Tom Hitchner on poker, stoicism, and letting go
"Training our attitude towards games, then, can help us train our attitude towards life."
Hi friends!
I’m really pleased to welcome my Writing Programs’ colleague Tom Hitchner to the table this month.
Tom illustrates how poker teaches embodied acceptance by making the practice of holding loosely—or folding—unavoidable. His discussion of imperfect information, material stakes, and a game that “doesn’t end” feels particularly timely right now.
For me, this piece inspired a review of the worldly winds. We negotiate things like gain and loss, praise and blame, pleasure and pain, fame and ill-repute, and do what we can to stay rooted in our practice.
As Tom writes: “All there is, is the continuous attempt to do our best, and the equally endless task of maintaining serenity no matter what the external world throws at us.”
I hope you enjoy!
Stoic Poker
I’m excited for the chance to share my new Substack, Stoic Poker, with the world! I’m particularly grateful to Logan for lending me space in their own Substack to do so. I love Logan’s work on games and what they can show us about life, and I’m abashed that I didn’t see the overlap between that topic and my own, something Logan was able to see even before my Substack launched.
Stoic Poker is a Substack about what the philosophy of Stoicism can tell us about the game of poker, and vice versa. For an extremely quick summary (see my Substack in the coming weeks for much more!), Stoicism is an ancient Greek and Roman philosophy that emphasizes control of our thoughts, emotions, and reactions. The classic Stoics believed that these—thoughts, emotions, reactions—are the only things ultimately up to us, the only assets we truly control, and therefore the only things the wise person should understand as good or bad. By contrast, sickness and health, wealth and poverty, even life and death, are all outside of our control, and thus should not be understood as positive or negative.
The extent to which we even can think this way, let alone whether we should, is a big topic, and not one I will even try to address here. (Though I will say, anticipating the reaction that this seems like a desperately unhealthy attitude, that Stoicism’s influence continues to be felt in the treatment of addiction and compulsion, from AA to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.) Instead, I want to address a pretty important question for starting a Substack called “Stoic Poker”: why poker? For that matter, why games?
What do games have to do with it?
The idea that acting well is similar to playing a game well is a mainstay of Stoic advice. The Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus, for instance, repeatedly used analogies to games to discuss how a wise person should interact with the indifferent facts of the world. “Indifferent” is a Stoic term referring to the proper attitude towards things we can’t control. For instance, we should do as well as we can at our job, because we are meant to use our abilities as well as we can. But the job itself, according to the Stoics, is indifferent—we ultimately aren’t in control of whether we keep it or not, and so if we are fired we have not truly been harmed.1
The implements of games are a good analogy for Stoic indifference, because we do the best we can with them while remembering that they aren’t truly ours and don’t have any importance in themselves. When people are playing ball, or dice, Epictetus wrote, they make the best use of the ball or the dice that they can, because that’s what the situation calls for. But when the game is over, the implements lose their meaning and are put away. Training our attitude towards games, then, can help us train our attitude towards life. (At least, that’s the theory of my blog!)
How is poker different?
But poker (or even playing cards) didn’t exist at the time of the early Stoics, so there’s no genealogical reason why it should be a better fit for that philosophy than other games, particularly games that (like our day-to-day lives) involve some element of chance. For instance, we could take a Stoic approach to dice-based role-playing games, and even learn some lessons about Stoic practice as a result. If I roll a critical failure at a crucial moment in a campaign, and my character—even my whole party—dies as a result, a Stoic would say I should see this as what fate had in store for me, and that as long as I did my best, I should not be upset at this outcome. And if I can take this loss with equanimity, why shouldn’t I do the same with losses in the “real world?”
I do think that games in general, not only poker, are a good way of exploring Stoic ideals and training our ability to absorb apparent disappointments without distress. (I would definitely read Stoic Role-Playing and encourage anyone who wants to run with this idea to go for it!) However, there are a few features of poker that make it a particularly good way to understand Stoic practice, over and above other games I can think of:
—Poker involves money. When we play most games, we understand ourselves to be playing in a kind of pretend world, whose stakes—like the dice Epictetus writes about—don’t carry over once the game is put away. You can’t spend victory points on groceries, so any anguish we feel when we return to the real world is likely muted.
Poker, though, is properly played for real money. Many times, when we stand up from the table, we’ll be a few dollars lighter than we would be if we had played better, or if the cards had gone our way more often. This makes it less trivial for poker players, even casual ones, to laugh off losses, making Stoic attitudes (in my view) a good aid to a player’s mental well-being. But it also means that a poker player who’s good at weathering losses emotionally is gaining experience that, if they apply it consciously, can help them weather losses (financial and otherwise) away from the table as well.
—Poker is a game of imperfect information. Plenty of games have some element of chance, but not all of those involve hidden information. In Monopoly, for instance, every player’s money and property is public knowledge. Some other games do have hidden information, but without the objective ranking present in poker: in Scrabble, for instance, I don’t know my opponent’s tiles and they don’t know mine, but the main thing that will distinguish who wins will be what use each of us will be able to make of our tiles.
Both of these are fine setups for a game, but they make poor metaphors for the situations we face in life. In life, we don’t know the full challenges that are arrayed against us, and the world is not meritocratic enough that we can be assured of a fair fight. In this way, life bears much more resemblance to poker, in which we almost never know for a certainty whether we have the strongest hand, and cannot count on our skill to save us if we don’t. To be clear, like both Monopoly and Scrabble, poker involves skill, but while some of the skill is mathematical and some is psychological, much of it is emotional: a successful player must not feel too attached to their cards when they feel their hand is weak, and not feel too attached to their money when they feel their hand is strong (or, in bluffing, if their opponent’s hand is weak). This is especially true since…
—Poker involves folding. One of the key practices of poker is surrendering one’s chance at the pot, not knowing whether one is right or wrong to do so. Imagine you’ve been playing for an hour without receiving any good hands, when finally a pair of aces comes your way. You bet big, and get called…but as the hand proceeds you realize the opponent probably has you beat. Because of poker’s incomplete information, you may never know whether it’s correct to fold, and you’ll certainly make the wrong decision many times. Yet you can’t be a successful player unless you’re willing to say goodbye to your pretty hands when you think they’re beaten. It’s vexing…but it’s the perfect illustration of the Stoic guidance against growing too attached to things we can’t control.
—Poker is a game that never ends. Most games are played until someone wins: reaches a certain number of points, eliminates all their opponents, etc. Poker isn’t like that.2 “How long is a poker game?” asks the professional player Eric Drache in Al Alvarez’s The Biggest Game in Town. “If you play for a living, there is no end to it.” One of the basic cognitive mistakes unsophisticated players make is to chase losses: down $50 on a night, they play hand after hand, hoping to break even on the night before leaving but ending up down more at least as often. They fail to realize that there is no “even” or “winning” in poker any more than there is in life, no point at which we are declared the winner. All there is, is the continuous attempt to do our best, and the equally endless task of maintaining serenity no matter what the external world throws at us.
So all of that is at least a start to an explanation of why, to my mind, Stoicism and poker are great tools to understand each other. But I think it’s always fulfilling to look for ways the games we play model something important about life, something we can take with us when we leave the table, whether it fits into a Stoic framework or not. I’m looking forward to writing and reading more about how to do this.
Thank you for reading. If this post resonated with you, consider checking out Tom’s “Welcome to Stoic Poker” and his new Substack!
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Needless to say, very few people feel this way about the prospect of being fired! It’s because the advice is so alien to what feels true to us that we need the analogies in the first place.
Granted, a poker tournament is like that.
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