The Poker Physicist

"What are so many physicists doing playing poker for hours on end in gaming rooms from Vegas to Monaco?" This is the question that opens this article. The answer?


"Probably winning."

In the last decade the poker fever has grown exponentially: it first exploded in US, then arrived in Europe and recently started colonizing Latin America and Asia. It is a fact that it became one of the most followed "sport" events in TV. Neglecting why it is so popular in general, the article focuses on the (many) reasons why there are so many physicists who decide to share their time between the passion for science and the one for poker.

First of all, contrarily to the common belief, poker is *not* gambling (at least not in the usual sense). Casino's games (roulette, baccarat, etc…), where gambling is involved, have a common aspect called the "house advantage", which is what makes the odds against the player. No one can define himself or herself a "roulette player", it just does not make any sense. The house advantage, however small, is obviously never equal to zero and it makes the gambler always a looser in the long run. No physicist could accept this, right?

Poker is different: it is played against other people and not against the casino, which just takes a small part of each pot, called the rake. In this way any player, who is skilled enough to beat the rake will be a winner at the poker table in the long run. One can play for any money at wish, and statistically speaking, any correct move, even those that have a high variance, will eventually show a profit in the long run if it is a play with a positive expected value.

Ok then, that may solve the profitability issue. But what makes poker appealing to physicists? After all, we didn't choose our job for the money, so money cannot be the only driver to play poker. According to the author, both physics and poker present multifaceted problems, which require analogous skills to be solved. Indeed, one of the fundamental aspect of poker is that it is a game of incomplete information (since, for example, you don't know your opponent's cards), and the more information you can collect, the better you'll be able to make a correct decision. The best quotation in the article is probably the one by Jeff Harvey, a string-theorist/poker-player: ''Chess is like classical mechanics. Poker is like quantum mechanics. In poker there is no single right move, there is distribution probability of right moves." To find it, you will have to use mathematical abilities, capability of spotting recurring patterns and… patience. And, let me add, many hours of hard study. It is not very different from what we do everyday, is it?