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Binger doesn’t mind gambling, per se, but he learned the pitfalls of blackjack as an undergraduate, when he wrote a computer program to beat the game through card-counting (or, as the casinos like to call it, “cheating”) for his senior project. Then he tried to put his strategy into practice. He lost a pile of cash playing blackjack on an ill-fated trip to Reno, and was barred from six casinos in one day for card-counting in a desperate attempt to recoup his losses. “I realized I wasn’t going to get rich playing blackjack,” he recalled.
But poker was different: as he studied the game and pondered the underlying mathematics, Binger realized that poker could be a “beatable game.”
Fundamentally, poker is a game of skill and strategy, not a game of pure chance (although luck plays a role). (UPDATE: For clarification, when you play poker in a casino, you are playing against the other players — not the house. The casino takes a cut of the pot, but in essence, you are renting the table. So casinos make far less money off of poker than they do off their usual pure games of chance. They make some — that’s their business model — but if poker weren’t so enormously popular, casinos might not host the games at all.)
Vonk has always loved games, but his love for poker rests on the combination of “math skills” and “people skills,” as he put it. “Good poker requires that you make sound game-theoretic decisions but there is still plenty of freedom to try and outsmart your opponents,” he said. “Other casino games miss that second element. All you can do in blackjack or roulette is make the best possible mathematical decisions, and even then, you will still lose in the long run. I have never been attracted to those games. It’s the fact that you play against other people that makes poker so interesting, and that makes it possible to actually be a winner at the game.”
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