When police begin to go after people playing low-stakes poker in VFW posts you know something’s going crazy. It’s apparently illegal in Texas for the house to make money off of a poker game, even if the money is being used for a charity. Keep in mind that it’s not illegal for the state of Texas to take a cut of lottery proceeds. Hmmm, something doesn’t seem too consistent about this.

Poker, the game played by Mark Twain, George Bush, members of the Supreme Court, is apparently destroying the fabric of this great nation. Watch the video and see for yourself the problems that cops face viz a viz people who play poker in “illegal” gambling rooms. Drew Carey does a nice job narrating.

I’m not a lawyer, nor a poker player, and don’t even have much interest in these topics.  So I figured I would sooner win the World Series of Poker than enjoy Lawyer’s Poker: 52 Lessons that Lawyers Can Learn from Card Players (see Suber’s review).  But surprise, surprise.  It’s one of my favorite books this year!!

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? (more…)

     Steven Lubet is a lawyer who’s also a Professor of Law at Northwestern University.  He’s written a book titled Lawyer’s Poker: 52 Lessons that Lawyers Can Learn from Card Players.  Both Sparky and I really enjoyed it.  I couldn’t put it down.  It’s fun, interesting, informative and says some insightful, intelligent things about luck, one of my favorite philosophical poker concepts that I’ve grappled with in prior posts on luck (see e.g. here).    

In a few days, Sparky will be posting an interview with Steven Lubet.   It’s a great interview, packed with a lot of food for thought.  To prepare you for the interview, I thought I’d say a few things about the book.

As the title suggests, Lubet presents 52 poker lessons, lessons that lawyers can use in many different aspects of law practice to become better lawyers, and lessons that poker players can use to become better poker players.   Many of the lessons are basic and obvious ones, such as the lesson on paying attention, which advises you to pay attention to your opponents at the poker table in order to read them.

But Lubet doesn’t just state the obvious.  He fleshes out each lesson with interesting examples, stories and advice.   For example, in the lesson on paying attention, Lubet makes reference to Mike Caro’s advice about common tells that are unique to the flop, such as when a player who involuntarily stares at his chips indicates that he likes the flop.

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