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As a cardplayer, I endorsee this take. It reminds me a bit of the blog post I did last year about how being a good player helps you analzye politics (mattglassman.com/?p=4225).
I'd offer a couple of additional thoughts on Trump behaving like a bad poker/Bridge player. 1/
I'd offer a couple of additional thoughts on Trump behaving like a bad poker/Bridge player. 1/
First, @NateSilver538 is 100% correct Trump often makes the most basic mistakes of weak hold'em players: he chooses the wrong battles and continues them way too far. To improve at hold'em, amatuer players need to play fewer starting hands and learn to fold when obviously beat.
Trump hasn't learned the basic Neustadt argument of the presidency: pick your battles and fight on turf you have an advantage and are likely to win. That's also known as play tighter at the poker table and don't put money in with trash.
Nate also talks about Trump as having gotten lucky on decent instincts, but that not being as important as cold political/poker calculation. I agree. But I see Trump's political problem in this respect as similar to people who can (onnly) beat the smallest stakes poker games.
The problem these poker players have is that they have a strategy that works really well in one particular environment (often low-stakes home games). They play a litte tighter than their buddies, they are a bit more aggressive, etc.
But then they go try to play a slightly tougher game--maybe a $1/$3 no-limit game at National Harbor--and they can't win. Their strategy doesn't work. And that's b/c poker is a dynamic, game-theoretic endeavor; your best strategy requires understanding your opponent strategy.
And that's the thing about poker and politics---mostly, the best players haven't figured out *the* winning strategy; they're actually really good at *adapting* strategy to fit circumstance. If all you know is how to beat one particular game, when you switch games, you're fucked.
And that's Trump! He's made his bones throughout his career on a fixed strategy: media. He ran his campaign on the same fixed strategy: media domination. Now he's playing DC legislative/govenring politics, and he's totally lost, because his only strategy is medai domination.
Trump does a million other things that poor cardplayers do: he's impatient, he's impulsive, he's emotional, he's tempermental, he takes confrontations personally, he's mean to his partners (Bridge ), etc. But there's one cardplaying thing that REALLY makes Trump bad at politics:
He doesn't understand how the game is fundamentally accounted. The goal in poker is to win money. But a lot of people seem to derive their pleasure from the game by trading money for other goals: having fun, bluffing their buddies, having people *think* they are a good player.
And that's Trump. My sense is he'd *way* rather have people think he's a successful pol than actual be a successful politician, if he had to choose. And that throws his whole game off. As the saying goes, you can accomplish a lot in politics if you don't care who gets credit.
But all Trump wants is the credit! As in poker, this fundamentally distorts your strategy, since once you are looking for the approval of people at the table above all , you'll stop playing winning poker and start playing to impress them, even if that means playing suboptimally.
/end Trump/poker rant. That was fun.
