I grew up in a games-playing family. Most nights, it was what we did after dinner. We had a massive collection of games, and we played a wide variety.  Family board games. Strategy games. Trivia games. Cooperatives. Parlor Games. You name it, we played it. Clue. Stratego. Risk. Connect Four. Trivial Pursuit. Spoons. Diplomacy. Pit. Chess. Balderdash. And while I didn’t realize it until I was older, we didn’t just play games, we were into games. We often spent as much time trying to dissect the strategic implications of the games—even simple kids games—as we did playing them. It was cutthroat but friendly. We were the kind of people who got locked in heated strategy debates about Hungry Hungry Hippos on Christmas morning.

But mostly we played cards. Usually tricks and trumps Bridge derivatives—I will forever consider Oh Hell the best (but not greatest) card game—but also the Rummy and Go Fish derivatives too. Pitch. Bid Whist. Catch The Ten. Spades. Skat. Euchre. Gin. Bridge. Authors. Speed. Gabes. And, of course, Poker. I swear I was the only 10 year old in America in 1988 who regularly played Heads-Up Pot-Limit Stud Hi-Lo. In college and graduate school I played serious poker and competitive Bridge. Still do. To this day, my first instinct when I don’t have anything to do is to start a card game.

Not surprisingly, I came to see the world through the structure and language of games. This has served me surprisingly well in my time thinking about, analyzing, and practicing politics. As it turns out, games and politics are often very similar. Both exist within structures of rules, with players trying to maximize some sort of utility. Often, political strategies are at least partially game-theoretic, in that the best choices for one political actor are partially dependent on understanding the choices of other political actors. This is both true on the electoral side of politics, as well as the legislative/governing side. Reducing politics to a really complicated card game isn’t a perfect way to understand it, but it’s a very good framework for organizing your thinking and it sure beats *not* organizing your thinking.

Anyway, here are six ways being a cardplayer has informed my thinking about politics.

1. I think a lot about the rules. Like, all the time.  Even among very casual, kitchen-table family card players, people who are new to a game almost invariably seek to clarify the rules. Well, of course they do. If you have any interest in winning the game, you are going to have to devise a strategy, and every winning strategy is derived from the implications of the rules of the game. This is so obvious when you play a card game that it amazes me how many people disregard it when they approach politics. Political behavior is constrained by all sorts of rules—the Constitution, laws, the chamber rules of legislative bodies, the private regulations of political parties and other groups—and understaning those rules is often the key for political actors  formulating a maximizing strategy, or for observers and analysts understanding the strategic choices made by political actors.

This matters at the global strategic level, but also at the tactical advice level. If someone came to me and said, “Oh, Hell. You’re holding AK9 hearts and two baby spades. Spades trump. What are you bidding?” I wouldn’t even be able to begin answering that question without finding out a whole lot more about what is going on. How many people are playing? Where am I in the biding order? Have any bids been made yet? What’s the score? What’s the scoring method? How many rounds are there to go? Are these players any good? Are we playing for money or for fun?

It’s no different in politics. If someone asks “Do you think bill X will pass this year?” you might be able to give an answer based on the title of the bill and a quick read on what it does, but you’d be a lot more capable if you knew more about the institutional structure of Congress. You should have a million tactical questions. Has it passed one chamber yet? What committee has jurisdiction? Who is the chairman? How many co-sponsors does the bill have? Does the leadership like it? Is there a companion bill in the Senate? What do interest groups X,Y, an Z think of it? Has the White House said anything? And, of course, these tactical questions are all derivative of an understaning of the rules structure that governs Congress and provides actors with opportunities to either help or hinder the bills chances of passing.

Not enough people think about the rules, either in cards or in politics. I see people entering expensive poker tournaments, all the time, who don’t even know the blind structure. And I see Members of Congress and their staff, often quite unaware of the parliamentary strategies they have available to them. In both cases, the players are likely not maximizing the likelihood of achieving their goals, simply because they have not fully understood the rules and their strategic implications. When I was at the House Appropriations Committee, I was often a huge pain in the ass, because I was constantly bugging our parliamentary and budget experts for advice about our strategic options under the rules. But in several instances, it made a huge difference.

2. I realize that political actors have extraordinarily disparate goals. What’s the goal in a card game? This is a tougher question than most people think. Most people answer “winning” and that’s a pretty good first approximation. But it’s also a very dangerous assumption. Sit down in any card game in America tonight, and the vast majority of people in the game will not be there simply trying to maximize their probability of winning. Some will be trying to maximize their fun, which in many games is not correlated with winning. Other are there for the thrill of running a big bluff on their buddy, or because they like seeing their friends on Friday night, or just to pass the time. And so drawing strategic implications about their play, either as an opponent or an observer, can become quite difficult. It’s just not correct to assume they’ll take win-maximzing actions; they may be on a completely different utility schedule than you. Even among people strictly trying to win, it’s often easy to forget that winning itself has its own maximization function, and isn’t just a matter of maximizing one’s score. In games being played for money, another whole layer goes on top of all of this.

Just as in games, one of the most common flaws in political analysis is the assumption about what a particular political actor’s goal is. And if you don’t have a good sense of the goal, it’s basically impossible to evaluate the strategy. Political goals can be incredibly complex, and even in the most straightforward situatons—general elections—the goals of the candidates aren’t as simple as they seem. My dad ran for judge a bunch of times in our suburban town, but he was never really trying to win. His hopeless candidacy was really just a favor to the powerful political machine in the city outside of which we lived, and to whom he had various reason to want to be well-regarded. And our strategy reflected that. People often mistakenly assume candidates are seeking to maximize their votes in an election. That’s ridiculous. Candidates are usually seeking to maximize their probability of winning; no candidate with 57% of the vote locked up is going to do something that will likely improve them to 67% but could possibly cost them 8%. That’d be insane. People also get confused about presidential primaries. There are a lot of reasons to run for president, and only one of those reasons is to become president. Some candidates are running for president. Some are running for vice-president. Some are running for Secretary of State. Some are running to sell books. Some are trying to get jobs on Fox News.

This is as true on the legislative side as it is on the electoral side. When the leaders of a party put a particular bill on the floor, their motivations are probably some combination of policy politics, internal party politics, personal politics, interest group politics, electoral politics, fundraising politics, long-term politics, and God knows what else. When you choose to criticize their decisions on one of these dimensions and promote an alternative strategy, you are often wrong because you aren’t correct about the actual goal. I’ve surely been critical of Pelosi’s decision in 2010 to put that climate change bill on the floor of the House, but I was mostly coming at that with an assumption it was a mistake given an electoral or party politics goal. But I really have no idea what Pelosi was thinking, and she may very well hae maximized some other utility schedule.

What this teaches you is to be modest in your criticisms of political strategy. If you don’t know the goals—and in many cases you simply can’t—it’s a fool’s errand to judge the decisions being made. This alone can make you a much better political analyst on Twitter. Just stop criticizing strategy when the goal of the strategic actor isn’t clear.

2. I appreciate the limitations of an incomplete-information environment. Almost all good card games are built on an incomplete-information structure. The players have private information that shapes their decisions, and a key skill in any of these games is to accurately estimate as precisely as possible the private information of the other players. Now and again in Bridge or poker you can use information you glean early in the hand to build a complete picture of the deal or perfectly read on opponent’s cards, but that’s unusual. Most of the time, you just have to come up with probabilistic estimates of where missing cards are located or a range of hands that an oppponent is holding. But you’ll never really know. So you make the best decisions and judgements you can based on the information you have.

This comes in handy in political analysis, particularly as an outsider trying to observe and understand things. So much crucial information in politics is private. Just realizing you should *start* from that assumption can make a big difference in how you perceive political events and evaluate political actors and their strategies. One place this comes up over and over again is with congressional Republicans and Trump. I see people every day online and in Washington whose main criticism of the GOP is that they aren’t doing enough to reel in the excesses of the president. But we only see the public side. Partisans aren’t in the business of publicly embarrassing their own leaders. Senators who publicly hold hostage nominations or bills are generally using their last-resort leverage, after private bargaining, negotiating, and compromising have failed. Why won’t the GOP Republicans do more to reign in the president? My guess is that their private communications with him have significantly reigned him in, across policy and investigative dimensions.

4. I know that random chance plays a large role in political outcomes. A deck of cards is close to a perfect randomizing device, and virtually all card games use it to create a fixed uncertainty that can affect the outcome. Even games that don’t—like duplicate Bridge—still generally have psuedo-random exogenous unknowns that the players themselves have little control over. The trick in card games is to embrace the randomness of the deck and become completely zen about it. All you can do is play the cards that you are dealt as best as you can play them, and not try to control things you can’t control.  Your job is simply to make the best decisions you can at each decision-point. If you do that, you will maximize your probability of winning. But you won’t guarantee it. Heck, in games played for money, you don’t want to guarantee it. If there was no luck, inferior players would quickly stop playing; it would become as obvious as it is in golf who is the better player.

Likewise, you can’t put a lot of stock in the results of an individual Bridge deal or a hand of poker if you are trying to evaluate your strategy. Such results-oriented thinking is devastating, precisely because the signal is so noisy. If you go about changing your strategy based on the outcome of each deal, you’ll be hopelessly lost in no time. The only way to evaluate card play is to break it down into individual decisions, assume he randomness of the deck, and evaluate each decision based on the know information at the time and across the probabilistic nature of the random deck. If you begin to associate outcome success with strategy success, you will at best be operating sub-optimally, and will often be heading dangerously down a negative-utility path.

This general idea is a core concept for both political practitioners and observers. There are lots of things that a political actor, for all intents and purposes, can’t control. The economic health of the country. The actions of foreign leaders. Natural disasters. All of these things can affect political outcomes, and all of them are best thought of as the randomness of the deck. Smart political actors focus on the strategic choices that are available to them, and approach those choices as individual decisions that have marginal effects on outcomes. Too often, people reach for monocausal explanations of political results. That’s nuts. Elections are bivariate outcomes that reflect the sum of a multitude of strategic choices and a good amount of random chance. To draw conclusions about the quality or effectiveness of a campaign based on it’s bivariate result just dumb. But there’s just so much results-oriented thinking in politics; every winning campaign is the height of technological and organizational sophistication, every losing campaign is a total shitshow and a comedy of errors. It’s all bullshit retrospective evaluation. The Clinton campaign probably wasn’t terrible; the Obama ’08 campaign probably wasn’t brilliant. And if they were, it wasn’t proven by the outcome.

5. I accept the players for who they are. There’s a type of ok-but-not-great cardplayer who is constantly berating other players for not playing their cards well, which in turn is causing the ok-but-not-great player to lose.  But there’s a dirty little secret to card games: you can’t choose how the other players play. All you can do is accept how they play and adjust your own strategy to maximize your utility against these players. This can reach the height of folly when you are playing poker or other card games for money. Certain mediocre players just can’t stand it that other players are playing “terribly,” winning, and causing them to lose. Logically, you want players to play terribly against you; if you can accept the randomness of the deck, there’s no better spot to be in once you figure out they are awful and correctly adjust your strategy. But for whatever reason—financial or ego or whatever—a lot of players hate when opponents play poorly and win.  A good cardplayer simply builds the opponents into the game; they are in effect part of the rules that create your strategic incentives. Getting angry at them is not only folly, but counterproductive; they only way they can beat you in the long run is by getting *you* to play badly.

This translates into a simple political truth: you can’t choose the voters. I am constantly amazed at the number of people who refuse to accept that voters are allowed to create their own utility schedule for which candidates they like. Liberals tie themselves into absolute knots because some voters in Kansas have a preference schedule that priorities a pro-life position over a economic redistribution that would improve their material conditions. How can it be! There are at least two nasty consequences to this. First and foremost, people simply disbelieve and project their own preferences onto voters, distorting their view of reality and weakening their strategies. Second, people tend to get angry at “the voters” and begin to flirt with darkly elitists theories of politics that end up being quite anti-democratic. You see this constantly from partisans who lose a bunch of federal elections in a row. They begin to blame the voters, or shift to an “if that’s what they want, they deserve what they get” attitude. That’s basically worthless, assuming you can’t actually destroy the democracy to save it. Most political actors and observers in America have a basic committment to a democratic system; the voters are not going away. As such, getting angry at them doesn’t really accomplish anything positive. Instead, you should use election results and voter preferences as signals for improving your own strategies and political evaluations.

6. I prioritize the mundane over the spectacular. There’s a popular myth that being great at card games is about making spectacular plays. Finding hard-to-see squeezes in Bridge or making incredible hero-calls for all the money in poker. Those things are nice, but they aren’t what makes a great cardplayer. Great cardplayers consistently make better decisions in the routine choices that come up over and over again, minute after minute, hour after hour, without error. For every time you might need to find a squeeze to make a Bridge contract, there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of little decisions that provide an edge against an inferior player. Just having a solid pre-flop strategy in hold’em is worth far, far more than an uncanny ability to read an opponent and be able to correctly fold the second nuts on the river in a huge spot. And the skills that go into developing this sort of mundane ability aren’t superhuman, most of it is actually quite pedestrian: discipline, focus, and practice. People want winning cardplay to be about romantic figures with superhuman talent for remember cards and making absurdly amazing negative inferences about missing information. But it’s almost never actually about that.

In politics, people vastly overestimate the spectacular. Everything is built-up as confrontations between individual titans. But most of the time, what is consequential in politics are fundamentals and shoe-leather. In presidential general elections, there’s a fair case to be made that almost nothing that happens in the campaigns matters much at all. Partisan allegiance drives most of the voters, and the economic fundamentals predicts most of the rest, and there you go.  All the gaffes and scandals and debates and ads and news cycle drama really doesn’t amount to much. The campaigns might matter, but most of the time they are both so well-funded and organized that they tend to just cancel each other out. At the local level, campaign effects might matter more, but everyone still wants to think the great upsets in congressional House races were secured via devastating one-liners in debates. Most of the time someone just outworked someone else. There’s nothing sexy about knocking on 50,000 doors, but it’s as close to a silver bullet as exists for purposeful action that might unseat an incumbent.

The same is true in legislative politics. It’s mostly just hard work. There really aren’t many secrets. You just work like hell to get co-sponsors on your bill and interest groups lined up behind it and press your case to the leadership and deflect all their objections and pray someone in the Senate doesn’t hate it and hopefully it gets the go-ahead from the committee chair and gets on the suspension calendar and finds a ride to the president’s desk and gets signed. Even the high profile stuff that is made via huge deals isn’t magical bargaining in smoke filled rooms between incredible wheelers and dealers who use their wizard power to extract huge concessions. It’s mostly just staff staying up late at night sending emails and eating cold pizza and trying to get everyone on board so they can go home with something their boss can claim is victory. Shoe-leather.

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If you enjoyed reading this, a lot of it is derived from times I’ve been a guest on the ThinkingPoker podcast, in particular Episode 191 (before 2016 election), Episode 195 (after 2016 election), Episode 2017 (June 2017) Episode 235 (late Fall 2017).