Poker lessons from non-poker movies: "The Hustler"

Being as deeply immersed in poker culture as I am, perhaps it's impossible not to see the game everywhere. I have frequently noticed potential poker lessons or parallels in non-poker movies. To date, I don't think I've blogged about any of them. And for all I know, maybe I never will again after today, though I'm tentatively envisioning this as an occasional ongoing series of posts.

When Paul Newman died late last year, I embarked upon my own little Newman movie festival through Netflix. I decided to try to review his career in chronological order--not everything he ever made, but the highlights. So far I've seen "Somebody Up There Likes Me" (1956), "The Long, Hot Summer" (1958), "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1958), "Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys," (1958), "The Young Philadelphians" (1959), "Exodus" (1960), and, last night, "The Hustler" (1961).

If you can't see important poker lessons to be learned from "The Hustler," well, you're just not trying very hard.


1. Take the money and run.

"Fast" Eddie Felson is loaded with talent at pool--of that there is no doubt. But early on in the movie he tries to take on the man who is, by reputation, the best in the world: "Minnesota Fats." (Note: There was a real pool player known by that name, but he took on the moniker after the film became a hit in order to capitalize on it. There is no evidence that the movie character was based on him.) Eddie sets a goal for himself: to make $10,000 from Fats in one night.

He does it. Soon after reaching that mark, his partner tries to get him to quit. Eddie won't hear of it. They keep playing, and after a while, Eddie is up by an astonishing $18,000. Again his partner pleads with him to walk away a winner. But for Eddie, it's no longer about the money. He wants Fats to cry uncle, to quit, to concede that Eddie is better.

Fats is too smart for that. He sees that Eddie's ego is crowding out his sense, and, further, that Eddie is getting drunk. Fats, being older and wiser, possesses greater self-knowledge than young Eddie (and can hold his liquor better, too). He knows that even if Eddie is a superior player, he (Fats) has the edge in endurance and a cool head. So he doesn't quit. On the contrary, he takes a break, washes up, shaves, changes clothes, and comes back both looking and feeling like a new man. Meanwhile, Eddie is getting drunker and more fatigued, fighting just to stay awake.

Predictably, the tide turns, and when all is said and done, Fats has won back all of the money. Eddie leaves broke again.

How many times have you had a great poker session, feeling on top of the world, then gave it all back, either little by little or in one fell swoop, and ended up leaving with nothing to show for your efforts? I can't count them myself. It's horrible. Of course, there have also been times when I stayed past when I thought I should and ended up winning a lot more than I would have if I had left, so it's not always a mistake. But that has never happened when my reasons for telling myself I should leave are things like recognizing that I'm too tired to play well, or that I'm at a table at which I have no significant edge in skill. The only times I've been glad I stayed past the point of thinking I should leave are when my reason for wanting to leave is simply to lock up a win. That wasn't Eddie's situation.

No, for Eddie, the pride became more important than the money, and Fats exploited that weakness magnificently, and it cost Eddie everything.


2. Know your opponent.

We might as well throw in here a conclusion that also follows directly from that first big confrontation between Eddie and Fats. Pool, like poker, isn't always about the best player winning. It's about knowing your opponent, his style, and his weaknesses, and how to take advantage of them. Whoever does that better will emerge the victor.


3. It's all about character.

A witness to the big match, Bert Gordon--played to smarmy perfection by George C. Scott--sees that the kid has talent and could be worth working with. He becomes Eddie's mentor/manager/advisor/backer. He tries to wise Eddie up about what's lacking in his game:

Bert Gordon: I don't think there's a pool player alive shoots better pool
than I saw you shoot the other night at Ames. You got talent.

Fast Eddie: So I got talent. So what beat me?

Bert Gordon: Character.

(Transcripts cribbed from this imdb.com page.)

Way back in my "Poker gem #2," I quoted David Mamet's great essay discussing how poker is all about character. It's well worth re-reading. I hadn't thought about this before, but I can now sort of see how pool is the same. Sure, you might have fine skill, but if you can't control your mood, your temper, your drinking, your steaming, the distractions from outside the game (onlookers, what's happening in your personal life and relationships, etc.), you can turn from the hustler to the sucker.

I learned last night from the "special features" documentary on the DVD that the self-named Minnesota Fats--not a great player--could beat Willie Mosconi, then considered possibly the best in the world (and, incidentally, the technical advisor on the set) by getting under his skin. Fats knew how to needle Mosconi and get him angry, taking him off of his game. We see the same thing in many poker players: Tony G comes to mind as a world-class needler. It takes character to resist and overcome such forces. Fast Eddie couldn't do it until he gained character, through some painful experiences we see him put through as the movie progresses.


4. Don't be a born loser.

Bert Gordon: Eddie, is it alright if I get personal?

Fast Eddie: Whaddaya been so far?

Bert Gordon: Eddie, you're a born loser.

Fast Eddie: What's that supposed to mean?

Bert Gordon: First time in ten years I ever saw Minnesota Fats hooked... really
hooked. But you let him off.

Fast Eddie: I told you I got drunk.

Bert Gordon: Sure you got drunk. You have the best excuse in the
world for losing; no trouble losing when you got a good excuse. Winning... that
can be heavy on your back, too, like a monkey. You'll drop that load too when
you got an excuse. All you gotta do is learn to feel sorry for yourself. One of
the best indoor sports, feeling sorry for yourself. A sport enjoyed by all,
especially the born losers.

Psychologists at least as far back as Freud have hypothesized that gamblers, or at least the pathologic gamblers, are actually playing out a subconscious desire to lose. Freud, rather unconvincingly, tied this in, to childhood stuff about Oedipal fears and masturbation shame. But others have subsequently made more plausible arguments about the "born loser" gambler being one who secretly longs to lose because losing confirms his view of the world being fixed against him. If he won, that would be inconsistent with what he had previously concluded about the entire universe being out to get him, and he cannot bear that level of cognitive dissonance. So he loses. In the event that he gets ahead in a session, he inevitably keeps playing until the winnings are all gone.

I wrote once before about an extreme example of such a "born loser"--here. In fact, I've played with this same woman twice since writing that post, and she got worse each time. I'll probably write up those experiences in more detail some day. But for now I'll just say that it's patently obvious that she couldn't bear winning. She is so heavily invested, psychologically, in having her notions of bad luck and unfairness confirmed for her through a poker game that she cannot win. It would turn her world upside down. At a level that she herself would be unable to acknowledge, she loves making her miserable life all the more miserable by proving how supremely unlucky she is at poker, as I'm guessing she is at all other aspects of her life.

If you enter a poker game believing that you will lose, you will. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the game cannot be played successfully without confidence (though, of course, stopping short of the arrogance/cockiness/hubris that lead to downfall). Perhaps if you recognize in yourself that your mind isn't right and you're feeling like you're going to lose, you can overcome that disadvantage through self-talking. (I've managed that once in a while.) But if you enter the game not even being aware that you possess, somewhere deep down, a belief that you are destined to lose, you're doomed from the start. You are a born loser.

Fortunately, this is not necessarily a lifelong affliction. Fast Eddie showed that born losers can turn it around, though the road to enlightenment is a hard one. The film gives us a painful but, I think, ultimately affirming message on this point.


5. Don't tap on the aquarium.

Gordon warns Eddie that he needs to be careful who and where and how he hustles, or he could get hurt. Eddie doesn't listen. He goes to a pool room where he isn't known and takes a bunch of the locals for small stakes. But then he tangles with the local shark, and the stakes quickly go up. After they agree to play ten games for a total of $100, the guy says something that ticks Eddie off, and he says, "I don't rattle, kid. But just for that I'm gonna beat you flat."

He proceeds to run the table ten times in a row, never even giving the other guy a chance to play.

Both his opponent and the other locals who have stuck around to watch realize that they've been hustled, and they don't like it. They take Eddie into a back room and break both of his thumbs, putting him out of commission for months.

I think we've all heard stories from the likes of Doyle Brunson and T.J. Cloutier about how playing poker for a living in Texas in the old days was a risky way of life. Sometimes winning wasn't the hard part--getting out of town with the money was. Of more relevance to modern games, Mike Caro constantly talks about opponents being "customers," and one has to treat them nicely, make them enjoy losing to you, so that they will keep doing it.

Eddie hadn't learned that lesson. He didn't cheat, but he pissed off the wrong people, rather than being friendly and casual and charming. He could have taken their money without them ever having a clue as to how far outclassed they all were, but his ego, again, got in the way. He had to show off. As he himself puts it upon later reflection, "Cause, ya see, twice, Sarah... once at Ames with Minnesota Fats and then again at Arthur's, in that cheap, crummy pool room, now why'd I do it, Sarah? Why'd I do it? I coulda beat that guy, coulda beat 'im cold, he never woulda known. But I just hadda show 'im. Just hadda show those creeps and those punks what the game is like when it's great, when it's REALLY great."

This is, frankly, one of the weakest areas of my game. Sure, I'm a substantially better player than the average tourist I play with, but I am pretty terrible at the schmoozing. I'm naturally kind of anti-social--even misanthropic, I'd have to admit--so the kind of salesmanship that Caro advocates is positively the hardest thing for me to do. At least I don't go the other way and irritate other players with arrogance and rubbing it in when I win and/or they play badly. Once in a while, when I pull off an excellent move, I can manage to say something like, "I just got lucky on you there." But that's about the best I have in me. I know that I need to learn to do more encouraging of the bad players to keep them playing badly. It's something I really need to work on. Fortunately, nobody has broken my thumbs because of how I acted at the poker table.


6. It's not a question of whether you can, but whether you will.

A rich man named Findley invites Eddie over to his home for a private game, but Eddie is surprised to see that the table has no pockets; the game will be straight billiards, not pool. (For an explanation of the difference, see here.) Eddie has never played it before. But, rather like a good poker player can pick up any version of the game and learn to prevail in it rather quickly (the best example of this is Jennifer Harman winning a WSOP bracelet in deuce-to-seven no-limit in 2000, having never played the game before, after a single ten-minute lesson in basic strategy from Howard Lederer), a superior pool player can adapt his skills to other variants and beat lesser players who trump him in experience in a particular form of the game.

So after a few games, they're about even in money. The host wants to raise the stakes, and Eddie does, too. He tells Gordon (his backer), "If that's his best game, I can beat him." Here's the dialogue as they're negotiating new stakes (my transcription this time):

Gordon: You really think you can beat him?

Findley: Of course he thinks he can beat me, Bert. He wouldn't be playing
me if he didn't--right, Felson?

Gordon: I didn't ask him can he beat you. I already know he can
beat you. I asked him will he. With Eddie, that's two different things.

Setting aside the technical point that Gordon's question was, in fact, "can" rather than "will," he makes a crucial observation. Perhaps it's not too different from what I've discussed already in this post, but having the technical ability to win just isn't enough. Do you possess the will to win? Do you possess the temperament to win? Do you possess the character to win? Those are not questions that can be asked and answered once, but must be re-asked and re-answered before every poker session, and even repeatedly over the course of a session. Whenever the answer is no, you need to either leave the game or somehow find a way to get the answer to change back to yes.


So there you have it: At least six worthwhile poker lessons from a non-poker movie. If you're never seen "The Hustler," it's time you rented it. If you've seen it long ago but never considered its poker implications, it's time to watch it again.

It's a movie about pool, but it's one of the best poker movies I've ever seen.

Best law ever

Now THIS is what America's been needing: a law making a crime to annoy another person! It should be, like, federalized. Only problem is, I'd spend all my time making citizen's arrests of, well, practically everybody.

Of poker and porn stars

Last night I played what is for me a marathon-ish session at the Venetian--just shy of eight hours.

This is always an odd and amusing time of year here in Vegas, with the confluence of the Consumer Electronics Show and the Adult Video News conference. Let me tell you: it is usually not difficult to tell who is in town for which meeting.

Take this guy, for example, who was sitting next to me at the poker table:




Zoom in on that wrist band and the pink emblem on it. Does that look to you like something issued by the CES? I think not.

Of course, if you saw the rest of him, you wouldn't need the wrist band to confirm your impression. That black shirt is tailored and pressed, topped by a chic gray Euro-scarf around the neck. This is not an electronics geek.

You could also note that his European wife or girlfriend, in the seat to his right, was wearing no bra, and a blouse open enough to make that fact clear. Again, not your typical peddler of the latest whiz-bang pocket computer. (Though, for all I know, whizzing and banging are, in fact, key elements of her job.)

I should note that the gentleman in the black shirt was an incredibly good sport. I put horrendous beats on him twice. First, my jacks cracked his aces when I flopped a set. But at least on that occasion I had the best hand when all the money went in. Unlike the second occasion. There, I had K-J on a jack-high flop and was confident I had the best hand. But he had limped in with pocket queens, presumably to deceive me in exactly the manner that it did. We got it all in, and I caught a third jack on the river to save my sorry butt. He just shook my hand and laughed it off. Whew! I think the typical CES attendee would be a little more uptight about such matters.

Sometimes you don't need to be sitting right next to people to be able to tell which meeting they're here for. Take a gander at this couple:



They appear to divide their income equally between gym memberships, plastic surgeons, and manicurists. (You can't see it in this photo, but the dude has perfect nails, including clear nail polish.)

Over the course of the night, I learned that the young woman--whose cups overfloweth, if you catch my drift, much more than you might think from how things look in this photo--goes by the name of "Phoenix Marie." I won't provide a link, but you can Google it. Be prepared for some VVVVVNSFW results, however.* The gentleman declined to give his name or say what movies he has been in (he was pestered on these questions to the point of rudeness by a young female dealer who had to wear a bib to keep from drooling all over the cards), but he is clearly "in the industry." His reticence was not because of general shyness, but a bit of gallantry. He said that he was here to support his girlfriend's career, and didn't want to divert attention away from her and to himself. They were both very nice, and he was definitely better at poker than the average tourist.

Incidentally, Ms. Marie is a stunningly beautiful young woman. I looked around for a few minutes at some of her photos and video clips, and they really don't do her justice. She's one of those people who turns out to be far more attractive in person than on film, for whatever reason.

When deciding on the Venetian for the night, I had thought that I would mainly be facing egghead engineering types flashing the latest gadgets. It was true that the halls and casino floor had more than the usual percentage of young Asian males flashing cutting-edge cell phones, but my particular poker table, at least, was attracting players who were here for the other convention.

I can't say that was entirely a bad thing. It did, however, make for some, uh, interesting table conversation. It also provided new shades of meaning to otherwise innocuous poker terminology. For example, when the dealer announces, "Three-way action".... oh, never mind.


*He told us this name while she was briefly away from the table. It sounded so obviously fake that I thought he might be pulling our legs, so I Googled the name from my spiffy new web-enabled cell phone. An image quickly popped up that was, well, the first of that genre to appear on my new phone. It did so just as a couple of people were walking behind me, so I quickly had to turn the phone face down on my lap. Not that those people likely would have either noticed or cared, but I really don't want to get known as the guy who is so pathetic that he surfs the net for porn on his cell phone between poker hands.

Guess the casino, #21b (oops! misnumbered them!)

I'm reverting back to my original way of hiding the answer, now that it has been explained to me that RSS readers won't act as spoilers if I include some other bit of text before the answer. So future installments will look like the below (without this paragraph). The generic directions should (1) prevent the answer itself from showing up as part of the post title in RSS readers, and (2) clue in new readers about what to do, in case they missed the first post of this series. Again, let me know if this fixes the problems and/or creates any new ones.


To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.

Answer: Eureka, in Mesquite. Bet I fooled a lot of you!

Fun on TV

This week's "Poker After Dark" is an unusually entertaining one so far. This is mainly because of the other players picking on Phil Hellmuth. He made the unfortunate mistake of comparing himself to Winston Churchill, a remark which Phil Gordon, Gabe Kaplan, and Cory Zeidman will not let him forget.

We also have Hellmuth telling Zeidman (paraphrased; it didn't seem worth the time to go back and transcribe accurately), "It's like there's a hold'em ladder with 30,000 pegs, and I'm at about peg #20,000--higher than anybody else in the world. You're at about #4. I'm so far above you, you have no right to talk to me about hold'em." Other players later noted that Phil placing himself at only 20,000 out of 30,000 may be the humblest thing he's ever said.

Phil boasts about being paid $50,000 a pop for doing corporate gigs. Then he badly misplays a hand and loses a pot he could easily have won. Zeidman zings him: "People pay $50,000 to watch you play like that?"

Spoiler: Hellmuth is first to bust out, and does so in an uncharacteristic fashion. Whatever his faults, it must be said that Phil rarely exits a tournament by calling off all his chips when he's badly behind. He's usually much more careful than that (too careful, in fact). But this time he called twice (turn and river) in a situation where he should have been far more willing to dump his hand. Naturally, he has to inject some under-the-breath remarks about how he had his opponent (Kaplan) beautifully trapped until a miracle card hit, and how he "knew" Gordon had paired that ace. (So why did you call, if you knew?)

If you love to hate Hellmuth as much as I do, it's all great fun. Watch it here.

Poker gems, #205

David Mamet, in a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece, September 16, 2005 (available here). (Hat tip to James McManus's most recent Card Player magazine installment on the history of poker for referring to this essay, which I had not seen before.)


One needs to know but three words to play poker: call, raise or fold.

Fold means keep the money, I’m out of the hand; call means to match your opponents’ bet. That leaves raise, which is the only way to win at poker. The raiser puts his opponent on the defensive, seizing the initiative. Initiative is only important if one wants to win.

The military axiom is “he who imposes the terms of the battle imposes the terms of the peace.” The gambling equivalent is: “Don’t call unless you could raise”; that is, to merely match one’s opponent’s bet is effective only if it makes the opponent question the caller’s motives. And that can only occur if the caller has acted aggressively enough in the past to cause his opponents to wonder if the mere call is a ruse de guerre....

In poker, one must have courage: the courage to bet, to back one’s convictions, one’s intuitions, one’s understanding. There can be no victory without courage. The successful player must be willing to wager on likelihoods. Should he wait for absolutely risk-free certainty, he will win nothing, regardless of the cards he is dealt....

One may sit at the poker table all night and never bet and still go home broke, having anted away one’s stake....

[One] may be bold and risk defeat, or be passive and ensure it.

Guess the casino, #21

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Poker gems, #204

Barry Tanenbaum, in Card Player magazine column, December 31, 2008 (vol. 21, #26), p. 78.


Some players, probably due to proper upbringing, find it hard to escape the feeling that bluffing is somehow unethical. They rarely try, and if they do get caught bluffing, they feel just like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar....

Bluffing is part of the game. It is not theft, any more than a baseball pitcher who mixes up a fastball with a curve is stealing from the hitter. If you are ashamed to bluff, you will have a very hard time beating anyone except the most oblivious players.

Guess the casino, #20

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This and that

1. Just back from Salt Lake City. Had a nice visit with family. While there, we went to see the "Body Worlds 3" exhibit. There was an unforgivably long line to slog through to get in. The only entertaining part of the wait was the display above. One could text messages and the skeleton would "say" them. I was too bored to resist.

2. I had gotten a bit behind on listening to the Hard-Boiled Poker Radio Show, so I downloaded the last three (episodes 9, 10, and 11), put them on my non-iPod, and listened to them today while driving home. Good stuff, as always, and utterly unlike any other poker podcast out there.

3. The SLC editorial I mentioned a couple of days ago is available here. The highlight: "Internet wagering is the crack cocaine of gaming. It's highly addictive and readily available, a round-the-clock siren preying on those too weak to know their limits."

I wonder if the Salt Lake Tribune is consistent in wanting to ban everything for which it is true that a small minority of users indulge to excess, causing personal and societal woes: alcohol, computers, pornography, sex, eating, rummage sales, shopping in general....

The concluding paragraph: "The Legislature should approve the resolution and send a strong message to Washington. It's imperative that federal officials respect Utah's constitution, and preserve the state's right to protect the public from these Internet predators."

The actual legislative proposal on the table wouldn't make it a crime to engage in Internet wagering in Utah, but that sentence sure makes it sound like the Tribune editorial board thinks the state legislature should follow Washington state down that path.

I shouldn't have to tell you by now how things like this make my blood boil. I neither need nor want any government (local, state, or federal) to "protect" me from my own decisions. The unstated, but unavoidable, implication behind this is that they know better than I do what is a good use of my time and money. That's appallingly, shockingly condescending, and such overt governmental paternalism should be offensive to every right-thinking American.

4. Rather than risk an expensive breakdown of my old car in the middle of the Rocky Mountains, I decided to go for a rental. Found a great deal from Alamo: a 2009 Toyota Yaris 4-door for four days for $59, including all fees, taxes, etc. The thing got 39.2 mpg over just under 1000 miles, even though most of that was at 75-80 mph, not exactly the car's sweet spot for optimum mileage, while going up and down through mountains (at least 5000 feet of elevation change). Impressive.

Guess the casino, #19

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Guess the casino, #18

Some readers have pointed out to me that at least some RSS readers reveal the answer in the title. I still haven't figured out why this is, but in an attempt to remedy that problem, I'm trying a new way of revealing the answer. (And, by the way, there are still a few people who haven't caught on to the fact that the answer will always be contained in the post--no need to submit guesses!) Just hover your mouse over the appropriate text below, and the answer should pop up. Please let me know if this solves the problem and/or creates any new ones.



HOVER YOUR MOUSE HERE FOR THE ANSWER

Readers seeing the light on the 2-4

Remote-posting as a virtual outlaw from one of the two states of the union in which all gaming is illegal. (I slipped over the border unnoticed.) It's even in the state constitution, f'r cryin' out loud. (Article VI, Section 27: "The Legislature shall not authorize any game of chance, lottery or gift enterprise under any pretense or for any purpose.") In fact, the state's biggest newspaper this morning carried an editorial urging that that prohibition be allowed to be extended to a ban on online gambling, no matter what international trade agreements might say to the contrary. It even used the lame "crack cocaine of gambling" line. Srsly. I'll post a link to it when I can, but it seems not to be available on the paper's web site yet. (The editorial is in support of the legislative proposal discussed here and here.)

Anyway, this is just a quick post to point you to an excellent 2-4 hand posted by reader GrrrlZilla here. (See her blog here.) I won't embed it because I keep getting complaints about the page being slow to load when it contains Flash movies.

Nice to be getting more converts to the cult religion of the deuce-four, of which I have anointed myself to be Grand Poo-Bah.

Oh, and while I'm throwing together unrelated links, F-Train shows why it pays to read the ol' Grumpster once in a while!

I'll be back in Vegas late Monday. Don't go crazy while I'm gone.