Card games have transcended the divides of class and culture for centuries. In my family, this timeless hobby serves as an essential experience at any large gathering. Different games have been taught and passed on from generation to generation. I started my journey with my grandma trouncing me in Pinochle, and I plan to carry on this tradition with my own grandchildren. 

Though games like BS, Setback, and more all hold a special place in my heart, a friendly, low-stakes tournament of Texas Hold’em is my family’s game-of-choice. To summarize, Texas Hold’em is a poker game where each player is dealt two pocket cards to begin with. The players then place their initial bets or choose to fold and exit the hand. After these bets, three shared community cards are flipped, followed by another round of betting and folding, and this sequence repeats twice with only one card being flipped in the next rounds. This leaves five community cards on the board at the end with one more round of betting and folding for the remaining players. The player with the best hand when combining the board and their two pocket cards wins the pot. 

At this point, you may be wondering why I am explaining the fundamental rules of a game that serves as a destructive vice for millions of people across the globe. The reason is that I believe poker games can build upon necessary skills for success in everyday life, even as a lawyer.

I feel like I need to preface this by saying that I do not think practicing as an attorney is the same thing as gambling (although many people have problems with each for varying reasons). I did not grow up playing cards and suddenly have an epiphany that a knack for these games would make me a good lawyer. I do believe, however, that certain principles hold true for each discipline. It also goes without saying that I am using the term “discipline” in its broadest sense.

First, a player’s cards and the cards on the board are strictly matters of chance in Texas Hold’em. The only way players can differentiate themselves over the course of a game is through their placement of bets and their response to others doing the same. Winners and losers are seldom determined by luck or order, but rather by the way hands are played. Some know how to win large pots in ways that others cannot. Certain strategies offer a path to victory within the strict confines of the rules. Similarly, attorneys cannot always choose the facts of their case or even their clients. They might have a situation that works heavily in their favor or they might know that their chances of meeting a client’s lofty goals are slim. However, they can decide which cards and arguments to play, when to fold and settle, or when to bet big and earn maximum value for their clients.

Texas Hold’em and law also share the unique and complicated element of human-decision making. When I first started playing poker, I figured that I could just memorize some formulas of when and how much to bet or when to fold, and this would mean that I would finish the game on top. Any confidence I had in a strictly formulaic approach was quickly shattered when I saw myself losing to much worse hands. The deception of others and the overpowering biases we all share as a species make these efforts completely useless. Even if I could calculate my exact odds of holding a winning hand, it is impossible to fit human behavior into a neat equation. Poker is a human game, and I tried to play like a machine. 

For better or worse, the legal system shares similar attributes. Lawyers understand that winning at trial or negotiating a deal requires so much more than working with the blackletter law. Trial attorneys must master storytelling and perfectly frame details for a jury or judge to portray their client favorably. Deal teams can gain a leg up on counterparty counsel by utilizing cognitive biases, such as the anchor effect. When starting a negotiation by demanding above and beyond what the terms of a contract will actually specify, attorneys can fully meet their clients’ desires in a way that will feel like a bargain to the other lawyers. No good card player relies solely on numbers, just as no successful lawyer limits their arguments or techniques to a formal analysis of the law.

Obviously, professional poker players and career attorneys live very different lives and engage in very different “work.” Even so, it is no coincidence that in the film Rounders, Mike McDermott (Matt Damon) begins as a law student and finishes by beating Teddy KGB (John Malkovich) in an underground game of Texas Hold’em. The legal world cannot be reduced to a card game like in movies, but we can still appreciate that both require valuable skills like precision, adaptability, and a deep understanding of human behavior.

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Joe Monti is a first-year student at BC Law. Contact him at montij@bc.edu.