Phil Helmuth's Poker Theory Explains Ted Cruz's Strategy

The United States’ Presidency has had a history, both long and illustrious, of poker players – from Harry S Truman’s ‘the buck stops here,’ – ‘the buck’ being a now obsolete term for the dealer button – to Nixon’s naval career in which he is supposed to have been every bit as formidable and ruthless a card player as he was a President; the records do not show if he was quite as crooked at cards.

There is an obvious link between the power struggles of politics and poker. Both are games where appearance matters as much as the reality of one’s hand and one’s moves are made with limited information on what one’s opponent might really be holding. In fact, game theory – so crucial to the way poker strategy has developed – found its earliest practical use in the international politics of the Cold War. The most famous example of this is, of course, the idea of the nuclear deterrent and Mutually Assured Destruction.

In a recent article, Wired magazine’s Jason Tanz, even went so far as to dust off his copy of Phil Hellmuth’s book Play Poker Like The Pros and see what light it shed on the strange happenings at the Republican National Convention.

Taxonomic Theory With Phil Hellmuth, Jr.

Phil’s book breaks players down into five types of animal. There is the mouse – a term for conservative players who are broadly tight and passive. Jackal describes a loose aggressive player, who is not Dwan enough to make the strategy profitable. Elephant is what Phil calls loose passive, calling-station types. Lion is the name for solid tight-aggressive players, who will occasionally mix it up and play some speculative hands, mostly for deception purposes. Then final class of player is the eagle, who in Phil’s mind are only represented in the top 100 players because Phil has yet to hear of internet grinders. The eagle are great exploitative players. Guess which category Phil sees himself in.

For Tanz’s analysis though, it’s really only the hyper-aggressive jackal, the timid mouse, and calculating lion we need to be thinking about.

Phil Hellmuth and the RNC

The tone of the RNC was – in the words of the many commentators – largely apocalyptic. The take home message was that there was something bad coming for everyone white, straight, and Christian, and come November ‘true’ Americans are gonna have to go with Trump if they want to live.

In Tanz’s article he describes Trump as a jackal saying:

These mice took too long to make a move against all that bravado in the primaries, so when the RNC came along, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan and Chris Christie were sitting on dwindling stacks and up against what looked like a monster hand: the Presidential Nomination. They folded, giving the jackal their nomination.

Cruz opted for a different strategy.

He refused to endorse Trump in his speech, and while he certainly had a go at Obama’s legacy and Hillary’s candidacy, he also told the crowds:

The full transcript of his speech can be found here.

There was some shock, not least because it later transpired that Trump may have known and simply not cared about the speech, but the main source of alarm was the riskiness of the move. It set Cruz against his party right at the point everyone was expected to get in line to take on Hillary.

This sort of thing is not unusual for Cruz. After all, he is the man who read Green Eggs And Ham to the Senate as part of his – failed – twenty one hour filibuster of Obamacare. He was also one of the orchestrators of the government shutdown in 2013, a bold strategy that also completely failed to achieve his ends. In other words he is practically a jackal himself.

Here Cruz is effectively counting on Trump losing. Suddenly Cruz is left as the one person who didn’t kowtow to Trump and remained independent from what looks to be a disaster for the party, whether Trump makes it to theWhite House or not.

Cruz, unlike Trump, has a real strategy which he is working toward bringing to fruition. He may be an unpleasant sort of human – aren’t they all? –but he is also someone with a clear agenda: big government in the bedroom, small government everywhere else. This act of defiance against the GOP’s chosen one has the potential to put the political chips in his pile if it pays off. We all know how easy it is to bully the table when you’ve got plenty of chips behind.

Extending the Metaphor

Tanz also adds that:

Against those gains he has only wagered the risk of being the one person to not get in line when President Trump was being touted as the savior of the free world.

Come November I guess we’ll see if this lion’s bet pays off.