The legendary mathematician Dr. John Von Neumann had little use for games of chance such as roulette, craps, or slots. There’s no mastery to be found in pure chance, he believed. No doubt Dean Martin’s Sam Harmon character would have agreed when he exclaimed in the original Ocean’s 11 (1960) that “the house always wins.”
Interestingly, Von Neumann thought that chess was also problematic - boring to his brilliant mind - for the opposite reason. All chess moves can be mathematically accounted for in advance, he asserted. Well The Queen’s Gambit (2020) fans, that’s a skill not possessed by mere mortals like me or anyone else I know.
In her 2020 book, The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win, Dr. Maria Konnikova said that she, like Von Neumann, finds poker to be that rare middle ground between chance and skill - a place where leaders often find themselves.
I met Konnikova at the MIT Sports Analytics Conference last year. She participated with FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver (both pictured on far right of photo below) in a panel on legalized gambling. An impressive scholar and writer, the psychologist and New Yorker contributor took a deep dive into competitive, high-stakes poker for research purposes and, well, became a highly regarded champion in the process.
She writes in Bluff that, "Poker, unlike quite any other game, mirrors life. It isn’t the roulette wheel of pure chance, nor is it the chess of mathematical elegance and perfect information. Like the world we inhabit, it consists of an inextricable joining of the two. Poker stands at the fulcrum that balances two oppositional forces in our lives - chance and control" or at least the skills we think provide us with some level of control.
This makes poker a useful analog for decision-making. After all, the best leaders and poker players approach sense-making and decision-making with skill at and experience in understanding, navigating, and optimizing both chance and control. They understand, as well, that no matter how pristine the system or the analytics, “the human always gets in the way of the mathematical model," as Konnikova put it.
Konnikova references Colonel John Boyd’s OODA Loop for use in sense-making and decision-making from poker and chess competitions to combat and the courtroom. Boyd was a USAF fighter pilot who taught pilots and other decision-makers to Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. He believed that out-maneuvering opponents means getting inside their heads and understanding their OODA Loop, imagining what the opponents are observing and how they are orienting themselves. This gives the pilot - or poker player - real-time intelligence to anticipate what that adversary will do next. As Konnikova puts it, “You’re getting signals and you’re giving off signals" all the time.
It’s a decision-making construct that can help even the odds a bit. Or as Konnikova writes, "Poker has been a way of reclaiming my agency over chance.”
