Do Games Not For Money Become Boring to Poker Players?
I have always loved games. Card games of all sorts - gin rummy, rummy 500 (the “old lady” version of gin rummy), canasta, hearts, pinochle - I played every last one of them. I could once recite verbatim the rules of every known card game in According to Hoyle.
In high school and college, I got serious about other types of games. I am enough of a geek to admit I played an awful lot of Dungeons and Dragons and similar role playing games. Those have helped my poker immensely, because they are so much more about the psychology of your fellow players and how they are likely to react to your actions.
Games were always a huge part of my life. Even though I admit it's a bit pathetic, the phrase, “it's only a game”, never had any meaning to me. Nothing was ever only a game to me. Games mattered. Playing them correctly and determining the proper way of playing mattered. Winning mattered some, but I never minded if I thought I did the right thing. (I was destine, in other words, to be comfortable with bad beats.)
Of course, by late high school, even though chess was still a big part of my life (admittedly, I was never very good at any game where complete information was available to all players), poker was my preferred game. C.M. (my college poker and chess friend) and I ran the weekly poker games in my college dorm. I (retroactively) call them “$5 buy-in pot limit dealer's choice mixed games&rquo;, but at the time it was just “poker”. I payed for most of my pizza in college with money won in those games; a usual good take was about $15 for an evening - honestly a lot of money for college students in those days.
In graduate school, I got interested some in Diplomacy. Of all the games I've ever played, I think it is most similar to poker. Diplomacy is a board game where the winner is determined by who negotiates best with the other players. There are bluffs (usually called “stabs” in Diplomacy-speak), where you make promises to support another player's armies and then don't. There are moves similar to defensive bets, and over-bets, and slow-plays. Someday, I had actually thought I'd write up a comparison between Diplomacy and poker, but I don't think I ever will. My love for Diplomacy doesn't seem sustainable.
When I took a break from poker recently, I got pretty serious about Diplomacy again. I signed up for a few Internet games. They take a long time to play (usually live games take 7 hours and Internet games, since all communication happens in writing rather than verbal, can take months). I'm still in the two games, but I have all but given up on trying anymore.
I have noticed an old frustration of mine. When there is no external reward (i.e., the money in poker), I find that people don't take the game seriously. And, it has the side-effect of making me want to quit playing. In both my Diplomacy games, two players have quit mid-game. Others had some early losses and gave up rather than play their best. (Comebacks happen often in Diplomacy, so you should never give up.) Others simply lost interest and aren't playing the game fully. Either way, the games turned sour because there was no real competition.
I started to think about why I don't feel this way about poker. The answer is quite obvious, actually. When people don't take poker seriously, I get free money (or, at least, situations with wonderfully positive EV). One of two things happen when you play poker: you are challenged by opponents that you have to work hard to outplay, or you are presented with lots of great EV situations. Either way, you win.
Meanwhile, if you play a game where nothing of value is on the line against opponents who don't take it seriously, what's the point? You get frustrated; well, at least I do. I remember a time in my life when I would get so angry at such a thing - people didn't see the games as important as I did and I couldn't stand it. Since then, two things have happened: (a) I am more likely to realize that I don't have control of other people's actions, so I just quit the game, and (b) I'm usually playing a game (namely, poker) that rewards me no matter what others do. I either get an enjoyable, serious, challenge game, or I get really good EV.
Other games could be like this, I guess. I can imagine a Diplomacy game where the seven players put up money to make a prize pool. Diplomacy even has, as part of its tradition, negotiated settlements (where people agree to end the game with a certain number of players remaining). Those negotiations would be very interesting if there were money to be won. Indeed, I can imagine that people would rediscover the game and how amazing it is if there was serious money in it.
I have to admit, though, a twinge of sadness that games are about money for me now. I guess the truth is that almost all people don't love games the way I do. I'd guess around 1% of the population feels as I do about games. So, odds are that my opponents won't ever have that same love for it, and they won't ever take it as seriously. So, I will usually have to “settle for” playing against players who just don't love the game like I do, and who want to give their money away to better players. It's a nice thing to settle for, but it still leaves some sense of loss.
Going back to Diplomacy reminded me, though, that poker is truly unique. It's an almost magical game of psychology, played for money with cards and chips. No other game really compares to it, because no other game has all these aspects. No other game digs at the deep psychological roots of how people feel about losing and winning money. I could imagine Diplomacy getting the job done in this regard, but I don't think there any high stakes Diplomacy clubs sprouting up soon. It certainly won't be a casino attraction.
So, I'll stick to poker. It's a wonderful game, and while I have a twinge of regret that I won't sit for hours figuring the best opening moves when I've been drawn Austria against an aggressive Turkey, I will still have plenty of game strategy to think about against a nice array of opponents. That is, until the poker bubble bursts.