I hate the “… For Dummies Books”

They have become so ubiquitous that I must confess to having one on my bookshelf (It was given to me. Just so we’re clear!). It infuriates me to no end that people spend money on books that say in the very title that they are completely dumbed down. Why would one buy a poker book on that level? There are tons of great books out there written by incredible poker players that give their personal insights.

Even for a person that doesn’t read much, they are still better off going straight to the primary sources. I mean Phil Helmuth and Doyle Brunson might be amazing poker players, but neither they nor their ghost writers are T.S. Eliot. The language is pretty easy to understand.

So please don’t patronize these asinine books that only add to the dumbing down of our culture. Read something with at least some semblance of intelligence. If you’re going to do something, like play poker, you owe it to yourself to do it right.

So I wanted to talk with the author, Steve Lubet, a Law Professor and Director of the Bartlit Center on Trial Strategy at Northwestern.  Turns out he’s a bright, funny guy, and accomplished both in law and outside the field.  Not a guy I’d want on the other team in the courtroom!!  Not a first-time author… he’s previously written Murder in Tombstone: The Forgotten Trial of Wyatt Earp, and his textbook Modern Trial Advocacy has been used at over 90 American law schools as wellas in Canada, Israel, and China.  Lubet has written humorous commentaries for NPR’s Morning Edition, and his opeds (both serious and humorous) have appeared in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, as well as Slate and Salon.

PokerMoments:  What inspired you to write Lawyer’s Poker?  Was your goal to teach lawyers, or to show similarities between practicing law and playing poker?

Steve Lubet:  I became interested in the idea when I read Andey Bellin’s book, Poker Nation, which combined memoir with poker theory.  I’m always looking for new ways to teach lawyers, and it struck me that poker could provide some good analogies, so I bought a bunch of other poker books and began to research.  Almost immediately, I learned that the great advantage in poker is the constant repetition of a relatively limited number of situations.  In other words, the game is almost like a living social science experiment – high-stakes decision making based on incomplete information.  Lawyers do the same thing, so it made sense to look at common poker strategies and map them onto law practice.

PM:  I found the number of examples in Lawyer’s Poker amazing, and thought they were thought provoking.  How long did it take to think of all the correlations and then write the book?  Any new books in the works?

SL:  Having written a couple of books (and many articles) about trial advocacy, I already had a good idea of the skills that I wanted to discuss.  I read the poker books over the course of about a year – while doing other things (it wasn’t like researching a dissertation).  Then it took me exactly 60 days to actually write the manuscript, writing one “lesson” per day over the course of a summer.

I’ve just finished the manuscript for a new book called The Importance of Being Honest:  How Lying, Secrecy, Myth, Hypocrisy, and Misperception Collide with Truth in the Legal Professions.  It’ll be published in the spring of 2008.

PM:  Do you play no-limit Texas Hold’em?

SL:  No.

PM:  Do you use any of the poker lessons or stories from the book when you teach law?

SL:  Absolutely.  The great problem in teaching law practice (as opposed to legal doctrine or theory) is that it’s hard to know what really works.  That is, you can have a feeling about successes and failures, but every case is unique and there are thousands of discrete decisions in every case – so it’s impossible to isolate the variables.  Thus, we end up with a lot of “common wisdom” that might or might not actually be right.  Poker analogies are helpful precisely because they can be validated through repeated play.  The trick (or maybe the art) in teaching involves identifying the truly parallel situations.

PM:  How did you get interested in law?  in teaching?

SL:  I went to college in the 1960s, so law school was a natural choice for an activist.  I got into teaching by accident in 1975 – only my friends and family think the story is interesting – and I’ve somehow stayed with it for 30+ years.  I still do pro bono work.

PM:  I’m a doctor who gives depositions and goes into court for patients very occasionally.  This book opened my eyes to a whole new way of seeing what lawyers do.  Any suggestions for doctors who appear in court in support of patients?

SL:  The best advice is to read my book, Expert Testimony: A Guide for Expert Witnesses and the Lawyers Who Examine Them.  Expert testimony is an extremely important part of the trial process, yet many experts enter the courtroom relatively unprepared.  Many experts will say that they fear, or resent, cross examination, but in my experience they really have more trouble with direct examination:  their answers are too long, too discursive, too technical, and too hedged.  So here are two basic pieces of advice:

1.  Remember that law is a binary system in which questions need to be answered Yes or No; there’s no wait and see, and no re-evaluation based on further developments.  That environment is often uncomfortable for scientists, but there’s no alternative because lawsuits have to be resolved with some degree of finality.

2. When answering a question, give the conclusion first and then the explanation or the background.  That is contrary to the way most conversations proceed, but it’s essential to courtroom communication.

PM:  Do you have reservations about playing poker yourself?  about practicing law?  For example, being good at bluffing – is there a downside to “perfecting” that skill?

SL:  I don’t play poker because I’ve learned too much about it – I would lose for sure.  I have absolutely no reservations about law practice, which is the most noble of the professions (note: I’m not saying that lawyers are the most honorable professionals, but rather that the profession itself is the most noble).

PM:  What do you think about mediation?  Does that require a different skill set for a lawyer?

SL:  True mediation requires a very different set of skills, in which the parties attempt to accommodate each other’s needs, rather than simply prevail.  Much of what passes for mediation, however, is really just facilitated negotiation.

PM:  The issue of law versus justice… do you believe, in general, that the more skillful lawyer, who represents her client better, is the lawyer who serves justice better?  If so, why?  If not, is this a reason to doubt your view that the purpose of the practice of law is more admirable than the purpose of poker?

SL:  The practice of law is the most admirable and important of all professions because it’s essential to the maintenance of personal liberty and economic freedom.  Most people, including lawyers, don’t realize this because:  (1) the social benefits are diffuse and often invisible; and (2) many practitioners fall very far short of the ideal.

You’re probably skeptical, so let’s engage in a little thought experiment.  Which sort of society would you prefer to live in, one without medicine or one without law?  Before you answer too quickly, consider two contrasting examples.  The Golden Age of Muslim Spain – profound equality under law, but no truly effective medicine.  Nazi Germany – great medicine, rotten law.

Medicine has made outstanding achievements, but consider the achievements of law:  The First Amendment, the abolition of slavery, the equality of women (still in progress), the development of economic stability and the broad middle class.

PM:  Lawyer’s Poker clarified that, for me, medicine was a much better career choice than law.  I do believe both can be intellectually challenging, and draw on many different skills when practiced well.  But 2 differences I see between law and medicine:

First, medicine gives me a chance to help people everyday; the same could be said of law.  But I can help people in medicine without another side needing to lose.  Medicine isn’t competitive – it can have winners without losers.  In medicine, I’d say we battle against disease, but not one another.

SL:  Medicine is focused on helping identifiable individuals, which must be very rewarding on a daily basis, but it’s not quite correct to say that it’s not competitive.  Patients compete for your attention and for institutional resources; you decide who gets what.  The difference is that the losers have little or no recourse, and they often don’t even know that they’re losing.

PM:  And second, when I’m being a good doctor, it makes me a better person.  I listen to someone in their time of need.  I help heal them.  More comprehensive still are the life values I strive to practice – honesty, altruism, practicing peace and harmony.  These are hard enough to practice and learn, but I think practicing law would take me away from these ideals.  How do you cultivate these ideals, yet practice law?

SL:  Law definitely proceeds from a different value system – an ethic of autonomy as opposed to an ethic of benevolence – but that doesn’t mean that medical ideals are superior.  That is, the job of a lawyer is to enhance a client’s autonomy, allowing the client to make his or her own decisions (whether those decisions are good or bad).  Civilization prospers when people have substantial control (with legally defined limits) over their own choices, and that’s what lawyers ideally accomplish.

I don’t doubt that you’re honest and altruistic in your own practice, but that’s a highly idealized view of the profession in general.  Physicians routinely withhold information from patients, take shortcuts, perform unnecessary procedures for financial reasons, and engage in risky practices.  One of the greatest public health problems in history has been the over-prescription of antibiotics, almost exclusively due to physicians’ loose self-discipline.

Please don’t get me wrong – I think very highly of physicians (including my own internist, who is brilliant and good), and I agree that the typical doctor is far more altruistic than the typical lawyer.  But that’s actually the genius of our legal system – it doesn’t rely on altruism (which is usually in short supply) in order to benefit society as a whole.

PM:  Thanks to Steve Lubet for taking time from his many activities to talk with us.  I personally appreciated his insightful comments about law and medicine, and he’s given me some points to mull over - although I still don’t think I’ll trade in my MD for a JD anytime soon.  But I do believe that a new Golden Age of intellectual rigor and great book writing might just be blossoming in an office at Northwestern.

Any questions or comments for Steve… let us know in the comments.

As a follow up to our review on Bringing Down the House, the exciting book by Ben Mezrich about MIT students’ card counting adventures of winning millions in Las Vegas…

It’ll soon be a movie!

The name of the movie is reported to be 21, with Kevin Spacey playing Micky, the father-figure, master-mind in the book.  Filming begins in February around Boston and Las Vegas.  More details…

Hey, you could always try out as an extra!

 

 

(A) A guaranteed $1,000,000

or

(B) A %10 chance of getting $2,500,000, an %89 of getting $1,000,000, and a %1 chance of getting $0.

Which option would you pick?

According to Gregory Bassham and Marc C. Marchese (B & M), the authors of “Don’t Play on Tilt! Avoiding Seven Costly Critical Thinking Errors in Poker,” most people would choose option (A) even though the expected value of option (B) is $140,000 higher.  Why?  It is because most people suffer from what is called “loss aversion,” which is, according to B & M, “the tendency to prefer avoiding losses rather than acquiring gains.”

B & M’s essay can be found in the collection of essays called Poker and Philosophy: Pocket Rockets and Philosopher Kings, edited by Eric Bronson.  I have already commented on two of the essays in this book.  See here and here. 

B & M’s essay discusses seven costly thinking errors, loss aversion being one of them, that poker players make, and that the good players make less frequently than the players who are not that good.  The other six thinking errors that are mentioned are (1) Self-serving Bias (2) Short term Thinking (3) The Availability Heuristic (4) The Fundamental Attribution Error (5) Superstitious Thinking  and (6) The Gambler’s Fallacy. 

I begin with loss aversion, because it is a tendency that my poker game particularly suffers from, but I eventually plan in future posts to say something about some, if not all, of the other thinking errors.

I prefer to avoid losing money rather than winning money, in large part because losing money, at least the kind of money I lose, bothers me a lot more than the joy I gain from winning money, at least the kind of money I win.  Take today, for example.  I was playing $.05/.1 no-limit hold’em (5 players) at Dream Poker, and I was up at the table about $5 when I was dealt pocket kings.  I bet these cowboys hard, and everyone folded except one other player, who kept on calling.   I don’t remember what all the community cards were.  I believe that at the turn that there were a pair of threes, no flush or straight possibility, and nothing higher than a jack.  I do remember that on the river an ace showed up, and it was then that my opponent makes a relatively large bet, his first bet that wasn’t a call.  He makes the bet quickly, and I tend to think that when a player makes a quick bet on river he may be bluffing.  For some reason, which I’m still trying to figure out, I folded.  After I told my opponent what I had, he said he was glad that I didn’t call.  Aaargh! I was so annoyed at myself.  I lost a nice size pot, one that I should have won.   As a result of my error in judgment, I stewed for a good long while.  I know that the positive feelings that I would have had had I called and won would not have lasted nearly as long.  

There are times when I win a hand and feel good about it, for exammple, when I win an all-in or a pot because of some lucky draw.  But these happy feelings don’t last very long, and nowhere near as long as the angry feelings last when I sometimes lose. 

I think that part of the reason for my strong aversion to losing is that I think the other players think of me as a fish, a sucker, a newbie, you name it.  However, when I win, I never think that the other players think of me in a positive light, as a shark, someone who knows what he’s doing.  Is this rational?  I doubt it.

Another reason for my strong aversion to losing is that I know that I spend many hours – too many hours - playing poker for a measly few dollars, and when I lose, I tend to reflect on this time spent, questioning whether it could have been better spent.  I rarely indulge in this sort of thinking after I win.   

B & M write that “[p]oker players afflicted with a bad case of loss aversion tend to become “rocks,” that is tight, passive players who fold hand after hand, bet cautiously, and in general play very conservatively…In the long run, however, such a strategy is bound to increase losses.”  Yes. Yes. Yes.  I have the affliction.  I play extremely conservatively.  And I often do pay the price. 

Fortunately, my case of loss aversion isn’t terrible.  I can loosen up and play aggressively frequently when the time is right.  And this is why I believe that I am overall up.   B & M quote Alan Schoonmaker, author of The Psychology of Poker, who says “nearly all successful professionals are tight and selectively aggressive.”  B & M support this idea by saying that “to win money over the long haul, you’ve got to win big pots.  And to win big pots, you can’t be held back by loss aversion.” 

I know that I won’t get better at poker until I get better with my aversion to loss. 

  

 

 

Here’s a good book for gambling fans – perhaps even as a stocking stuffer for your fellow gambling fans…

“Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions,” by Ben Mezrich.  It’s an exciting read, and gives you some sense from the “inside” of card counting, Vegas and high stakes gambling.

Basic story:

Students from MIT use card counting and working in teams to win at blackjack in Vegas.  The drama comes as the casinos get smarter – and more violent – trying to stop the team from using their MIT brains to the casinos’ disadvantage.  One of the students in the story has misgivings about his double life as an upstanding student at MIT, fulfilling his family’s dreams, and a professional, quasi-legal card player.

The book is easy-to-read, and the story moves forward quickly.  Their card counting system is explained at the end, for those of you who’d like to try it!  Although not a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, if the story is ture, the team could certainly pay for a few of the million dollar loot bags that go along with those Nobel Prizes.

Has anyone read the book yet – what did you think of it?