The restrictions on online poker in the USA are forcing me to adopt the casino as my office. It’s an environment where I feel comfortable, but outside of the poker room I am a complete spectator. I will not put a quarter in a slot machine, roll the dice at a craps table, or place a bet on the spin of a roulette wheel.

Many friends and associates have cited my uncompromising casino policy as further evidence that I’m a miserable misanthrope who wouldn’t know how to have a good time if it sat on my face. While that may be an accurate characterization of my personality, I still maintain that my stance is the only sane one.

Let’s suppose you’re playing in a rather odd No-Limit Holdem game in which you always flop a flush draw against a single opponent. This opponent has a made hand and always moves in on you. Effective stacks are such that you are getting an insufficient price to call the bet and draw to your flush. Specifically the expectation value of a call is -5.26%.

Outside of occasional metagame considerations, any competent player will fold their flush draw in this spot. And yet playing roulette on a standard American double-zero wheel is equivalent to calling this bet on every spin.

“But roulette is fun, Kat!”

No it isn’t. Not to me. Maybe it’s because my step-father was a compulsive gambler or because I have a PhD from a Mathematics Department, but knowingly making a decision that has a negative expectation… There’s nothing “fun” about the guilty queasiness it produces.

We all know poker players who regularly pull to draws when they are facing far worse than the -5.26% house edge of roulette. Sometimes they do so because “it’s fun” and sometimes because they don’t know any better. The technical term for such players is “losers.” However, these losers do not hold a monopoly on mathematical ignorance and faulty logic. There are also well-known poker winners who not only blow fortunes on the craps tables but who get important elements of poker math wrong. And interestingly the casino culture in which poker is often played tends to reinforce some of this bad math.

The hero of the anti-math poker crowd is Doyle Brunson. Clearly Doyle is a remarkable poker talent and as the author of the “Poker Bible” his words carry considerable weight. However, like other holy scripture Mr. Brunson’s teachings are accepted purely on faith by many of his followers. This is particularly the case when his words coincide with what his disciples want to hear.

One of Brunson’s most frequently quoted broadsides against math concerns rushes:

“[A]fter I had won a pot in no-limit I would be in the next pot, regardless of what two cards I picked up. And if I won that one, I’d always be in the next one. I’d keep playing every pot until I lost one. And in all those pots I’d gamble more than I normally would…

“If you don’t play that way, you’ll never have much of a rush. I know that scientists don’t believe in rushes, but sometimes rushes can make you a fortune. There’s only one world-class poker player that I know of who doesn’t believe in rushes. Well he’s wrong, and so are the scientists. Besides how many of them can play poker anyway? I’ve played poker for more than fifty years now, and I’ve made millions at it. A big part of my winnings came from playing my rushes.”

[Super System 2, p.562. See also Super System, p.450..]

This is exactly the type of finger-wagging rant that the congregation laps up, particularly since Doyle bags on the “scientists” who are exactly the sort of people who drone on and on about starting hand requirements and pot odds and generally take all the FUN out of poker.

In the quarter of a century or so between Super System and Super System 2 being published, the only substantive modification to the above quote was the number of years Doyle had been playing. I’m pretty sure that the number of world-class players who did not believe in rushes grew over that time. Perhaps this was overlooked. Fortunately, some of Doyle’s other firmly-held views in 1978 were modified for the 2005 upgrade, including his belief in ESP, the idea that women had no place at a poker table, and that none of his children would make good poker players.

My primary goal here is not to point out that Doyle Brunson is fallible. Rather what the above highlights is an ongoing tension between mathematical purists and those detractors who hold a range of views that include unflattering ones of the killjoy (or allegedly inept) “scientists.” And partly because of casino culture, I am convinced that members of the anti-math crowd are more likely to be found in live games where I am now forced to ply my trade.

Which gets us to the strange business of the pole dancers.

Regular readers will recall that I used to smoke heavily. I also used to struggle with tilt, so in live games I would regularly feed my addiction and try to regain my emotional equilibrium by doing a lap of the casino floor while chain smoking.

As a kid, I remember being fascinated by roulette. My view of the game came almost entirely through the cigar smoke of James Bond films, in which the immaculately dressed players and the croupier conducting proceedings in French made the whole business seem extremely glamorous. When I started spending time in American casinos I was obviously a little disappointed in the reality – tuxedos and gowns replaced by Iowa State sweatshirts and voluminous shorts bulging with Parliament Lights – but although the croupier had now become a “dealer” at least he or she still had a little stick.

The one item you will never see in a James Bond movie is the pole that rises from the roulette layout with illuminated numbers of the most recent spins. Stranger still are the players who regard the pole with almost religious awe. The most devout of them – the pole dancers – will hop from one table to another inspecting the sequence of numbers, presumably looking for a wheel that will give them (and their “betting system”) an edge.

When I first witnessed this pole dancing I was worried my eyes were going to bleed.

I was saved by the realization that the casino was doing something so delightfully bizarre that it would serve as a totem (pole) for the superstitious, bankrupt, anti-logical, post-modern maelstrom of our current society that I was satirizing in a novel that nobody other than my future third ex-wife is likely to read.

To put it another way… A roulette wheel is carefully designed, constructed and tested such that the result of a spin is impossible to predict. The Nevada Gaming Control Board is very clear on this point. And yet nearly all Vegas roulette layouts shoot this wondrous pole upwards, its illuminated numbers revealing… Well, revealing the result of previous spins. And saying absolutely nothing about future ones. Because if there was any information in the “pattern” of numbers on the pole concerning future spins, the aforementioned Nevada Gaming Control Board would escort the pole, wheel, and casino owners from the premises.

And presumably leave behind the ashen-faced roulette players.

“We can’t play without our pole! It’s not fair!”

And maybe the distraught pole dancers would try their luck instead at the poker tables. Which would be great for the nasty scientists laying in wait. Except… the pole dancers are already here.

I know of poker players who play regularly and who follow the “patterns” in flops. If they perceive an excess of cards of a certain rank hitting the flop they will incorporate that information into their decisions. The next time you stare in bemusement at a normally timid opponent who makes a wild four-bet shove with A9, consider the possibility that “nines had been flopping a lot.”

Are such players common? I’m not sure. I suspect those who act regularly on perceived “flop patterns” or similar nonsense tend to get culled from the herd in a sort of Sklanskian natural selection. Perhaps the more important point is that pole dancers represent one end of a continuum of faulty mathematical thinking that can be exploited by those of us who have ceased believing in fairies, goblins, and Santa Claus.

“So you know better than Doyle, Kat?”

When it comes to rushes, yes. In fact in most areas of statistics, combinatorics, and probability theory I would say I am way ahead of Doyle. Am I a better poker player than Doyle? Clearly that question need not even be asked.

And here’s where the math-bashers like to use faulty reasoning one more time:

Kat is a better mathematician than Doyle.
Doyle is a better poker player than Kat.
The best poker players ignore math.

If you hold to the above view, let’s discuss it further at the 1-2 PLO game at the Venetian.

Kat Martin is a poker player and coach from London, U.K. who has accidentally spent the last eighteen years living in Kansas. The death of online poker in the U.S. has compelled him to relocate to Las Vegas. If you would like to buy his house, please e-mail him at gamekatpoker@gmail.com.