On the Poker Bookshelf

If you like to read books about poker, you probably have copies of everything from David Sklansky's Theory of Poker to A. Alvarez's The Biggest Game in Town somewhere on your shelves. But not all of the books you, as a poker player, might want to read will necessarily have the word "poker" on either cover, or anywhere in between. If you wanted to put together some poker reading for yourself, it would be easy to overlook books that might be helpful and/or relevant, even though they weren't written just for this purpose. A few such books have even made it into the oft-recommended list, most notably, Sun Tzu's The Art of War.

I've decided to devote this column to a few books I think deserve to be on the poker player's bookshelf, even though they weren't written for poker players. I've restricted myself to nontechnical books, and although some of the books would be most at home in the games section of your local bookstore, none of them are regularly recommended as poker reading.

If you read a lot about poker, you've probably read quite a bit about game theory, a branch of mathematics that deals with games and decision-making. Game theory provides a framework for strategic analysis of games, and is well worth studying outside the confines of the poker literature (where the term "game theory" is often used inappropriately). Many books have been written on the subject, and most of them are fairly difficult reading. One exception is William Poundstone's Prisoner's Dilemma (subtitled John Von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb). Poundstone's book isn't a textbook or tutorial on game theory; instead, he introduces game theory in its historical context, describing the conundrums that drove critical developments in game theory, and that continue to challenge our intuitions about rational, cooperative behavior. The dilemma that gives the book its title is still good for an argument now and then, and you've probably heard at least one variant of it at some point. A common cover story goes something like this: You and a friend have been imprisoned for some crime. If neither of you talks, you both get one year. If one of you talks, the squealer goes free while the other person gets three years. If you both talk, you both get two years. Clearly, the best mutual outcome would be for both of you to remain silent. Yet, regardless of what your friend does, you will do better by squealing. He faces the same decision. How should you act? The prisoner's dilemma is only one of the many game theoretic puzzles covered in Poundstone's book, which also does a great job of putting them in historical context and describing examples of how these dilemmas occur in the real world.

Lawrence Lessig is a lawyer, professor, author, and activist, whose most active interests concern the intersection between issues in technology and intellectual property. Lessig recently came out on the losing end of a Supreme Court battle to curtail the continued expansion of copyright protection, and he's devoted substantial effort to a project he calls the Creative Commons, which promotes the contribution of creative works to the common good. His first book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, developed a thesis that's central to his work, and that's critical to understanding the relationship between law and technology today: that the laws governing technology are decisions we (as a society) have to make, not truths to be uncovered. Whether or not you agree with this thesis, Lessig sets out some of these issues in particularly compelling fashion in this book, detailing in some cases how technology has overtaken the foresight of the framers of the Constitution. Why should you care as a poker player? Online poker and online gambling is a fast-growing industry of uncertain legal status. Yet, existing statutes may ultimately have little to do with how these industries progress in the United States. While the focus of Code is mostly on freedoms of various kinds (and you may want to read it for that alone), its relevance to online poker should be obvious.

Is the poker community the most dysfunctional game-playing community in the United States? Possibly, but the "Scrabble" community is poised to pose a major challenge. Stefan Fatsis' recent best-selling Word Freak is a look inside the serious Scrabble community in the spirit of Tony Holden's Big Deal. The similarities between the books include the basic premise: Fatsis, a journalist, wants to make a go of it for a year in the serious Scrabble world. Word Freak is a tremendously readable and enjoyable tour of a community that struggles with many of the same issues as poker, most notably the difficulty in finding tournament sponsorship for a game that most people view as an occasional distraction. There's even a little poker crossover, in the person of Jim Geary, an accomplished practitioner of both games.

If you're into gambling, you've probably devoted some time to thinking about the societal impact of gambling and casinos. A few books have been written on the subject, and The Luck Business by Robert Goodman may be the best of them. Based on a project called the "United States Gambling Study," which Goodman directed, the book offers a mixed (but mostly negative) review of the social and economic impact of the gambling industry on local communities. The back cover of the paperback edition describes Goodman's book as "a damning indictment of legalized gambling," while also quoting a review from A. Alvarez. Having mixed feelings about the issue myself (despite the fact that I like to play poker), I thought Goodman's discussion was substantially more balanced than the back cover quotes might suggest. At least he makes an effort to delineate the conditions under which introducing gambling is liable to be harmful to a community. At any rate, I've yet to read, or even find, a book-length defense of the gambling industry, so I think this is a reasonable place to turn. The Luck Business may be an especially good book to read if you're concerned about the potential economic or social impact of introducing riverboat gambling in your hometown.

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." This remark, attributed by Mark Twain to Benjamin Disraeli, is, like just about everything else I've cited here, a good way to start an argument. A lot of complexity underlies this criticism, and not just because its original source is a little muddled. We're all subjected to a constant barrage of statistics on a daily basis, whether we're reading the Wall Street Journal or Card Player. Some throw up their hands (the Twain/Disraeli view, perhaps), others are too trusting (the suckers who are born every minute), and the rest of us live with the reality that it's not always easy to be certain what if anything we can usefully conclude from a given statistic. The classic in this field is a short book written by Darrell Huff half a century ago, called How to Lie With Statistics. Huff's book is far from technical, and really offers only a surface view of the complicated topic (obviously not informed by recent advances in spin control). Its lessons are things that may be best learned in more detail from other sources. But those other sources are generally more technical, so I'd still like to recommend Huff, a standard place to start that ought to convey an appropriate degree of skepticism when it comes to statistics, and that provides a little laundry list of things to watch out for. In fact, it might even be helpful in reading books like The Luck Business. I'm a little wary of recommending Huff's book too strongly, because I think it does a little too much to feed the mistaken notion that statistics are completely meaningless. But at the same time, I think most of us are better served by excessive skepticism than excessive credulity, and anyone who doesn't already have a good feel for the material covered in How to Lie With Statistics ought to read it.

That's all for now. I have a few more suggestions that I'm saving for a later column. And I've stuck to nonfiction for this round, but there are certainly a few novels that ought to make the list. Feel free to e-mail me suggestions.