Our Hypomanic Helix: The Poker Strand of American DNA

All the right cards were in our hands and so, gracefully, he gave his opinion that we had the answer.

– James D. Watson, The Double Helix



Why would an 18th-century parlor game played by a few French and Persian aristocrats take hold and flourish in kingless, democratic America? Why did poque (or poqas, or As Nas) evolve into our national card game, some say our national pastime, instead of piquet or cribbage or whist? How much has poker's popularity had to do with bluffing and risk-management, and with the fact that money is its language, its leverage, its means of keeping score? And why have Vietnamese Americans become so damn good at it?



American DNA is a notoriously complex protein, but two strands in particular have always stood out in high contrast: the risk-averse Puritan work ethic and the entrepreneur's urge to seize the main chance. Proponents of neither m.o. like to credit the other with anything positive: Huggers of the shore don't praise explorers, while gamblers remain unimpressed by those who husband savings accounts. Yet blended in much the same way that parents' genes are in their children, the two ways of operating have made us who we are as a country.



Ever since the Mayflower carried separatist Puritans to Plymouth in 1620, what is often called the American Experiment has lavishly rewarded and punished those who take risks. From Washington's attack on Trenton after crossing the Delaware in a Christmas night hail storm, Alexander Hamilton's revolutionary banking and credit systems, to the nine-figure bonuses for today's hedge fund managers, our military, political, and economic systems have all been tipped in favor of people who bet big and won. In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville was the first to notice how different this made Jacksonian America from classbound European kingdoms: "Those living in the instability of a democracy have the constant image of chance before them, and, in the end, they come to like all those projects in which chance plays a part." This was true, he deduced, "not only because of the promise of profit but because they like the emotions evoked." It remains unclear which games Tocqueville had witnessed, but he came to appreciate our allegiance to chance while traveling aboard the steamship Louisville down the lower Mississippi at the very moment his own country's bluffing game, 20-card poque, was evolving into 52-card poker on boats just like his.



The game has since gone hand in hand with pivotal aspects of our national experience. As our language adopts more and more poker terms, the ways we do battle and business are echoed, and echoed by, our favorite game's tactics: cheating and thwarting cheaters, dealing with runs of bad luck, leveraging uncertainty by bluffing and sussing out bluffers, managing risk and reward.



Meanwhile, geneticists are learning there actually is such a thing as American DNA, not surprising given that nearly all of us are descended from immigrants. We therefore carry an immigrant-specific genotype, a genetic marker that expresses itself – in some environments, at least – as energetic risk-taking, restless curiosity, and competitive self-promotion.



Even when famine, warfare, or another calamity strikes, most people stay in their homeland. The self-selecting group who migrate, seldom more than 2 percent, are inclined to take chances; they also have above-average intelligence and are quicker decision-makers. There's something about their dopamine-receptor systems, the neural pathway associated with a taste for novelty and risk, that sets them apart from those who stay put. While the factors involved are numerous and complex, the migratory syndrome can be summarized as: It's not about where you come from, it's that you came at all.



The migratory gene was probably even more dominant among those who first moved west across the Appalachians, up and down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, then out to Nevada and California during the mid-century Gold Rush. Their urge to strike it rich made poker much more appealing to them than point-based trick-taking games like whist, bridge, or cribbage.



Today the U.S. population teems with exuberant, curious, energetic risk-takers, a combination of traits called "hypomania" by Peter C. Whybrow, a behavioral scientist at UCLA. But why aren't Canada, Central and South America, and Australia, where so many immigrants and their descendants also live, quite as hypomanic as the United States? Because, Whybrow argues, human behavior is always a function of genetics and environment – of nature plus nurture. In America "you have the genes and the completely unrestricted marketplace," he says. "That's what gives us our peculiar edge."



Our national card game still combines Puritan values – self-control, diligence, the steady accumulation of savings insured by the FDIC – with what might be called the open-market cowboy's desire to get rich quick without working very hard. The latter is the mindset of the gold rush, the hedge fund, the lottery ticket of ordinary wage-earners. Yet whenever the big-bet cowboy mucks a weak hand, he submits to his Puritan side.



Whoever is inclined to make as much money as possible by working smart instead of hard will naturally prefer what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls "scalable" income, which can multiply exponentially without extra labor. A musician with a record contract, for example, doesn't have to replay the same song each time he wants to get paid for it, as a live musician does. Buying 500 shares of stock takes the same time and effort as buying 15. And a high-stakes poker player can make thousands more dollars per hour than those playing for smaller stakes. The obvious downside is that he also can lose thousands more, especially because his competition tends to be stiffer. Yet these days, online, he can simultaneously play three or four tables (or more) at his best game and most comfortable stakes. Live and online tournaments are also attractive to risk-lovers because while more than 90 percent of the entrants lose their entire buy-in, the winner makes life-changing money.



Why do so many of us find risk so compelling? Because despite what some of our preachers and politicians may tell us, nothing is more natural, or more crucial to human progress, than gambling. For two and a half million years, our brains have evolved by genetic chance amid environmental uncertainty. In the 21st century, risk continues to haunt nearly every decision we make – whether or when to have children, cross the street or board a plane, invest in real estate or the stock market, enroll in an MBA program, or go on the poker circuit.



But it's not only humans, of course. Every organism needs to constantly manage a series of life-or-death risks. Ants and beetles, algae and trees, hyenas and monkeys all must maintain their physical safety while competing for nourishment and opportunities to copulate. And when either pursuit could be lethal, especially to our early human ancestors, success became all the more satisfying – caused all the more dopamine, that is, to be released by the hypothalamus, while failure caused the anterior lobe of the pituitary gland to release more prolactin, too much of which causes impotence. Today, when we take a "sick" beat at the poker table, what we're actually experiencing is a surge of prolactin, the result of both our genetic heritage and the coolly vicious laws of randomness. We somehow got lost in the shuffle.



In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins makes it wonderfully clear that as mammals compete, often to the death, for scarce resources, they "should give no inkling of when they are going to give up. Anybody who betrayed, by the merest flicker of a whisker, that he was beginning to think of throwing in the sponge, would be at an instant disadvantage. … Natural selection would instantly penalize whisker-flickering and any analogous betrayals of future behaviour. The poker face would evolve." And so it has, even if today it is often artificially enhanced by sunglasses, hoodies, and baseball caps.



Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker explains the instinctual poker face by saying what it isn't: namely, the countenance of a bald-faced liar. "Just as a poker player actively tries to hide his reactions," he writes, "natural selection may select against features of an organism that would otherwise divulge its internal state. And just as it would do no good for the poker player to lie about his hand (because other players would learn to ignore the lie), selection would not favor an animal giving a false signal about its intentions (because its adversaries would evolve to ignore the signal)." Pinker concludes that "just as an adversary in poker will develop increasingly sensitive radar for any twitch or body language that leaks through – the 'tell' – animals may evolve increasingly sensitive radar for any tells in their rivals." Attention, poker big-mouths: The game requires the expression of a sphinx, not the babbling of a congenital liar.



Leonard Kriegel offers a more personal take on the migratory genotype. His memoir Poker's Promise describes the rites of passage of Jewish immigrants after the Second World War, when poker "eased us into American aspirations, suggesting how each of us might bankroll his sense of belonging."



"Like me," he writes, "the friends who introduced me to poker in the early 1950s were the children of immigrants. And that, I suspect, explains our infatuation with a game that seemed quintessentially American. No game commanded greater loyalty and no game promised more. Along with the intricacies of baseball, poker was a cultural bridge that helped you cross over into a wider world." Kriegel recalls listening as a boy to middle-aged furriers, garment workers, and taxi drivers "vehemently discussing in Yiddish the trials and tribulations of their weekly poker game. I can still hear the echo of those voices dripping with derision as a player's efforts were dismissed with the contemptuous, 'Er spelt vee ah greener.' ('He plays like an immigrant.') No condemnation could have been more formidable, no dismissal more damning. For to play like an immigrant was to deny the very entitlements America offered … Even in the golden land, one listened carefully to opportunity's knock." Because as David Mamet later observed about poker and politics, opportunity may knock, but it seldom nags.



Young Leonard gradually realizes that, "No game better embodied the enormous sense of possibility we felt was ours by right of having been born in this America. A man could shed the past in poker. What could possibly be more American than that?"



His most dramatic case in point is a Holocaust survivor. "Defined by the horror of his past and limited by the paucity of his English, he searched our fears as closely as we searched his." One night a mutual friend (not Larry David) brings the survivor to their poker game. "Almost immediately, he established a reputation as a daring, skillful player. It was as if the nightmare of Europe could be expunged by the mundane triumph of drawing an inside straight. I can still see him as he dealt, slamming the cards down, blue numbers tattooed on his arm seeming to quiver beneath the living flesh. I remember him holding his own cards like a sweeping fan of affirmation as he said in his thickly accented yet suddenly triumphant English, 'I open!'"



Speaking of daring and skillful, the Indonesian-born master John Juanda says that when he first came to America in 1990, he spoke almost no English. Since he couldn't follow conversations at the poker table, he concentrated on the action and the players' body language. When he couldn't understand what people were saying, he read their facial expressions to make educated guesses. "You learn a lot more by listening than you do by talking," he says.



Asians in general have done remarkably well at poker, of course, but it's the Vietnamese who dominate tournaments far out of proportion to any other ethnic group's record. One reason has to do with the fact that being lucky and clever are highly esteemed in Vietnamese culture; gambling carries little stigma and is often lionized. (The much stronger stigma against it in Japan and India, on the other hand, makes it unsurprising that relatively few Japanese or Indian Americans play poker at all.) The Vietnamese who managed to emigrate after the communists took over were an ambitious and tough-minded lot. Most settled in California just as poker was becoming legal throughout the state. Men "The Master" Nguyen and others who had early success tutored members of their extended families and gave their best students a stake in L.A. and Las Vegas tournaments. By the late 1990s, a stunning percentage of winning players were named either Nguyen, Pham, Phan, or Tran.



Card Player's 2007 Player of the Year is once again David Pham, the cousin and former student of "The Master." J.C. Tran finished second. Men Nguyen himself is the only four-time winner of this widely respected award. His consistently dominant performance is no doubt attributable to both genetic and environmental factors, not the least of them being tall boys of frosty Corona.