Annie Duke Knows How to Handle Donald Trump

For anyone who uses Twitter, you may have noticed that a lot of your favorite pros tweet less about chip counts and more about the upcoming US elections. Daniel Negreanu has tipped from merely relentless in his pro-Hillary sales pitch to outright invasive; and Mike Matusow seems to have been going through some sort of Trump based mental breakdown for months. Even old-timer’s like Doyle are pushing their candidates harder than their sponsors or even their own poker exploits. And now that crowd favorite Annie Duke is weighing in on the elections too.

After digging up Phil Hellmuth’s strategy books to shed some light on the RNC doings of Ted Cruz, Jason Tanz of Wired recently called on Annie Duke to give him a poker player’s perspective on the way Paul Ryan has backed himself into a corner with his rather weak attempt to have his cake and eat it since then.

Ryan found himself between on the one hand the proverbial rock of endorsing Trump and being tarnished with the Orange haired brush of narcissism and incompetence; and on the other hand the hard place of refusing to endorse Trump and making an enemy of a spiteful man who may well be president in a few months. And which ever way Trump points his tiny-hands is the direction his followers will go with their poorly spelled campaign slogans.

So, Ryan has taken the position of endorsing Trump as the party candidate while distancing himself from all the nasty particulars of Trump’s frequently racist, fascist and occasionally just stupid words.

Duke on Ryan

The problem with this strategy, as Duke sees it, is that he’s played weak-tight too long now. Ted Cruz came back over the top of Trump by refusing to endorse him, and most other Republican just went ahead and got on board, gambling their chips on Trump to win. In contrast, Ryan is doing the equivalent of just min-raising every hand.

Take for example Ryan’s description of Trump’s words as ‘a textbook example of a racist comment.’ A comment he followed up by saying that he still backs Trump for presidency. Duke compares that sort of thing to ‘raising weakly instead of folding or raising aggressively,’ so when Trump reraises Ryan’s bet by supporting his opponent on Twitter and making a show of not endorsing Ryan, no one should be coming away from this surprised. Least of all Paul Ryan.

But now this weak-tight play has put him in a bind. With Trump’s recent attack on the bereaved parents of a US army veteran, Trump may have gone too far, and Ryan will have to start screwing something to the sticking place, either his courage or his career. As Tanz puts it:

So now, with his options reduced in both payoff and number, Paul Ryan is going to have to play back at Trump. His problem, as Duke points out, is that your odds of getting back in the game are better with a weaker hand and a decent stack than having to risk your smaller stack multiple times on stronger hands. Because now, Ryan’s first double up probably won’t give him enough to get him out of danger. He’ll find himself gambling for it all again soon.

Duke on the Other Side

Compare this to Trump’s position which Duke describes as being like the players ‘you see doing really well for six months to a year and then disappear.’ Her explanation for flashes in the pan like that is that:

It gives other players two options: they can either ratchet up their own play, firing back like Rubio tried to do in the primary campaign; or they can get off the pot, folding around Trump and avoiding getting too many chips in against the unpredictable player as most of the rest of the primary candidates did.

That is how Tanz characterizes the Khan family debacle. Here is an easy spot for Ryan to push back.

Duke says that in a spot like this, you need to work out ‘the right way to punish aggression,’ but is a little inexact here as to exactly what Ryan could do. Poker metaphors only go so far, I guess.

Tanz on the other hand thinks now that Ryan’s own Congressional district primaries are over his life will get a little easier with his ‘Trump-touched challenger’ out of the way, but he may still be forced to make a move, because Trump shows no sign of letting up on raising the blinds.