The Biggest Bluff

We walk, we talk, and we let the pace of the afternoon determine the flow of the conversation. As the majestic Hudson glitters blue on our left and the flowered carpets of Riverside Park open up on the right, I try my best to keep up with his long strides while strategically perching my phone on the side of my bag to record the conversation, alternating between fishing a dog-eared Harrington out of said bag to find the pertinent pages and holding a mini notebook to jot down especially important thoughts that I want to make sure to revisit. It doesn’t help that I’m not the most coordinated person in the world, and I often find myself performing interpretive dance moves to catch a falling phone or pen while trying to not break stride. I’d like to tell Erik that his step count doesn’t care about how quickly those steps were taken, but I don’t quite have the breath left to do so. We must look like a very odd duo.

Our earliest walking conversations are, as you’d expect, among the most basic. I’ve drilled down the super basics—the ground rules, so to speak. You are dealt two cards. You decide whether to play them or to fold. If you do play them, you call or raise. Everyone else follows the same decision process, going in a clockwise direction starting from the player to the left of the big blind, a position called, appropriately enough, under the gun. And then you make that decision again every time new information, in the form of new cards, appears. At the end, if only one person holds cards when the betting is done, she wins the pot. If the hand goes to showdown—that is, the final bet is called—the person holding the best cards will win. In rare cases, the pot can be split if the cards are the same, or if both players are playing the board, or the community cards (that is, when what’s on the board beats the individual hands). But what of the slightly less basic basics?

“Harrington is big on different types of players,” I report to Erik. “Are you a conservative player, an aggressive player, a super-aggressive player, or this or that?”

“I don’t think you need to decide that at this time,” Erik says, laughing. “But I’m glad he’s laying out all those approaches.”

“Well, why would I ever want to be anything other than super aggressive?” I ask. “He basically says that the only players who he can’t ever really predict are the super-aggressive ones, because they’ll play any hand, so it’s impossible to tell what they’re holding at any given point. But if that’s true, why wouldn’t you always want to play like that?”

One of the first things I’ve been learning is starting hand selection: I know you get two cards and have to decide whether to play them or not, but what cards should you be holding, at what position at the table, to decide that your hand is good enough? Erik has explained that the earlier you open, the stronger your hand needs to be, because more players are still to act. That makes sense. In any decision, information is power. The earlier you act, the less information you have. With multiple people still waiting to make their decision, the landscape may well change. He’s talked about the value of various starting possibilities. The pocket pairs—two cards that are the same. The suited connectors—cards of the same suit that are one apart in ranking, like a seven and an eight. The suited one- and two- and even three-gappers—cards of the same suit that are sort of related but not immediately adjacent, like a six and an eight of hearts. The suited wheel aces—an ace with a low second card of the same suit that can make a straight, or a wheel. They all have different strategic value, he’s told me. They all need to be part of a well-rounded arsenal. Some are good on their own. Some are good because they give you board coverage—that is, you can make strong hands in a variety of situations. Some are worthwhile for blocker value—key cards that lower the chance your opponent has a strong hand. Some are powerful because they can make monster hands that will get maximum value from weak opponents. And he’s explained how you can’t play all those cards in the same way all the time, especially given my lack of experience. “Basically, you can’t go too wrong in the beginning if you play good cards” is one of the first concrete pieces of information he ever gave me. But what Harrington seems to be saying makes a lot of sense to me, too: If I suddenly start opening hands that aren’t expected of me, in super-aggressive style, how will people know how to react?

Erik starts laughing. And the way he begins to say, “Well …” sounds an awful lot like the Well … I give to aspiring writers who’ve just read Kerouac for the first time and are having a mind-blowing epiphany that I already know is not going to end the way they think it will. “Well, there’s definitely an appeal to it. Aggressive people are going to get you. They are going to get you in a lot of spots where you’re going to be like, you know, I can’t handle the pressure or whatever. They’re very good at finding that,” he says. “But they also could get themselves in spots where they’re giving away a lot. I agree with Dan that they’re really challenging to play against and you don’t necessarily always want them at your table—but then you’ll get a beautiful gift from them. You can forgive them anything then.” By beautiful gift, Erik means a lot of chips. Hyper-aggressive play, he tells me, can be a short-term boon. But most of the time, those players go broke. And at the highest levels, they don’t last more than a heartbeat.

My enthusiasm for this particular section of Dan’s work, he says, reminds him of poker as it was ten or so years ago. “There was a time when these hyper-aggressive guys could do very well. Some of them were stars. And then the overaggressiveness ironed them out. They’re on the rail now. You have to find the balance, and some of these guys don’t put the brakes on, ever. In the highest buy‑in events, in the hundred‑Ks, you really have to be able to put the brakes on. There’s an entirely different style, winning a two-hundred-dollar online tournament and winning a hundred‑K.”

So what’s the answer? Action Dan and Erik himself actually offer a pretty compelling case study by their success: Be solid, fundamentally. Cultivate the solid image. And then add the hyper-aggression, but at the right place and the right time. Not always, not continuously, but thinkingly.

There’s never a default with anything. It’s always a matter of deliberation. Even seven-deuce—the worst hand, statistically speaking, that you can be dealt—can be playable in the right circumstances. The thing is, the circumstances are usually not right—and the hyper-aggressive player may run over everyone for a while and forget that at some point, it will all come to a screeching halt. Of course, being too conservative is also a liability. You become predictable. And often times, you lose the ability to press the fold button. You’ve been waiting so patiently for a good hand that you won’t let it go. “If you want to be good in big tournaments,” Erik tells me, “like, let’s say you’re playing a field of four hundred people. You have to be involved in many more hands, because just good cards aren’t going to get you there. They’re not going to get you there a high enough percentage of the time.” And so despite knowing fundamentally sound strategy, you have to be willing to part with it. “It turns out that people who are sort of involved and reckless are more likely to go deep.” To go deep means to make it through a large portion of the field. “You just have to be smart about it.”

I nod. It’s not the answer I wanted, but it’s the answer I get. There’s one more question from the Harrington books that I want to ask before this particular walk is done. What exactly is “M” and do I care? It’s a term I’ve circled in red, to make sure to review. It seemed awfully important to be designated with a single letter. M, Erik explains, is a way of thinking about your position in a tournament. “You have to be aware of everyone’s stack size,” he tells me. “When you get to Vegas and start playing, I want you to write down hands for me. And for every hand, you need to tell me how much everyone has behind. You have to always be aware of it.” Normally, people think of stack sizes in terms of big blinds. M takes it one step further, by quantifying your risk of going broke. How many orbits around the table can I sit and not play a hand? Your M is, basically, your cushion for putting in the minimum each orbit. The lower your M, the more in danger you are of busting the tournament sooner. And the letter M itself? It comes from the last name of a player named Paul Magriel. “I want you to meet Paul when you’re in Vegas,” Erik tells me. “You should ask Dan about him. Tell him to tell you how M came about.”

But as it turns out, I forget to ask Dan. Mostly because he cuts off any more technical questions with one thought. “We can go over everything you should be paying attention to, but the truth is, until you start playing a lot, it’s just information overload.”

I nod. I certainly know the dangers of too much information in an experience-free vacuum. And I realize that my piles of margin notes and the barely legible notebook jottings of Seidelian wisdom don’t necessarily need any more friends, at least at present.

“But here’s what I can tell you. The thing you have to conquer most obviously is yourself,” Dan continues. “Mike Tyson said it best. ‘Everyone has a plan until you get punched in the mouth.’ And he’s right. Until you go through a month of everything going wrong, you won’t know whether you have what it takes. You will never learn how to play good poker if you get lucky—it’s as simple as that. You just won’t.”

He’s not talking about hazing. It’s not the attitude of “no pain, no gain.” Nor is he giving me “permission to fail.” Instead, he’s talking about something very different, something so fundamental that we often forget about it whether we’re learning something new or just going about our lives: you need a way of testing your thought process. Before I get fancy with strategy, with the curlicues and trappings of expertise, I need to answer something far more basic: Am I thinking correctly? Before I start experimenting with writing free verse, have I learned how to think through a poem’s basic structure? Before I start adding those exotic spices to my recipe, have I learned how to make a basic white rice?

And the only way to do that is by failing. By writing bad poetry. Burning your food. Turning in shitty first draft after shitty first draft. “You have to suffer defeat,” Dan continues. “As brutal as it sounds, that’s the way it is.”

The benefit of failure is an objectivity that success simply can’t offer. If you win right away—if your first foray into any new area is a runaway success—you’ll have absolutely no way to gauge if you’re really just that brilliant or it was a total fluke and you got incredibly lucky.

The real reason Erik is still around, Dan tells me—I’ll have to see if Erik agrees on this one—is that he can take chances but still retain enough balance to pull back. Action Dan got his nickname because of a conservative image. Erik isn’t always known for running wild bluffs. “There are many great players who play with a lot more courage than Erik or I will ever know. The trouble is, that’s inherent in their personality and that contains the seeds of their destruction.” They go on hot streaks—but they don’t know what it takes to lose with grace and keep going. “You’ll see a whole bunch of superstars from ten years ago, and you’re not going to find any with money today. They were superstars because they were able to bring it to the edge, they had ability, but when things went a little bit wrong they either fell apart or didn’t know what to do with the money and spent it all on drugs and sports betting. So were they actually courageous? No.”

Nothing is personal. Everything should be treated like a business. My goals need to be pure: to run the best business I can. “Some of these other people had a goal to become famous, or even more, they just wanted action,” Dan says. And that’s their eventual downfall.

Do I know what I don’t know? Am I thinking well? “As a professional gambler, you have to understand: if you don’t have an objective evaluation of what’s going on, you’re a loser,” he tells me. “This game will beat you—it’s as simple as that. If you don’t understand what’s going on, the game will say, ‘We’re taking your money away from you.’”

What’s crucial, Dan says, is to develop my critical thinking and self-assessment ability well enough that I can constantly reevaluate, objectively, where I am—and whether where I am is good enough to play as I’m playing. It’s not about winning or losing—that’s chance. It’s about thinking—the process. Dan himself is a living illustration of how true this is: he quit not during a downswing but at the top of his game.

“Nine years ago, I’d just won $1.63 million. I’m walking out of the tournament, and I look around, I say, ‘This is it. I can’t take this crap anymore. I win $1.63 million and all I do is feel tired and beaten-down. This is just not worth it.’ I just right then and there decided I wasn’t going to play serious poker anymore. My heart’s not in it.” Most people won’t tell you to quit after the biggest score of your life. But Dan could tell that he was getting weaker, he was getting older, and the field was getting stronger. He’d quit before he had fallen behind.

And thus my first real poker lesson isn’t about winning. It’s about losing.

“You become a big winner when you lose,” Dan says. “Everyone plays well when they’re winning. But can you control yourself and play well when you’re losing? And not by being too conservative, but trying to still be objective as to what your chances are in the hand. If you can do that, then you’ve conquered the game.”

And it resonates. After all, losing is what brought me to the table in the first place. It makes sense that learning to lose in a game—to lose constructively and productively—would help me lose in life, lose and come back, lose and not see it as a personal failure. It resonates—but it’s a tough ask. Dan nods. “It’s still tough to do. Even for me, and I have a lifetime of experience, that’s not an easy thing.”

We say our goodbyes. He missed his morning gym session, but he’s off to enjoy his “quiet retirement.”

Oh, and I did learn how to beat roulette. Turns out all you need is a Department of Defense supercomputer, a software program developed from the work of Claude Shannon and Edward Thorp in the fifties, and an earpiece. Also casinos that don’t know what you’re up to. Get too greedy and you’re out.

“DAN IS GREAT,” ERIK agrees. And, yes, everything he has told me is true: one of the keys to success, Erik says, if not the key, is objectivity. And objectivity is a hard thing to come by.

“It’s good that you’re starting with a rare realistic understanding of what you’re up against,” he says. “You know that these swings happen, that there’s a randomness to the way these swings happen.”

It doesn’t make me feel much better. I’m a writer, I want to remind him. I don’t have much money to lose. It’s easy enough for someone with over $30 million in earnings to say.

But actually that’s unfair. When Erik was just starting out, he had nothing—and he nearly lost it all. He’d dropped out of college to play backgammon—that’s when he first met Dan—but then decided to go back to a more traditional career path. He’d met his future wife, Ruah, and knew he had to get “serious” about life. So he went to Wall Street—just in time for the crash of 1987. He lost his job. And Ruah was now pregnant.

He didn’t take the loss personally. Instead, he reevaluated his options and buckled down on his studying. He was, in essence, “scared into playing well.” And he started winning. Why did he emerge on the other side while so many others didn’t? Obviously, there’s the talent factor—Erik is clearly someone who is very good at the component parts of poker—but there’s a larger skill at play: his absolute lack of ego. His willingness to be objective about himself and his own level of play.

“When things go wrong, other people see it as unfairness that’s always surrounding them,” he tells me. They take it personally. They don’t know how to lose, how to learn from losing. They look for something or someone to blame. They don’t step back to analyze their own decisions, their own play, where they may have gone wrong themselves. “It’s a really big handicap in life to think that way. All of us can step into that sometimes, but it’s important to know the difference. It’s like that great Kipling quote: ‘If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same …’”

I nod. I know the one.

“I love that. This is such a fundamental part of poker. The wins really go to people’s heads. And the losses—they can’t deal. It’s so easy to be delusional in this game,” he tells me.

I jot it down. Understand the dark side of variance first: that’s the only time you’ll actually learn to process your decision making well. Because when you’re winning, it’s just too easy not to stop and analyze your process. Why bother if things are going well? When it comes to learning, Triumph is the real foe; it’s Disaster that’s your teacher. It’s Disaster that brings objectivity. It’s Disaster that’s the antidote to that greatest of delusions, overconfidence. And ultimately, both Triumph and Disaster are impostors. They are results that are subject to chance. One of them just happens to be a better teaching tool than the other.

In the classic demonstration of the illusion of control, the Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer had students guess the outcome of a coin toss, heads or tails. They were then told whether they were correct or not in their guesses. In three separate setups, the outcomes were predetermined in a specific order: they could be distributed in an intuitively random pattern, there could be more correct guesses clustered near the beginning, or there could be more correct guesses clustered near the end. In each case, the absolute numbers were the same. The only difference was the order.

But the results couldn’t have been more different. After the guesses concluded, Langer asked each participant a series of questions: Did they feel they could improve on this task? Did they feel they were particularly talented at it? Did they need more time to get better? Would they be better with limited distraction? And so on. In each case, the obvious answer is no: to answer otherwise is to classify something that is the outcome of chance (a coin toss) as being in the realm of skill. But the obvious answer is not the answer she got. When students had a random progression or one where the accuracy clustered near the end, they did indeed answer in the negative. But when the correct answers were clustered up front, they developed a sudden myopia. Why yes, they said, they are quite good at this, and yes, they would improve with time. Success led to an abject failure of objectivity: suddenly, they were in the throes of the illusion of control. They thought that they could actually predict the results of a coin toss.

If we lose early, we have a shot at objectivity. But when we win at the start, that’s when we see the illusion of control playing out in full swing. As Langer titled her paper: “Tails, I Win. Heads, It’s Chance.” Though Langer’s work is from the seventies, when I was in graduate school, Walter and I replicated the effect precisely with our new subjects: it remains just as strong. The outcome rightly shouldn’t matter. And yet how it does.

“The beauty of poker is generally, delusion is punished,” Erik tells me. You may get away with an illusion of control in the short term, but if you persist, no one will know your name in a few years’ time. In real life, we can remain deluded indefinitely. If we choose delusion over objectivity in poker, we are eventually doomed.

I admit to being nervous. Objectivity at its purest is a big ask. Can I truly hack it?

Erik certainly can. Somehow, even over smoked fish, he manages to demonstrate just how able he is to learn from feedback and to change his actions accordingly.

“Do you not like the way egg yolks taste?” I ask him as our orders hit the table. I’ve ordered the lox and bagel platter. He’s ordered some salmon, too, but also an egg-white omelet, just as he had at our first ever meeting. To me, that seems like cutting out the part that makes eggs eggs, and even though I don’t yet know Erik well, I can’t help but comment.

“No, I like them,” Erik says. “But I read that it’s healthier to only eat egg whites.”

I’ll soon learn that Erik is big on nutrition science—but that he’s always willing to listen if someone points out contradictory evidence. Which is precisely what I now do, even pulling out my phone to punctuate my mini lecture with references to newer work. Nutrition is a tricky beast, and nutrition advice offered in a vacuum, even trickier. Many people will bristle and shut down—who are you to tell them what to eat when they’ve already formed an opinion? Erik listens. He reads. He nods. And the next time we have breakfast, he orders the full egg. I resist asking if it tastes better, but I imagine I see a satisfied look on his face. I take out my phone again, this time with a quote I pulled from one of my favorite Nora Ephron essays. “You can eat all sorts of things that are high in dietary cholesterol (like lobster and avocado and eggs),” she writes, “and they have NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER on your cholesterol count. NONE. WHATSOEVER. DID YOU HEAR ME? I’m sorry to have to resort to capital letters, but what is wrong with you people?” She reserves special pity for the egg-white omelet. “Every time I’m forced to watch [friends] eat egg-white omelets, I feel bad for them. In the first place, egg-white omelets are tasteless. In the second place, the people who eat them think they are doing something virtuous when they are instead merely misinformed.” She goes on to say that no amount of haranguing from her tends to change anyone’s mind—a common enough effect, especially when it comes to nutritional beliefs. Erik laughs and eats his eggs, yolks and all.

AS I RIDE THE subway back to Brooklyn, I realize Erik hasn’t given me much in the way of concrete advice. Our conversations remain more theoretical than I would ideally prefer. It strikes me that the experience feels somehow familiar, this dynamic of back-and-forth with no real answers forthcoming to any of my questions—or, rather, the only answer being one of “Well, it depends; why don’t we think it through for ourselves?” It’s not quite a Socratic dialogue—Erik doesn’t keep me hanging to that extent—but it’s an interaction that focuses more on process than prescription, on exploration rather than destination.

When I complain that it would be helpful to know at least his opinion on how I should play a hand, he gives me a smile and tells me a story. Earlier that year, he says, he was talking to one of the most successful high-stakes players currently on the circuit. That player was offering a very specific opinion on how a certain hand should be played. Erik listened quietly and then told him one phrase: “Less certainty. More inquiry.”

“He didn’t take it well,” he tells me. “He actually got pretty upset.” But Erik wasn’t criticizing. He was offering the approach he’d learned over years of experience. Question more. Stay open-minded.

And then I realize what I’m reminded of: Dante and Virgil. Dante, in a strange place, not knowing what anything is or where it might lead. Virgil, his guide through this infernal landscape, who doesn’t offer directions but rather stands to the side as Dante forges his own path.

When people find out I’m working with Erik, they immediately want to know what he thinks of certain plays and how he himself plays certain spots. Will the elusive champion finally give up his secrets? For Erik, the answer is simple: there is no answer. It’s a constant process of inquiry. A hand can be played any number of ways, as long as the thought process is there. And Erik may himself decide to play the same cards, in the same position, even against the same opponents, in a different fashion from one day to the next. There is no certainty. There is only thought.