On card games and shutdowns
The bias against passivity and the problem of tilt, in bridge and party politics
Dear Friends,
People always bristle when I say this, but politics is a game. Not in the sense that it is unimportant—of course it’s more important than parlor-room Monopoly— but in the sense that it is a group activity where players have competing goals and get to choose strategies in order to try to achieve those goals, all bounded by a set of rules under which they operate.
It’s much more complicated than any board game or card game, and neither the rules nor goals of the players are quite as clear or fixed, but many of the principles of good card play carry over and become solid advice in both analyzing and practicing group public decision-making.
I continue to believe that it would be a big mistake for the Democrats to force a government shutdown as a strategic political move. Some smart political observers agree with me. Many other smart political observers see it differently.
And I could totally be wrong.
But after surveying many of the pro-shutdown arguments, I have detected two dynamics that are very reminiscent of some of the analytic biases that plague people at the card table.
Which, surprisingly, when taken together might actually make the case for a shutdown stronger.
Bias #1: People hate giving up, even when it’s best
The first strategic rule of any game is that when you have a choice, choose the option that yields the highest expected value, in whatever metric you are measuring it. That might be money in poker or bridge, points in football or basketball, or just the highest forward-going probability of winning a game of Clue or Chess. Maximize your utility.
It’s tougher in politics, because except in very limited circumstances (a general election campaign where you either win or lose), your goals won’t be as black and white as in, say, poker. Legislative strategy, for example, includes considerations across time and space and hundreds of potential allies and opponents. The game tree explodes almost instantly. But you still think about your strategy as it relates to your goals, however you define them.
People aren’t so terrible at this when there are good options and bad options. They tend to choose from the good, plus EV, options. Maybe not the best option, but they can usually avoid the obviously bad ones.
Where a lot of people get twisted up is when they have no good options. When all the choices are negative. They don’t like to think about the choice. They try to make a decision quickly. They get emotional, and sometimes just go off the rails. In any case, the quality of their decision-making becomes much worse.
But it’s an incredibly important skill in any game to still be able to choose the least-worst option when every option stinks. When all your choices are bad, there is often still a clear best choice, and there is always one that maximizes your expected value. It sucks when you estimate you will lose $20 making choice A and $50 making choice B, but choice A is still $30 better, and going with choice B is still a huge mistake.
This happens all the time in poker. Dozens of times a night if you are playing a recreational home game. People get to the river card, they are facing a bet and there’s a lot of money in the pot, and they know they are beat. But instead of folding—the least-worst option, with an EV of zero—they throw away another stack of chips calling, even when it’s obviously a -EV play. Half the time you can see it on their faces as they toss the chips in.1
I’m convinced a lot of recreational players (and even some better players) do this because they can’t stand the passive, surrender nature of folding. It feels like giving up. Especially on the river, when you’ve played the whole hand and it’s going to end momentarily anyway if you just persevere. But you don’t have to be Sun Tzu to understand that knowing when to fight is as important as your ability to fight.
And people also really don’t like to be hoodwinked at the poker table; they want to be certain they weren’t bluffed. So they tell themselves all sorts of things like “there’s some chance he’s bluffing here” when there’s really close to zero chance. But they really just want to know for sure. Even when everyone knows that most amateur players don’t bluff nearly enough to make calling them with bluff catchers profitable in the long run.
All of this is even more plainly obvious in Bridge. You will often get to a spot in the bidding where the opponents have bid, say, 4 ♠️ (saying they will win 10 tricks if spades are trumps and they declare the hand), and it’s pretty obvious they are going to succeed if you let the bidding end there. So you have to decide if you want to take a sacrifice by bidding more, perhaps 5♦️(saying you will win 11 tricks with diamonds trump if you declare the hand), knowing you are not going to successfully make your bid, but hoping that the penalty you pay for missing your bid is less than what they would have gotten for making 4 ♠️.
You are explicitly looking to choose the least-worst option from a bunch of -EV plays, and good bridge bidding is built on sound decision-making in this spot.
For example, if you are playing for 10 cents/point, letting them play 4 ♠️ and make it will cost you $42.2 If you bid 5 diamonds and only fall 1 trick short, it will only cost you $20.3 But if you fall 2 tricks short it will cost you $50, and 3 tricks short will cost you $80. So obviously smart play is to bid 5♦️ if you think you are only going down 1 if you play 5♦️, but let them play 4♠️ if you think you are going down 2 or more in diamonds.4
Put yourself in North’s shoes and think about what you would do. A lot of average players (ahem) overbid this spot. They don’t like the idea of being pushed around at the table, and they hate surrendering the hand when they know they are going to lose points/money. And it just plain feels better to take the aggressive action rather than sit there and defend. Even when a sober analysis may point to it being a complete disaster, like here.
And so they bid on, and they lose $80 on the hand, because the passive least-worst option just didn’t sit well with them.
This is where I think a lot of Democrats are right now. They know in some sense that a government shutdown is probably a losing play that certainly won’t get Trump and the GOP to capitulate on the executive spending encroachments or his general lawlessness. But they feel like they have to do something. Doing nothing and negotiating another appropriations “deal” they know is going to be undermined by rescissions, pseduo-impoundments, and actual impoundments just feels like giving up and surrendering. And with a plausible option sitting right there—shut down the government!—they are going to be left wondering down the road why they just didn’t try something. I mean, it has to be better than this, right?
Bias #2: People go on tilt
One reality of card games and politics is that not everyone acts fully rationally all the time. I know, breaking news.
When people are playing card games for money or even just pride, this often is a consequence of tilt, which is a general term for players losing their emotional control, and making decisions not based on sober analysis but instead out of anger or vengeance or anguish or frustration. In poker and bridge, it often manifests itself as playing too aggressively, trying to win pots or bidding auctions in an attempt to get lost money back immediately.
It’s one of the most dangerous leaks you can have in your game. A player whose game is an A when playing well but a D- when on tilt is almost certainly worse than a steady B player, if they are at all prone to fits of tilt. Poker isn’t a team game, so another player goin on tilt at the table is usually a financially lucrative opportunity for you.
But Bridge is a partnership game.
So circling back to our Bridge example form above, all of a sudden there’s a meta-issue to the bidding dilemma, precisely because it’s a partnership game. Even if you realize as North that the passive option is the least-worst strategy, what if your partner disagrees with your decision to pass and let the opponents play 4 ♠️?
And now the hand ends and it has cost you a combined $42. But your partner pissed at you—he’s incorrectly claiming 5♦️ would have been an better outcome for your side—and you try to tell him that’s wrong (because it is) but he doesn’t want to listen. Two hands later, after he butchers an easy hand, you realized he’s on tilt—playing totally emotionally rather than rationally—and things are about to really go off the rails. And you’ve got an hour left in this match and there’s no telling how much money he is going to throw away for you.
All of a sudden, bidding 5♦️ looks like it might have actually saved you money, because even though it was objectively worse than just passively letting them play 4 ♠️, you didn’t realize what it was going to do to your partner. The narrow card game analysis said the least-worst option was letting them play the spades. But the narrow card game analysis forgot this is a repeated, partnership game.
Knowing what you know now, your choice wasn’t really about whether playing 5♦️ is better than letting them play 4 ♠️; it also had to consider what happens to your partnership when you don’t make the sacrifice bid.
Every bridge player knows that a solid partnership is a key to winning at the game; nothing undermines the results like partners who don’t trust each other and who hold grudges about mistakes. But every bridge player also knows that’s an aspiration, and frustrations inevitably set in, even in the best partnerships. Partners screaming at each other in frustration after the hand—or even coming to blows—is literally the most stereotypical bridge phenomena.
Perhaps incredibly, this might be the best strategic argument in favor of the Democrats causing a shutdown. Even if it is objectively worse than doing nothing in the narrow sense, not shutting down the government might so depress the portion of the party that wants the shutdown that it is going to rupture the coalition and create the kind of internal fight that will ultimately leave the party worse off in the 2026 election.
This is an argument explicitly being made by a number of pro-shutdown observers. Progressive Dems are restless. They sat on their hands in March when Schumer took the passive strategy in the face of what they perceive as a full-blown crisis which has now gotten worse. If he does it again, there could be a full-on mutiny that sink the Dems next November, or at least ruptures things to an unacceptable level.
Now, I have my doubts about this as a practical matter. No matter how many activist Dems and their left-wing brothers tell me they will abandon the party in 2026 if they don’t start fighting now, I just have a hard time believing it. It seems to me that there are numerous issues that will activate Democrats a year from November, be it ICE raids or Medicaid cuts or tariffs, and the lack of a appropriations shutdown fight will pale in comparison to all of this. I don’t think base enthusiasm is really a core issue that can be altered by Senate leadership strategy right now.
But that’s an empirical question that the pro-shutdown faction and I disagree on, not a theoretical mistake they are making. If you believe the government needs to be shutdown because that’s the only way to bring Trump to heel and end his lawless actions on the spending authority, in my view you aren’t realistically thinking about the plausible goals of a shutdown and the incentives of the players. But if you think a shutdown is the only way to hold the Dem coalition together and therefore the way to maximize seats in the 2026 election, I can’t dispute the framework, even if I disagree in practice.
And while you might ideally like to convince the pro-shutdown faction that the best course of action is doing nothing, they certainly don’t want to hear it. They simply disagree. And they already sat there and ate the surrender served up to them by Schumer back in March, which (from there point-of-view) was a complete disaster. Doing it again will just disillusion them beyond repair.
Which is sort of the point they are making; if you know your partner is going to go off the rails for two hours after you let the opponents play 4 ♠️, all of sudden you need to bid 5♦️, because it has now become the least-worst option, once you take the proper time horizon.
Note that Schumer himself might see this logic more than anyone. After all, he doesn’t have to just worry about the Democratic Party rupturing prior to the 2026 election. He has to concern himself with the Senate Democratic caucus rupturing at any point in the near future, since they could sack him as leader. And that problem seems much more acute to me than a general party rupture. If enough of his Senators believe a shutdown is the right course of action, there’s little he can do but mime a John Boehner shrug and let them have it, if he cares about keeping his job.
You Can Still Screw This Up
Even if you buy into the idea of a strategic shutdown for these coalition reasons—and again, I don’t—none of this tells you how to conduct a shutdown. Like, even if you decide for whatever reason that you need to bid 5♦️, you still have to worry that your partner will pick a stupid line of play as the declarer and go down a lot more than anticipated.
Which might bring the whole thing full circle. Even if going down 2 tricks in 5♦️ (and losing $50) is better than him going on tilt for the next hour, it’s not clear that still holds if he’s going to play it like a total noob and go down 4, costing you $110. Heck, he might go on tilt anyway if that happens. Now you’re in the same partnership spot you could have been had you just passed 4 ♠️, except you’re also out an additional $68.
And if you ask five different pro-shutdown Democrats for how the party should go about it, and you’ll get at least five different answers. Some want to focus on the spending authority and lawlessness. Others want to make it about all that and policy too. Others want to make a specific policy demand, most often the ACA subsidy extension. Some people want to use it to try to kill the filibuster. Jonathan Bernstein wants to split the baby and have a “symbolic” shutdown. I thought Nate Silver’s argument today for tying it to tariffs was intriguing.
But the point is that you still need a plan.
The state of play in DC is now this: Congress is now gone for the week, the House having passed a continuing resolution (CR) that would keep the government open into November, and the Senate having preliminarily rejected it, as well as a Democratic alternative plan.
The House is trying to jam the Senate Democrats by leaving town until after the October 1 deadline—forcing them to either eat the House CR or have the government shut down—and the Senate won’t even be back until Monday, 9/29. It feels like crunch time, but we’re actually still early enough in the brinksmanship that you can’t really trust any of the position-taking.
Senate Democrats are looking to negotiate with the president and GOP Senate leaders, everyone is talking about potential meetings, but nothing is scheduled yet. Even once it does happen, I wouldn’t expect all that much movement until next weekend, and the stiff-spines you are seeing now aren’t a particularly strong predictive signal from either side. As for the House jam-play, it’s far from ironclad; if a different compromise materializes in the Senate, the House will surely come back and eat that.
The alternative plan/demands released by the Democrats is an obvious non-starter, but a good concrete guide to their overall substantive position here: they want an extension of the expiring ACA subsidies, reversal of Medicaid cuts from the Big Beautiful Bill, and a variety of protections against executive spending power encroachments, ranging from barring pocket rescissions to further structuring executive discretion in spending.
I think the ACA subsidies are popular enough and may have eventually have enough GOP Senate support that they become the face-saver prize the Dems get in the avoid-a shutdown scenario. On the other hand, if the GOP doesn’t want/care to settle the ACA issue now, the House CR is clean enough (and has new security funding in it for all three branches of government) that Schumer and the Dems will be really boxed in arguing against it.
Curiously, they will sometimes even articulate this afterwards: if there was $20 in the pot and the bet was $20, the opponent would need to be bluffing just over 33% of the time for a call to be +EV. If you ask them how often they think the opponent was bluffing, they will say things like “definitely at least a little, like definitely 10% of the time!”
In this example, we are assuming you are vulnerable and the opponents are not. The value of making 4♠️ is therefore 420.
Assuming they double you in 5♦️, which they will. In that case, going down 1 trick costs 200 points, down 2 costs 500, and down 3 costs 800.
This is, naturally, a probabilistic calculation across all possible layouts of the hand. Based on the bidding as shown in the picture, if we are North, we can narrow things down pretty well even though we can’t see anyone else’s cards. For example, our partner almost certainly has 6 diamonds in his hand to make that weak 2♦️ bid, our opponents should have at least 9 spades between them. These two simple inferences can already tell us that if they play spades, we won’t win more than 1 diamond (one of them will have a singleton and will be able to trump our second diamond winner) and if we play diamonds, they won’t have more than 1 spade winner (because we only have one spade, so we can trump a second spade winner of theirs).
The democrats have taken a reasonable position. Specific compromises regarding health care funding and against unilateral Trump recissions to protect that funding. Anything less is nonsense and a betrayal of the country. Anything less is capitulation, and a majority of the country is sick of it!