As Jared Diamond demonstrates in Guns, Germs, and Steel, when Francisco Pizarro and 168 Spanish soldiers defeated Atahuallpa’s army of 80,000 Incas at Cajamarca in 1532, the decisive factor was the Spaniards’ ability to read and write. Because while it may seem as though civilizations master each other with avionics and blunderbusses, viruses and Tomahawk missiles, really we do it with books. (Relative levels of book learning are a function of the shape of the continent you hail from, believe it or not, but that’s a whole other discussion.) “Literacy,” Diamond makes clear, “made the Spaniards heirs to a huge body of knowledge about human behavior and history. By contrast, not only did Atahuallpa have no conception of the Spaniards themselves, and no personal experience of any invaders from overseas, but he also had never even heard (or read) of similar threats to anyone else, anywhere else, anytime previously in history.”
God may play dice with the universe, despite Einstein’s last hope, but serious gamblers, scorning metaphysical crapshoots and the casino’s house edge, prefer no-limit Texas hold’em. Light years removed from the alcohol-soaked nickel-dime-quarter games of kitchen and dorm room, where the most you can lose is your beer money and just who walks away with it depends less on skill than on luck, no-limit tournament action is always a ruthlessly disciplined fight to the death. The beverage of choice at these tables is mineral water, and the aces primly quaffing it have worked long and hard to make luck as tiny a factor as possible. How did they learn to do this? They went back to school.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
These days an education–even a refresher course–in no-limit hold’em can easily cost as much as four years at Stanford or Princeton. Even the textbooks are pricey: Super/System goes for $50, Theory of Poker for $29.95, Championship No-Limit and Pot-Limit Hold’em for $39.95. The last two are published in paperback, yet at 20 times the price they’d still cost only a fraction of the bankroll required to play uninformed no-limit hold’em for a session or two, let alone year after year. It goes without saying that all three spell out how to steal blinds and antes and pots.
Although born in northern California, Cloutier has lived in Richardson, Texas, for over two decades, and he’s now considered to be among the last of the Texas road warriors. After retiring from the Canadian Football League, he worked as a food wholesaler with his father and brother-in-law; when that business failed, he drove a bread truck for Toscana and later became night manager at the Wonder Bread bakery in San Francisco. In 1976 he moved to Dallas to work as a wildcatter, playing poker first on his days off, then, as the oil boom sputtered, pretty much every day, and he gradually learned the game’s subtleties.
When Cloutier calls more blandly analytical experts “poker mathematician types,” he is referring, above all, to David Sklansky (more on him later) and Mason Malmuth. He says that they fail to adapt to the ebb and flow of tournament competition, implying that this is because they’ve lost touch with poker’s outlaw heritage. McEvoy interjects that their play is “too mechanical,” then ups the ante by charging that “they lack flair.” Whether things like adaptability and flair can be taught in a book is an interesting question, and I don’t know the answer. But the issue itself reminds me of Edward O. Wilson’s remark in On Human Nature–that neurobiology cannot be learned at the feet of a guru, just as philosophy “must not be left in the hands of the merely wise.”
Super/System was launched with maximal authority because Brunson had just won the no-limit world championship at Binion’s in ’76 and ’77 and narrowly missed the hat trick in ’78, a few weeks after the book was published. He finished second that year to–who else? His coauthor, Baldwin. And then second to Ungar in 1980.
The heart of his philosophy is what he calls the Fundamental Theorem of Poker: Every time you play a hand differently from the way you would have played it if you could see all your opponents’ cards, they gain; and every time you play your hand the same way you would have played it if you could see all their cards, they lose. Conversely, every time opponents play their hands differently from the way they would have if they could see all your cards, you gain; and every time they play their hands the same way they would have played if they could see all your cards, you lose. Sound simple? It is and it isn’t. Of course you’d win more if you were privy to your opponents’ pocket cards, but reading those cards as they lie facedown on the felt is an inexact science at best. Sklansky teaches you to make highly educated guesses based on previous plays, current position, and a host of related criteria. He also makes clear how much correct play depends on the pot odds–that is, on the ratio of the size of the pot to the bet you must call to continue with the hand.
