Roy Brindley, Degenerate Gambler

I promised to introduce you to some of the more interesting characters who wander through my world. Here’s one. I don’t know him personally, just through his autobiography — but I have known one or two of his soul-mates. This essay was first published in Poker, Life and Other Confusing Things which will soon be out in print form and, until then, can be downloaded from Amazon by chlicking here.

Roy Brindley has written his autobiography, Life’s a Gamble. It’s a book about life – with a little poker tossed in along with booze, broads, dogs, racing, a couple of bouts of “where the fuck am I?” and of course, a dollop of redemption when our hero discovers that his totally bat shit crazy life style just happens to work at the poker tables. We like to say stuff like, “Hey, man, poker is life.” Right? Right!

Brindley is a gambler, as the title tells you. He is a sick, demented, compulsive, self-destructive gambler with a deep streak of insecurity, an almost pitiable desire to be loved and accepted, a crazy longing for what he thinks is the “good life,” the “cash in pocket” life style: fast cars, big houses, booze, women and it’s all wrapped up in an ego the size of Ireland, which is where he now lives with the loyal Meg, their two children and a Ferrari with a blown engine and maybe, just maybe, the life he thinks he wants. Who knows? I, for one, wouldn’t put much loose change on his future. But I am rooting for him. He’s now got a contract with a major management firm, is sponsored by Ladbrokes, and does sports commentary on the BBC. But you can’t shake the sound of hoof beats in the distance….

Brindley gives us an insightful, sometimes painful tale of a working-class bloke from Southampton struggling: an unloved child in a family of emotionally distant compulsive gamblers, a reasonably successful greyhound trainer who blows it all on various hopeless bets, a life dropout living rough, begging on street corners with a cardboard box as his home and, 300 pages later, a successful poker pro with over a million dollars won in tournament and live play.

Brindley’s a compulsive gambler, of this there is no doubt. He knows it and you will too. But, as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the real problem isn’t gambling in any simple way. It’s losing. And as he loses he dreams, romanticizing about the big one, the “life-changer” of a win that will fulfill the fantasy.

Back in the ‘80’s Howard Sartin developed the ‘pace’ method for handicapping racehorses. Sartin was a psychotherapist who, frustrated over his lack of success treating problem gamblers, decided instead to teach them to win. The pace handicapping he claimed to have developed with some of his patients revolutionized the game. Sartin became something of a legend among horse players (count me among them). He was the first to break a race down into segments and to analyze the amount of energy a horse exerted in each. His major contribution was to point out that closers don’t really “close” – they merely slow down less than the horses in front of them. This might not seem important but if you bet the ponies you better understand the implications. His clientele, now playing with positive EV, were “cured.”

And so it was with Brindley. Poker took a pathetic loser betting the dogs, horses and sports and made him a winner. He is now in his forties, has his family and considerable wealth, but the reader knows that he could, in a New York minute, succumb to that irresistible tug to unwrap his bankroll and mix it up.

 ‘Roy the Boy,’ (his poker moniker) is another of those mugs in this game who pull me in. I just can’t resist a quick analysis of him – any more than he can pass a bookmaker without tossing a couple of quid on a nag at Epsom. At the core, Brindley seems to be a deeply sensitive fellow, albeit a rather fragile one. He is also ingenuous and open about his failings and honest about them to a fault, a tendency that often has unhappy consequences. He is so emotionally vulnerable that sessions of poor play, tournaments that end short of his goals (and hopes) can totally derail him, shake his confidence and wreck his game. He lets remarks that are simply one-offs from frustration get to him. A cavalier remark from Howard Lederer denigrating his play sets him off in a spiral of angst and depression. Simply getting needled by opponents in Vegas, a tactic designed to put players off their game, does just that.

There are cultural elements Brindley doesn’t seem to recognize. He learned the game in Europe where decorum rules, where even talking at the table is frowned on and he despairs over boorish Americans. But then, while doing poker commentary for British TV, he insensitively makes religious and ethnic slurs. He also ends up good friends with Tony Guoga (aka ‘Tony G’), one of poker’s most notorious trash talkers.

For someone who spent so much of his life in betting shops, at race tracks, casinos and poker rooms, he can be astonishing naïve. At Binion’s for the WSOP he spots a single-deck blackjack table, a card-counter’s wet dream. He starts betting $2 a hand, wins consistently, boosts his bets way up and then is astonished and appalled when he gets that fatal tap on the shoulder from a large gentleman telling him his action is no longer welcome. How this can be a surprise to someone who developed his own card counting system (apparently never having read or even heard of Thorpe, Uston or Snyder[1]) and was so successful that he got barred from every casino in England is beyond me.

He is also proud that he has survived this life without ever doing drugs. He seems not to realize that alcohol is a drug. He drinks copiously, explaining in a painfully defensive way that he likes to drink while playing poker, especially tournaments, because it calms him and allows him to focus. The tale of winning a tournament so plastered that he couldn’t make out the cards and then passed out leaving the loyal Meg to bag up the prize money should be a warning. It appears not to be.

He ends upbeat, believing he has vanquished his demons, mended his ways, overcome his insecurities and doubts. One can only hope….

A note: The book is written for a British audience. The old line rings true about the US and the UK: “two great lands separated by a common language.” Many passages will be cryptic to a North American reader and many words will be strange. But that’s okay. Just plow through; they’ll start feeling familiar after a while. You might wanta ‘ave a couple o britneys to help you work yer way t’rough the bits and bobs, then Bob’s your uncle.

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[1] Three of the legends of the world of the professional blackjack player. Thorpe was a mathematician who first worked out the statistical properties of the game that made card counting possible. Uston was a former stock market executive who developed some of the more intriguing ways of staying under the radar of casino bosses who were looking to quash the counters. Snyder developed some of the more sophisticated counting techniques and championed subtle strategy-shifts that they entailed. Snyder has, more recently, become active in the poker world.

Homeopathy, quackery and the CAM movement

I’ve a friend, let us call her Shelia, who is a homeopathic practitioner. We agree on much, but not this. Homeopathy is quackery, pure and simple. It’s based on the utterly moronic notion that a substance that has been dissolved in water leaves behind a “trace” or a “memory” of its presence even after the water has been diluted to the point where no residue of the original substance remains.

The theory, developed originally in the late 1790s by Samuel Hahnemann, assumed that “like cures like” — or that a substance known to cause a disease in the healthy will cure it in one suffering from it. So, he hypothesized, the cure is the diluted essence of the compound originally believed to have caused the disorder. Wikipedia has a nice entry on it.

Shelia worries that I do not fully grasp the important role that homeopathy has in maintaining the well-being and health of the people of the world. She wonders, from time to time, if I have read the literature, seen the latest studies, appreciated the supportive data base. She wondered, just the other day when we were working on a local project that we both support, whether I really had an open mind?

That triggered an extended trail of thoughts which I decided to share with whothehellever reads these bloggy barfs of mine.

Of course I have an open mind. You can’t be a good scientist without one. I am/was a very good scientist with all kinds of sciency-cred to back it up. But, as every good scientist learns early on, there’s a trick you need to learn: the mind cannot be totally open or all manner of useless shit drifts in. You need to put some filters in place.

So, with all those filters engaged, here’s the bottom line:

I. Homeopathy cannot work. It is biologically, biochemically, biophysically and psychoneurologically impossible. An inert substance cannot have a causal impact on biological function. There is no such thing as a “memory” of a removed substance. Distilled water is just distilled water — after you’ve distilled out everything else.

II. So, there can be no reliable, replicable study (or studies) that show a therapeutic effect over and above that of any number of placebo effects. Any study that shows a clinically effective outcome for a homeopathic procedure must be contaminated by any of a score of different methodological flaws. I could go on about this topic for hours … days…. I used to teach this stuff.

III. This obvious truth, of course, doesn’t mean that homeopathy doesn’t “work.” It does but its value is derived wholly from its placebo effects which are very strong. I’m making this point as clearly as possible. The “working” part must be partialled out between the supposed effects of the homeopathic compounds and the known effects of placebos. It practically never is — and when it is, the effect size of the homeopathic variable approaches zero.

IV. This also doesn’t mean that there won’t be occasional findings that suggest that homeopathy has a greater clinical impact than genuine pharmaceuticals. But such a finding only shows that the drugs currently in use are, themselves, ineffective and, because they often have side effects (which are impossible with homeopathic compounds), they fail against placebos.

In short, no compelling scientific evidence for a clinical effect of any homeopathic remedy can possibly exist beyond that of a placebo. It would be the scientific equivalent of data that showed that pigs could fly or faster than light propulsion was possible or that precognition was real (and, yes, Daryl Bem, a well-known psychologist at Cornell published a study showing just this — it was quickly shown to have been methodologically flawed and, of course, all efforts to replicate failed). 

So, my beef with homeopathy isn’t with the fact that you won’t find evidence of clinical data that suggest that it can have a positive clinical effect — it is that homeopaths don’t grasp that it isn’t the remedy that’s doing the job. It’s the powerful psychological impact of the compound, the “bedside manner” of the homeopath and, importantly, that the practitioner is a firm believer whose convictions are picked up by the client.

Placebo effects are so strong that recent studies have shown that they work even when the participants in the study know that they are taking a placebo!

It’s a lot like psychoanalysis. It too doesn’t work despite the fact that many clients in psychoanalysis show improvements over time. The reasons they do are numerous but have nothing to do with the clinical effectiveness of psychoanalysis. It took decades of research to show this and many devoted psychoanalysts still don’t get it.

Clinical psychology and psychiatry are now driven by “evidence-based” therapies and psychoanalysis ain’t one of ‘em. Modern medicine is, likewise, driven by evidence-based procedures and homeopathy ain’t one of ‘em.

Now, the next important question is: Is homeopathy dangerous? Generally speaking, no. Most minor disorders cure themselves over time and it can be comforting for a homeopath to provide counselling and advice. A lot of people with minor psychological problems (mild depression, stress from life’s travails) go to astrologers who actually play a role here. Lots of folks couldn’t handle the stigma of seeing a psychotherapist (and many communities ostracize those who do) but their neighbors all think seeing an astrologer is fine — and a good astrologer, like a good Tarot card reader or a careful, caring naturopath or homeopath is really doing “baby” psychotherapy.

But it can be devastating in cases where serious illness is present and needs proper medical attention. My friend Shelia is a reasonable, if somewhat gullible, soul and she pays attention to these things. She’s careful (well, as careful as someone not trained in medicine can be) to refer people to real physicians if she suspects a serious underlying problem. But not all homeopathic practitioners do this. There are far too many instances of outright quackery and too many making false promises and far, far too many setting up phony clinics and unscrupulous alternative “medical” centers.

This is where the serious problems come in.

Is my mind open? Sure. Stating that homeopathy can’t work doesn’t mean a closed mind any more than stating that pigs can’t fly does.

And citing a new study that shows a positive effect of homeopathy would have as much impact on me as the one on precognition Daryl Bem published in, I might add, one of my field’s most prestigious journals. When it can’t be true, it can’t be true. Claiming that one is closed-minded is just silly.

If the proposed remedy for suffering has a legitimate, possible foundation for actually working then the classic scientist, the one with the classic “open mind” will, in fact, be open. The recent movement to acknowledge the powerful therapeutic effects of mindfulness (and other forms of) meditation is an excellent example. These approaches, once thought to be on the margins of medicine and psychotherapy have, by virtue of careful and replicated scientific study and a solid neurocognitive theory, become an accepted part of modern psychology.

But this little sideshow on homeopathy is really just a minor affair. There’s a much deeper, better funded, more connected movement here. It’s the so-called “CAM” or “complimentary alternative medicine” program. It’s touted as being an “alternate” form of medical treatment that “compliments” traditional, evidence-based medical practice.

It’s a monstrous, expensive and intellectually dishonest fraud. I’ll save my diatribe against it for another day. It’ll take far too long and this entry is long enough.

In passing, let me note that I sent this blog entry to Shelia before posting it. I wanted to give her a chance to respond. I expected her to do so. Nothing…. Sad. I guess her mind isn’t so open.

Or, more likely, recognizing that what she’s made her life’s work and her primary source of income is a sham is something that she just can’t deal with. I understand. In fact, I wish I never sent it to her. Like I said, I do like her. She’s a good person, just like me.

A Thought on Ferguson

Riots erupted across the country over the decision not to indict Darren Wilson, the officer who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO. Arguments about whether Brown charged him or fled or whether the shots were in self-defense or unprovoked are, when you pull away all the layers of obfuscation, irrelevant.

The real issue is that young black men are targets wherever they go. They are harassed, stopped, frisked, interrogated, arrested, framed and killed in numbers wholly out of proportion to their representation in the population.

This fact, simple and bold, is where the problem lies. We saw it in the Zimmerman case; we’re seeing it here. Anyone who wants to take an hour or two out and surf the Internet can find scores of other cases.

We need to stop splitting hairs over what are essentially meaningless details and focus on the deeper issues.

Exploding Brains

My brain did, indeed, finally explode — well, metaphorically speaking. As reported today, the Republicans in the House filed a formal suit against President Obama for abuse of executive power.

Now, given the dust-up over immigration or the nonsense over the XL pipeline you might think this is where the GOP’s annoyance would be focused.

Nope, it was at the ACA or “Obamacare.”

Now, given the fact that no Republican in the House voted for the ACA and that they have introduced bills to repeal it over fifty times and that they have, using various surrogates, initiated dozens of law suits in Federal courts to have it overturned that this suit would be in the same vein.

But you’d be wrong.

It was filed because, they have argued, President Obama used executive orders in a manner that exceeded his constitutional authority to:

(a) extend the time period that companies had to come into compliance with the act and,

(b) set aside funds to subsidize insurance companies which are caught in a bind during the run-up period to full implementation of the ACA.

In short, they are suing the president for not implementing  rapidly enough the very act they’ve spent the last five years railing against and trying to undo!

Boom.

Net Neutrality: Liars and Hypocrites

Why does this keep happening? Why do Republicans always make the wrong choice? Why do they deliberately misrepresent the truth? Do they now own the trademark on “hypocrisy?”

Ted Cruz recently took a swipe at net neutrality that was classic. He compared it with Obamacare — as though it was a government bill designed to impose controls on the Internet. The gambit is classic: make it look like it’s something that (“hated”) governments do and that, by opposing it he is, somehow, allowing us to remain free of unnecessary regulations.

Now either Cruz is a total idiot or he is assuming that voters are — and we know the answer to that one.

The Affordable Care Act was, as many have noted, a piece of legislation designed to fix health care problems. Yes, it imposed some governmental controls and regulations. Cruz may hate that but over time everyone else is coming to like it for one blindingly simple reason: it’s working.

But drawing this parallel with net neutrality is bizarre. Net neutrality is what we now have! There’s nothing to fix, nothing’s broken. Opposing it means bringing government into the picture. Net neutrality isn’t a piece of legislation. It’s the lack of legislation.

If Cruz had even a dollop of honest belief in conservative, small government principles, he’d be a banner-waving net neutrality cheer leader. Net neutrality means what it says. The net stays neutral. Everyone gets the same services. Businesses that use the Internet rise and fall based on their business models. Smart, effective business practice is rewarded, not-so-smart is not. Everyone gets treated the same. It’s Cruz’s vaunted populism.

Abandoning net neutrality means that the government comes in and imposes regulations and sets usage patterns. It takes away from the free market system currently operating. It is everything that Cruz rails against on a nearly daily basis. How can he take this position?

Well, you can guess. First, Obama favors net neutrality so he’s against it — Cruz and company have this knee-jerk reaction. It gets him brownie points with his base. But there’s more here.

We need to ask, who benefits from abandoning net neutrality? The big communications companies and the big corporations. Abandoning the neutral net means that Internet providers can charge differential rates to their customers. If you pay a higher premium for using say, Comcast’s services, your messages get priority. They go out first and faster. Those paying a lower rate become, literally, second-class clients. So who do you think has the cash to pay for the high-end services? Could it be the folks who also have the wherewithal to bankroll Cruz’s campaigns, who shovel corporate cash to corporate-friendly Republicans? So much for the level playing field. So much for all that talk about helping small businesses.

Kind of pisses you off just thinking about this doesn’t it? Sure got my knickers in a twist ‘cause I’m a very small player but I do love my fast Internet connectivity. I also cannot abide Ted Cruz’s hypocrisy.