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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forums538 "How President Trump Is Like A Terrible Poker Player"
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-president-trump-is-like-a-terrible-poker-player/by Nate Silver
I was playing poker in Atlantic City this weekend, so Ive had poker on the brain as Ive been thinking about President Trumps tactics during the partial government shutdown, which ended on Friday after Congress passed a three-week continuing resolution to fund the government. What will happen at the end of the next three weeks is very much up in the air. But the way Trump has played his hand so far on the shutdown has a lot in common with how bad poker players tend to cost themselves money.
If you read the headline of this post, you may have assumed that it refers to Trumps getting outmaneuvered on the shutdown by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. I do think Trump was outmaneuvered by Pelosi, but the analogy to poker is a little different from that. It has more to do with Trumps overall strategy toward the presidency.
In general, the strategic goal of poker is to put your opponent to tough decisions. If you see one of those hands on TV where one player is thinking for several minutes about whether to call or fold on the river, that usually means the other player has played his or her hand well, putting the opponent in a no-win position by leaving just the right amount of doubt about whether its a bluff or a real hand.
As a corollary, good players play in such a way as to avoid putting themselves to tough decisions. Bad players, conversely, tend to paint themselves into corners. Theyll curse their luck when they suddenly realize that a hand theyd assumed was a winner might be no good. But more often than not, it reflects a mistake they made earlier in the hand, such as playing a weak hand that they should have folded to begin with
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last paragraph
But Trump has no sense for which battles to pick and seemingly little awareness of his own unpopularity and the consequences it has for the presidency. Moreover, although Trump sometimes seems to realize when he has gotten himself into a no-win position, he doesnt recognize how often his own decisions are responsible for putting him there. The presidency is a long game, and a much harder one than being a real-estate developer or a reality television host. The scary possibility for Trump and I do mean merely a possibility isnt that the chaos of the shutdown, coming on the heels of the midterms and as the Russia investigation still looms over him, is a new low for him. Its that its the new normal.
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538 "How President Trump Is Like A Terrible Poker Player" (Original Post)
NRaleighLiberal
Jan 2019
OP
lunatica
(53,410 posts)1. Interesting perspective
But to me its more like Trump playing poker with a slot machine. He thinks he can bluff it with his superior brain and then wonders why the slot machine keeps winning.