keep listening.
If you’re not into this, like I said, write in, let us know. But more importantly, if you want to know more about what Paul thinks about poker right now, and you’re willing to spend a couple of bucks, but you don’t want to pay full retail price, and you also want to help this podcast a little, Paul, what can they do?
Paul
They can go to ZenMadman.com. There’s probably a link in the show notes you can click. You can also go to ZenMadman.com and use the code SHE400, celebrating the 400th episode that recently came out. And get this book, Zen Madman’s Friday Night Is My Monday Morning, Volume One. It’s a two hundred fifty-six page book. There’s also paperback, hardcover, and Kindle, and those links should be in the show notes as well, with an affiliate code, but those don’t have a discount, so you should get it in PDF form on my website with the discount.
There’s also a lot of other stuff I’ve written, if you want to get a taste for it. It’s basically a collection from my newsletter called Friday Night Is My Monday Morning. I feel like we didn’t really introduce this properly, but that’s fine, we’re winging it here. We’re going to do more of that next time.
You can read some of my poker essays, like “Life, Death, and Poker,” or is it “Death, Taxes, and Poker”? I forget the order.
There are other ones that don’t have death in them. I think a lot of it is some of it is straightforwardly about poker, and some of it is more broad, things you can learn from poker and use elsewhere as well. Definitely.
Matthew
On that continued subject, next week our topic is going to be the sunk cost fallacy. What is it? How has it shaped a lot of superhero and supervillain narratives, and how does it affect our own lives, in terms of everything from financial investments to dating to a job, to a podcast that you’ve put four hundred episodes into and don’t want to give up on. That’s
a lot. So we’ll get kind of meta here, we’ll see. Anyway, thank you all so much. Please buy a copy of Paul’s book using that promo code. You get some good information, Paul gets a little bit of money, we get a little bit of money, everybody wins. It’s not even gambling, everyone can win. On behalf of Paul and myself, thank you all so much for listening. Get dealt aces, aces get cracked.
