Phil Gordon has made more than a few appearances on this blog, most of them concerning his skills as a jack-of-all-poker-trades: he’s a champion player, author, teacher, ringleader, analyst, and entrepreneur.
He hasn’t always applied his smarts to cards: a former computer programmer, he started out working at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company on artificial intelligence projects; he also sold a tech startup for a lot of money. He is so smart, or maybe it’s just that he’s so damn tall, that he persuaded Levitt and me to invest in a new startup he’s running. (This is what is known as full disclosure.)
He also likes Rock-Paper-Scissors a lot, and also fighting cancer.
Most important, he has agreed to take your questions here at Freakonomics.com, so fire away. As with past Q&A’s, we’ll let the questioning run for a couple of days and then publish his answers a few days later. Many thanks to Phil and to all of you for your kind, considerate, and heartfelt questions. And the inevitably snarky ones too.
Addendum: The answers to this Q&A can be found here.
and 
. You can also watch it on 
How does one get the discipline to be a top poker player?
Is the picture of you that is posted on this blog photoshopped?
What percent of your success would you say is attributable to randomness?
How do math and psychology cross in poker? For example, if the book says a this hand is a loser 60% of the time, how would this change if you know your opponent likes to raise with weak hands at this point, and if you suspect he is bluffing in this instance.
How did you go about developing your poker face so that other’s couldn’t read your unintentional body language?
I have been thinking about writing a simulation program that could be used with online playing for a final project in a class, and also for my own interest, that uses statistics to decides whether or not to play a hand and also uses a random bluffing factor. I am sure that I am not the first person to think of this. So what I want to know is, where have other people found problems when trying to attempt this? Has anyone, that you know of, been successful? Would it be unethical to use it?
1) How do you explain the phenomenal increase in the popularity of poker recently? (Or is it merely an increase in the visibility of the game, and the popularity is actually stable?)
2) Do you agree that “sunglasses is to poker” as “steroids is to baseball”? If being able to bluff is so important, isn’t hiding behind dark glasses pretty much the same as a baseball player amping up on steroids to be able to hit harder or throw faster/farther?
No-Limit Holdem has seen a dramatic increase in play and popularity, due most likely to a combination of televised poker and internet poker. What sort of push would be needed to get pot-limit omaha the same exposure and popularity? (Within the US) Or are the fundamental issues in the game which restrict it from being more popular?