Then again, they may not. Those are the players Brian Alspach hopes to find when the mathematician sits down in a card room.
Alspach, professor emeritus at Simon Fraser University and adjunct professor at the University of Regina, has figured out the probability of being dealt various hands in dozens of games.
"A straight whomps three of a kind in five-card draw," says Alspach, who Thursday delivers a lecture on "Mathematics and Poker" at the University of Montana.
But when a player has seven cards from which to choose five, the probability changes dramatically: 0.046 for a straight; 0.048 for three of a kind.
Alspach, 66, started playing poker as a graduate student in 1960, but didn't move from in-home games and into card rooms until the early 1990s.
"When you play in card rooms you're playing better players, and I was getting absolutely killed," Alspach says. "You either adapt, or go back down a level."
Alspach not only read some books, he started doing what he does for a living: math.
When he was done, he knew the probability of being dealt a straight flush in a five-card game was 0.000015, but in a seven-card game, it shot up to 0.00031.
And he knew it for three-, four-, five- and six-card games and seven-card games with a joker in the deck. He's done computations for mambo poker, losing flushes and pai gow poker.
There are three ways mathematics relate to poker, Alspach says.
"The first is the math we use while we're playing, which is minimal, but it's there," he says.
The second is where math can be used to prove or disprove things you believe to be true about the game.
The third? Well, the reporter writing this story can't balance a checkbook, much less understand anything he's written so far. The third has something to do with a mathematician who can't solve the problem he's been given to solve, so he changes the problem.
"It has almost no relation to how you play the game," Alspach says.
Good.
How about an example for No. 2?
Alspach says a common bar game used to be to take two decks of cards. Spread one out down the bar, shuffled or not, then bet that you could take a second shuffled deck and, flipping the cards over one by one underneath the 52 already layed out, match a card from the second deck with one from the first.
"Intuitively, you think it probably doesn't happen that often," Alspach says. "In fact, you'll match a card exactly two out of every three times."
Math can help poker players, but even Alspach - who writes for a Canadian poker magazine, consults for casinos such as the Tropicana in Atlantic City, and for people who have invented poker games - will tell you knowing probabilities are no help if you can't read people.
"Poker is much more a people game, and you've got to play situations," he says. "You'll see an artery in the neck start to pulse, and know somebody just got some good cards. People with a strong hand breathe faster. On the other hand, people who are bluffing hold their breath; because they're thinking, 'Please don't call me.' "
Televised poker has lured lots of new faces to card rooms, Alspach says, and he sees lots of rookie mistakes at tables.
"The other night, I was in a no-limit hold-'em game, at a table with 10 people and seven were clearly inexperienced," he says. "Every hand they'd limp in with the minimum bid, which was $25. When you have six or seven players putting out $25, they're signing their own death sentence. Three times I won on marginal hands, and if I did get a good hand I'd throw out a big raise and they'd all throw their hands in."
His favorite game is Omaha high-low, a split-pot game where players are dealt four cards and five "community cards" are turned over in the middle of the table. There are four rounds of betting, and players select their best (and/or worst) hand using two of their cards and three of the community cards.
Alspach likes the game because players accustomed to hold-'em games often don't understand how the probabilities change.
"They bet like hell, and lose with straights and flushes," Alspach says.
Reporter Vince Devlin can be reached at 523-5260 or at vdevlin@missoulian.com.
|
 |
 |
Add your comment now! Write your comment in the form below.
(Email address is for verification only. If you'd like to email a story, look for the link above)