Monday, May 14, 2001
By ANNE COLBY, Times Staff Writer
A new generation of technologically sophisticated
poker players are a growing presence in California and Nevada
card rooms.
Photos by GARY FRIEDMAN / Los Angeles Times
LAS VEGAS--The contrast between
the two players facing each other at the final table of the 2000
World Series of Poker championship event last spring was striking.
T.J. Cloutier, a beefy 6-foot-3,
at 61 looked every inch the former Canadian Football League player
he is. Clad in a golf shirt and beltless slacks, and sporting
a neat cap of curly graying hair, Cloutier peered at his cards
through aviator-style glasses. He coolly stared down his opponent
as he placed his bets, inhaling deeply on cigarette after cigarette.
His 37-year-old opponent, Chris
Ferguson, resembled an enigmatic modern-day cowboy with his slender
6-foot-1 frame, black Stetson pulled low, full beard and long
chestnut hair. Reflective sunglasses made his expressions unreadable
as he pushed piles of chips forward, pausing occasionally for
a swig of bottled water.
More than age and style separated
the two competitors, one of whom would walk away with $1.5 million
and the championship title to poker's premier tournament. Cloutier
is an old-school Texas road gambler who learned his trade in the
days when guns were sometimes brought to the table to settle a
game's outcome. Ferguson has a doctorate in computer science/artificial
intelligence from UCLA, and calculates all his poker moves mathematically.
Ferguson's rise to the coveted final
table of the World Series of Poker--something he'll try to reprise
as the 2001 contest begins today at Binion's Horseshoe casino
in Las Vegas--represents a coming of age for a new generation
of technologically sophisticated players who are a growing presence
in California and Nevada card rooms and tournaments.
Among the gamblers who will each
pay $10,000 to join the tournament, a cutthroat game of No-Limit
Texas Hold 'Em that ends when one player has captured all the
chips, is a scattering of computer programmers, physicists, mathematicians
and engineers. They'll be using their training in statistics and
game theory to try to gain an edge over "seat of the pants"
players in a game that, despite its outlaw past, is at its core
highly mathematical.
Though tech-oriented players represent
just a small fraction of the thousands who populate the card rooms
on any given day, their influence in the poker world goes beyond
their numbers. They are changing the way the game is played: laying
out new strategies in books, designing software simulations, raising
the bar for other players. And they're winning competitions.
"It used to be the only way
to become good at the game was to play over a long period of time.
That's why in the past there used to be very few world-class young
players," said Michael Zimmers, 42, co-organizer of an annual
Las Vegas gathering of poker players who participate in the Internet
newsgroup rec.gambling.poker, or RGP, as it is known. (To find
RGP, AOL users, for example, can do a keyword search for "newsgroups,"
then enter the newsgroup name.)
"The use of mathematics, probability
and online poker resources can greatly accelerate the learning
curve. So while there's no substitute for experience, you can
certainly come up to speed faster," said Zimmers, a Cupertino,
Calif., graduate student and former software developer.
The game is attracting young people
such as Patri Friedman, 24, who said that until he saw "Rounders,"
a 1998 Matt Damon-Edward Norton movie about two twentysomething
poker players, he had "never even thought of it as a game
of skill before."
The Sunnyvale, Calif., computer
programmer and grandson of Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton
Friedman grew up playing a lot of games and helped run the bridge
club at Stanford University, where he graduated with a degree
in math. After he became interested in poker, Friedman researched
the game on the Internet, read books about it and started playing
in California card rooms.
Friedman, who showed up at a recent
poker tournament wearing a fluorescent yellow smiley-face print
bandanna over his curly dark hair, said he's not interested in
pursuing the game full time--he wouldn't find it fulfilling and
is busy with a computer project--but he enjoys it as a hobby.
Spencer Sun, 28, an amiable player
who won last year's $240,000 Tournament of Champions poker event
at the Orleans Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, also came to poker
from the game of bridge, which he played on the Internet while
studying computer science at Princeton.
A fellow online bridge player got
him interested in poker five years ago, and over time he began
to play live games in card rooms in the Bay Area, where he works
as a consultant to a start-up company. He also attends tournaments
with friends he's met through the RGP newsgroup.
The sunglasses of poker champion Chris Ferguson reflect action at the table, as he handles chips. He'll compete in the 2001 contest in Las Vegas today.
For his part,
Ferguson--esteemed by his peers both for his poker proficiency
and his kindliness--honed his playing skills in the mid-'90s with
Internet games, software simulations and regional tournaments.
His mother, Beatrice Ferguson, has a doctorate in mathematics,
and he learned game theory from his father, Thomas Ferguson, a
UCLA professor emeritus in mathematics, who brought home strategic
games such as Nim and Reversi--a forerunner of Othello--for him
and his brother to play when they were growing up.
Today, strategy is his profession.
He's a part-time swing trader for a Westwood stock-trading firm,
where he buys and sells bargain-priced technology shares for profit.
He relaxes by doing competitive ballroom dancing with his girlfriend,
Cathy Burns.
And the rest of the time, he plays
high-stakes poker.
Tough Test of
Poker Theories
For Ferguson, the fourth day of
the Binion's Horseshoe championship last year was a rigorous test
of whether his poker theories would hold up under extreme conditions.
Everyone but Cloutier and Ferguson had been knocked out. The two
men seemed evenly matched, as control of the chips shifted between
them.
Then Ferguson was dealt an ace and
a nine. Cloutier bet $175,000, and Ferguson raised him $425,000.
Cloutier responded by going "all in" with the rest of
his chips, raising him $1.7 million.
Should Ferguson call Cloutier's
bet, or should he fold? If Ferguson lost the hand, Cloutier would
have a 10-to-1 lead. But if he won the hand, he would clinch the
tournament.
Cloutier looked on placidly. Like
other top players, he's a master at controlling his emotions during
a game and is able to outlast other competitors who may crack
under the pressure of a high-stakes tournament. His expertise
has earned him millions on the poker tournament circuit. A San
Francisco Bay Area native who lives in Richardson, Texas, when
he's not on the road, he's known as an instinctive player with
decades of experience who can expertly "read" his opponents
to determine the cards they're holding. He treats poker as a job.
Ferguson, a soft-spoken poker theoretician
nicknamed "Jesus" for his appearance, considered his
odds. His gentle manner and polite reserve belie an aggressive
style of play. Ferguson approaches poker almost as an academic
pursuit and says the gambling aspect of the game holds little
appeal for him. Instead, each of his poker moves is highly calculated.
Literally.
The game theory that guides his
decision-making hand by hand is a type of mathematical analysis
for selecting the best available strategy in a game or real-world
scenario. It can be used to minimize one's maximum losses or maximize
one's minimum winnings. First postulated in a 1944 book, "The
Theory of Games and Economic Behavior," by John von Neumann
and Oskar Morgenstern, it is practiced by military, business and
economic strategists.
In Ferguson's realm, it suggests,
for example, that you need to call a bet--match the money put
into the pot by another player to keep playing the hand--often
enough so that your opponent can't run over you by bluffing all
the time. But you don't want to call so much that your opponent
can make money by only betting when he has a strong hand.
"Game theory says that you
have to randomize your plays in such a way that your opponent
can't figure out what you have and can't exploit you," said
author David Sklansky, who touches on the subject in "The
Theory of Poker," an influential poker book that advises
players how to think about the game.
Ferguson also draws on a type of
mathematics called Bayesian statistics, in which a formula is
used to help determine what cards other players might be holding
after each new card is dealt and after every round of betting.
A player shuffles his chips.
He routinely
calculates the expectations of success for every card and betting
combination he might encounter. But not at the card table. Like
most mathematically inclined players, he works out his strategies
away from the card room.
"I sit at home and model the
game and decide what I'd do in a given situation," Ferguson
said. "The game I'm analyzing is not even poker, but simple
games that isolate the concept I'm most interested in. For example,
on the last betting round, what hands should I bet and what hands
should I bluff and call with?
"I might make the same moves
as other players, but for different reasons. I try and play a
game where even if my opponents know how I'm playing, they can't
take advantage of me."
Ferguson knew that his ace-nine
hand was only borderline from a mathematical standpoint. But he
decided the amount he had already invested in the pot made it
worth the risk of calling Cloutier's bet.
"I thought there was a very
small chance that I had the best hand. And if I had the best hand,
I was giving up a lot more by folding," Ferguson said. So,
removing his hat and mirrored glasses, he paused for a long moment
and then went all in, bringing the pot to $4.6 million.
Intent on Improving
Their Game
Not all tech-oriented players take
the game's mathematics to the lengths Ferguson does, and few have
so much at stake. But many spend time thinking over their moves,
figuring probabilities on hands they've played and debating the
merits of various strategies with their Internet friends.
"Poker players in our circle
are always trying to improve their games," RGP's Zimmers
said.
The younger players are aided by
the proliferation of poker-strategy books in the last few decades.
In the 1960s, there were only a handful of books in print on all
of gambling; today there are hundreds on poker alone. Many are
available only through specialized bookstores such as the Gambler's
Book Shop in Las Vegas and Internet sites.
"You have the advantage of
a whole library of scholarly thought that's going to teach you
how to avoid some of the mistakes that most of us had to learn
on our own," said Peter Ruchman, Gambler's Book Shop manager.
"Super/System: A Course in
Poker Power" by Doyle "Texas Dolly" Brunson, an
instinctive player who respects the mathematics of the game, is
considered one of the best books on the game. Published in 1978,
it contained the first computer poker simulation.
"Hold 'Em Poker," written
by Sklansky in 1976, was the first book on a type of poker that
today dominates play in California card rooms such as the Commerce
Casino in Commerce and the Bicycle Club Casino in Gardena. Sklansky's
"Theory of Poker," another classic, explains many of
the game's mathematical concepts.
Even as their books help teach younger
players the game, the older players are adapting to the changes
their computer-savvy competitors bring, logging on to the Internet
to keep up with RGP newsgroup discussions and play online poker.
Still, as newcomers find their way onto the veterans' turf, some
of the old-timers, including Cloutier, bemoan the studied moves
and lack of "street smarts" of their newer opponents.
Legendary poker player Amarillo Slim.
Most new players,
in fact, get a kind of "Poker 101" education when they
move from Internet games to the casinos and often lose money in
the beginning. Call it the price of tuition.
That's because success at live poker
depends on being able to read other players' "tells."
These are the unconscious mannerisms--a quick glance away from
the table or a soft clucking of the tongue--that can signal to
an observant player what someone is holding. It's also important
to learn to control your own tells.
Some step out of the virtual world
and into the casinos in August, when RGP newsgroup competitors
meet in Las Vegas for several days of tournament poker and general
merriment at an event called BARGE--the Big August Rec.Gambling
Excursion. BARGE started in 1991 as a casual hotel-room poker
game with a handful of RGP contributors who were in Las Vegas
for a technology conference, and became an annual event that last
year drew 220 registered players.
The BARGE event has spawned smaller
RGP gatherings around the country. In Southern California, poker
author Lou Krieger started ESCARGOT, or Experimental Southern
California Recreational Gaming Outing and Tournament, held every
February at different local casinos.
People who have played only online
in mock, real-time games on the Internet Relay Chat service--IRC
Poker is a starting point for many "techies"--also need
to learn the finer points of betting in live games and tournaments.
Learning how to consistently scoop up the biggest pots when real
cash is at stake takes some practice.
Luck Is Basic
to the Game
But no matter how much time they
log at tournaments or in front of their computers, veteran players
and math "brainiacs" alike are beholden to one element
they can't control: luck. It's an integral part of the game, tying
it to the rest of the gambling world.
Luck, in fact, was decisive in the
last round of the high-stakes showdown between Ferguson and Cloutier
last spring.
After he called Cloutier's bet,
and with the pot at more than $4 million, Ferguson's mathematical
detachment appeared to dissolve. He looked nervous, or perhaps
just tired after 12-hour days at the tables.
With all the betting completed,
the two men turned over their cards. Cloutier's was revealed to
be the better hand with an ace and a queen, making him a 71% favorite
to win. But the five community, or shared, cards still to be dealt
would settle the question.
The first three cards, the "flop,"
as they are called in Texas Hold 'Em, were a deuce, a king and
a four and strengthened Cloutier's lead. The fourth card, the
"turn," a king, gave Cloutier a pair of kings with a
higher "kicker" than Ferguson. Cloutier appeared to
be a sure bet.
But when the last card, "the
river," was turned over, a yell could be heard.
"Nine!"
And with that statistically improbable
card, which gave him two pair, Ferguson won the championship title
and the $1.5-million top prize. Cloutier scored nearly $900,000
with his second-place finish, and the rest of the pot was divvied
up, in decreasing percentages, among the next 43 players.
After the game was over, Cloutier
told Harper's Magazine writer and fellow championship finalist
James McManus, "There's a lot of luck in poker. And if you're
gonna play this game, you better get used to that."
Today, Cloutier and Ferguson are
back at Binion's, where daily tournament events with buy-ins of
$1,500 to $5,000 have been going on since April 21.
Cloutier hopes to finally win the
one major tournament title that has eluded him, and Ferguson is
looking for a repeat win that would make him one of the few players
to capture the title more than once.
Mixed among the pros and semi-pros
are more casual players who don't have the years of experience
of a Cloutier or the math skills of a Ferguson. Is there any hope
for them, either here or in the smaller games?
Perhaps.
"In the long run, the better
players will take the most money," RGP's Zimmers