How We Decide (30 page)

Michael Binger is a particle physicist at Stanford. His specialty is quantum chromodynamics, a branch of physics that studies matter in its most elemental form. Binger is also a professional poker player, and he spends most of June and July sitting at felt-lined card tables in a Las Vegas casino, competing in the World Series of Poker, the most important gambling event in the world. He is one of thousands of poker players who make the pilgrimage every year. These card sharks might not look like professional athletes—the tournament is full of overweight chain smokers—but that's because they are athletes of the
mind.
When it comes to playing poker, the only thing that separates the experts from the amateurs is the quality of their decisions.

During the days of the World Series of Poker, Binger quickly settles into a mentally exhausting routine. He begins playing cards around noon—his preferred game is Texas hold'em—and he doesn't cash in his chips until the wee hours of the morning. Then it's back to his hotel room—past the strip clubs, penny slots, and the $7.77 all-you-can-eat buffets—where Binger tries to coax himself into a few hours of fitful sleep. "You get so wired playing poker that it's not easy coming down," he says. "I tend to just lie in bed, thinking about all the hands I played and how I should have played them differently."

Binger began playing cards as a college student, when he was a math and physics major at North Carolina State University. One weekend, he decided to learn how to play blackjack. He quickly grew frustrated by the amount of luck involved—"I hated not knowing when to bet," he says—and so he taught himself how to count cards. He practiced in loud North Carolina bars so that he could learn how to focus amid the noise and revelry. Binger is blessed with a quantitative mind—"I was always the nerd who did math problems for fun," he confesses—and counting cards came naturally to him. He quickly learned how to keep a running tally in his head, giving him a crucial advantage at the table. (For the most part, Binger relied on the Hi-Lo card-counting system, which provides the player with a 1 percent edge over the house.) Before long, Binger was traveling to casinos and putting his quantifying talents to work.

"The first thing I learned from counting cards," Binger says, "is that you can use your smarts to win. Sure, there's always luck, but over the long run you'll come out ahead if you're thinking right. The second thing I learned is that you can be
too
smart. The casinos have algorithms that automatically monitor your betting, and if they detect that your bets are too accurate, they'll ask you to leave." This meant that Binger needed to occasionally make bad bets on purpose. He would intentionally lose money so that he could keep on making money.

But even with this precaution, Binger started to put numerous casinos on alert. In blackjack, it's supposed to be impossible to consistently beat the house, and yet that's exactly what Binger kept doing. Before long, he was blacklisted; casino after casino told him that he couldn't play blackjack at their tables. "Some of the casinos would ask politely," Binger says. "A manager would come and tell you to take your winnings and leave. And some casinos weren't so polite. Let's just say they made it clear you weren't welcome anymore."

After he started graduate school in theoretical physics at Stanford, Binger tried to shake his card habit. "The low point for me was getting kicked out of six Reno casinos in one day for counting cards," he says. "That's when I realized maybe I should focus on physics for a while." He was drawn to the most difficult problems in the field, studying supersymmetry and the Higgs boson particle. (The elusive Higgs is often referred to as the "God particle," since finding it would help explain the origin of the universe.) "There's no doubt that the analytical skills I learned in cards also helped me with science," Binger says. "It's all about focusing on the important variables, thinking clearly, not getting distracted. If you lose your train of thought when you're counting cards, you're screwed. Physics is a little more forgiving—you can write stuff down—but it still requires a very disciplined thought process."

After a few years of working diligently toward his PhD, Binger began to miss his beloved card games. The relapse was gradual. He started playing a few rounds of small-stakes poker with his friends, just a casual game or two after a long day spent contemplating physics equations. But it didn't take long before Binger's friends refused to play with him; he kept taking all of their money. And so Binger began playing poker tournaments, driving out on the weekends to the card rooms near the San Francisco airport. After a few months, Binger was making more money on the part-time poker circuit than he made as a postdoc. He used his winnings to pay off his student loans and start a modest bankroll. "I realized that I'd never be able to really focus on physics until I gave poker a shot," he says. "I needed to know if I could make it." That's when Binger decided to try his luck as a professional gambler.

THE WORLD SERIES
of Poker (WSOP) is held at the Rio Hotel, a Brazilian-themed casino that's across the highway from the Strip. For the most part, the Latin motif is confined to the silly costumes of the staff, the syrupy cocktails, and the ugly carpets, which are a swirl of Carnival colors. The hotel itself is a generic tower of reflective purple and red glass. During the WSOP, the lobby of the Rio accumulates the litter of the tournament: cigarette butts, empty water bottles, registration papers, fast-food wrappers. Anxious players collect in the corners, sharing stories of bad beats and lucky breaks. Even the hotel gift shop is stocked for the event, carrying a wide selection of poker primers right next to the nudie magazines.

Most of the tournament takes place in the Amazon Room, a cavernous warehouse-like space with more than two hundred card tables. Security cameras dangle from the ceiling like ominous disco balls. Compared with the rest of Vegas, the atmosphere inside the huge room is starkly sober and serious. (Nobody would dare litter in here.) Even when it's filled with poker players, the enormous area has moments of startling calm, when all you can hear are the shuffling of cards and the perpetual hum of the air-conditioning system. Outside, it's 114 degrees.

Binger is tall and lean, with a face made of angles. His hair is boyishly blond, and it's usually styled with copious amounts of gel so that it sticks straight up. At every poker tournament, he wears the same outfit: a backward baseball cap, opaque Oakley sunglasses, and a brightly colored button-down shirt. Such consistency is typical of poker players, who are creatures of habit and rigid believers in routine. (A common quip on the pro circuit is "It's unlucky to be superstitious.") Some professionals wear the same sweatshirts day after day, until the reek of their nervousness precedes them. Others develop bizarre eating rituals, like Jamie Gold, who orders scrambled eggs for breakfast even though he's allergic to eggs.

Binger actually eats his eggs. His breakfast routine consists of one egg over easy, sandwiched between a lightly toasted English muffin. After eating that, he drinks a small glass of orange juice and then a strong cup of tea. He digests for "approximately ten to twelve minutes," and next drives to the gym, where he performs an extremely regimented workout. "All these habits probably sound a little crazy," Binger says, "but when you're playing in a tournament it's crucial to not distract yourself with thinking about what to order for breakfast or how many laps to swim. The routine keeps it simple, so all I'm thinking about is poker, poker, poker."

At the 2006 WSOP, Binger was one of 8,773 players who each paid $10,000 to enter the main event, a no-limit Texas hold'em competition stretching over thirteen days. Since 1991, when the prize money for the WSOP first exceeded a million dollars, the poker tournament has been more lucrative for its winners than Wimbledon, the PGA championship, and the Kentucky Derby. Since 2000, it has become the most valuable sporting event in the world, at least for the winners. (More than 90 percent of entrants won't "make the money," which means that they'll lose their entire entry fee.) In 2006, the top prize for the main event was expected to exceed twelve million dollars. To make an equivalent amount of money playing tennis, you'd have to win Wimbledon ten times.

The rules of Texas hold'em are simple. Nine players gather around a card table, each of them determined to assemble the best possible poker hand. The game begins when each player is dealt two cards, face-down. The two players to the left of the dealer are then forced to make blind bets, wagering their money before they even look at their cards. (These bets ensure that there's some money at stake in every hand.) The remaining players have three options: they can match the bet, raise it, or fold. If a player has strong hole cards—a pair of aces being the best possible duo—he or she will make an aggressive bet. (Unless, of course, the player wants to act weak, but that's another story.) A bad hand is a good reason to fold.

After the first round of betting is over, three community cards are dealt, face-up, in the center of the table. These cards are called the flop. There is now another round of betting, as players adjust their wagers in light of this new information. Then two more community cards are dealt, one at a time, with another round of betting after each. (The fourth card is called the turn, and the fifth card is called the river.) Each player then assembles the most valuable hand possible by combining the two hole cards with any three of the five community cards shared by the entire table. So let's say you're dealt the ace and the ten of hearts. The best possible set of community cards would contain the jack, queen, and king of hearts, since that would give you a royal flush, the perfect poker hand. (A royal flush is dealt approximately once every 648,739 poker hands.) If you got the jack, queen, and king of different suits, then you'd have a straight. (Odds: 253 to 1.) You'd also be thrilled with three heart cards of any value, since that would give you a flush. (Odds: 507 to 1.) A more likely scenario is that you end up with a single pair (odds are 1.37 to 1), or you might get absolutely nothing, in which case the highest-ranking card, the ace, is your entire hand.

At its core, poker is a profoundly statistical game. Each hand is ranked according to its rarity, so having two pairs is more valuable than having one, and a straight flush is more valuable than a straight or a flush. A poker player who can parse his hole cards into possible probabilities—who knows, for example, that being dealt a pair of fours means that there's a 4 percent chance of getting dealt another four on the flop—has a distinct advantage over his competitors. He can make bets informed by the laws of statistics, so that his wagers reflect the likelihood of winning the hand.

But the game isn't just about the cards. The act of betting is what makes poker so infinitely complicated. It's what turns Texas hold'em into a black art, a mixture of stagecraft and game theory. Consider the act of raising the bet. Such a move can have a straightforward meaning: a player is demonstrating confidence in his hole cards. Or it can signal a bluff, as a player tries to steal the pot by intimidating all the other players into folding. How does one distinguish between these different intentions? That's where the skill comes in. Professional poker players are constantly trying to read their opponents, searching for the minor tells of deceit. Does this bet fit into a behavioral pattern? Has the player been consistently "tight" or aggressive all night? Why is his left eye twitching? Is that a symptom of nervousness? (Those who are easy to read are known as ABC players.) Of course, the best poker players are also the best liars, able to keep their opponents off balance with sincere bluffs and unpredictable bets. They know that the most important thing in poker is not what cards they actually have, but what cards people
think
they have. A lie told well is just as good as the truth.

IN THE BEGINNING
of the tournament, Binger played patient poker, using his extraordinary math skills—a talent he honed in grad school—to methodically figure out which hands he should enter. Nine times out of ten he immediately folded, and he risked his money only when he had hole cards with decent statistical odds, such as a high pair or an ace-king combo. "The opening rounds of every tournament are always full of players who probably shouldn't be there," Binger says. "These are the rich guys who think they are much better than they actually are. At this stage of the game, the most important thing you can do is not make a big mistake. You don't want to take unnecessary risks. You just want to stay alive. This is when I'm making sure that I'm always doing the math."

Look, for example, at one of Binger's early hands at the WSOP. He was dealt an immaculate pair of aces, a hand so good it has its own name (it's called American Airlines). Naturally, Binger decided to raise. Although it was a modest raise—Binger didn't want to scare anybody off—everyone at the table decided to fold, except for a well-groomed older man wearing a canary yellow polo shirt with big sweat stains in the armpits. He pushed his short stack of chips to the center of the table. "I'm all in," said the man in yellow. Binger assumed that the man had either a high pair (like two kings) or two high cards of the same suit (like the king and queen of spades). Binger paused for a moment and contemplated his odds. If he correctly read the other player's hand—and that was a big
if
— then he had somewhere between an 82 and 87 percent of winning. Binger decided to match the bet. The man nervously turned over his cards: the ace and jack of diamonds. The flop was dealt but it was a meaningless collection of number cards. The turn and the river were more of the same. Binger's pair of aces prevailed. The man in the yellow shirt winced and walked off without a word.

As the days pass, the weak players are ruthlessly culled from the tournament. It's like natural selection on fast-forward. The tournament doesn't end for the night until more than half of the players have been eliminated, so it's not unusual for the nights to last until two or three in the morning. ("Learning how to become nocturnal is part of the challenge," Binger says.) By the fourth day, even the skilled survivors are beginning to look a little worn out from the struggle. Their faces are masks of fatigue and stubble, and their eyes have the faraway look of an adrenaline hangover. The smell of stale cigarette smoke seems to be a popular deodorant.