Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Eh, that’s media spin. biden’s health is fine and he’s doing a good job.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

The revolution will be supervised.

Consistently wrong since 2002

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

This blog will pay for itself.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

We still have time to mess this up!

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

John Fetterman: Too Manly for Pennsylvania.  Paid for by the Oz for Senator campaign.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

In my day, never was longer.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

The words do not have to be perfect.

No one could have predicted…

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

You are here: Home / Past Elections / 2020 Elections / Late Night GOP Death Cult Open Thread: “Pot Committed”

Late Night GOP Death Cult Open Thread: “Pot Committed”

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NYMag‘s business columnist, who’s gradually migrated from his Republican roots:

Header-stripped for easier reading:

You are pot committed when you are highly unlikely to win, but there is such a large number of chips in the pot relative to the number of chips you have left in front of you that you might as well keep betting and hope for the best.

How does this relate to our current situation? Suppose you’re a commentator who’s made some large bets on a hand that isn’t looking so great. Maybe the cards you’re holding say “Joe Biden is senile.” Or they say “Joe Biden can’t win because of enthusiasm.” Sucks to be you. But!

If you fold now, you already look like an idiot. You threw so many of those chips (your credibility) into the pot and if you fold, they’re gone. But you can keep calling, repeating your stupid line, and who knows? Maybe you’ll get lucky and win the whole pot!

Pot commitment can explain some of the seemingly inexplicable commentary you will hear over the next three weeks. Someone who’s saying something that *seems* idiotic may actually just be making the only logical play with a weak hand and few chips facing a large pot on the river.

To felt someone in poker is to take all of their chips (leaving them only “the felt” of the table in front of them, hence the term).

So say we all!

Reader Interactions

53Comments

  3. 3.

    Roger Moore

    I think @SouffleOfTheDay has it right.  There are a lot of people telling themselves they’re only backing Trump because they’re pot committed because they don’t want to admit they genuinely want him to win.  I’m sure this is especially true among the anti-anti-Trumpers.

  5. 5.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Roger Moore:

    I’m sure this is especially true among the anti-anti-Trumpers.

    that’s probably true, the Danielle Pletkas and Dickie Lowrys who know it’s social/round-table suicide to come and admit they love the racism and vulgarity, so they just pretend Dems left them no choice by nominating wild-eyed leftist Joe Bide

  7. 7.

    eldorado

    also important is to been see fighting the good fight because after trump loses, you have to go ask all those people for more money to keep the gravy train going defeat the new policies

  9. 9.

    Roger Moore

    @Inventor:

    Isn’t this phenomenon also known as the sunk cost fallacy?

    It isn’t necessarily a fallacy in poker or in real life.  It’s mostly a fallacy when your sunk cost is small relative to your total resources.  If you’ve invested nearly everything you have and still have an interest in the outcome, it may be better to take the risk of winning it all than try to claw your way back from having hardly anything left.

    There’s also a quirk in poker that makes it different from real life: there’s a hard limit on the stakes.  In real life, you lose everything because you need to put in more money to keep the thing going and you don’t have any resources left.  In poker, if bet all your remaining money (go all in) you are effectively betting against an equal amount from each other player.  That limits your potential winnings, but it also means you can’t be forced out because the other players have enough money to keep betting.

  11. 11.

    LongHairedWeirdo

    One interesting thing about poker is, once you’ve put money in the pot, it’s not yours – it’s the pot’s. Each bet *should* be based on a calculation: what are the odds I’ll win? If I have to bet less than the pot, times the chance I’ll win, it’s a reasonable bet.
    So even if you have a 1% chance of winning, if the pot’s at $100, and you only have to call a $1 bet to stay in, you might as well. If you’re the one with 99% chance of winning – or even one person with a 10% chance of winning, you don’t let that happen: you make sure the bet to Mr. 1% is more than a dollar.

    I think that’s the most horrifying part of our situation.
    This:

    If you fold now, you already look like an idiot. You threw so many of those chips (your credibility) into the pot and if you fold, they’re gone. But you can keep calling, repeating your stupid line, and who knows? Maybe you’ll get lucky and win the whole pot!

    … sounds to me like someone who just doesn’t understand the landscape.

    Name me any person who is going suffer, just because they were wrong about Trump (assuming they don’t catch Covid-19). We can’t even *discuss* credibility when people can make risible claims, and have them discussed as if they’re discussion-worthy.

    You see what I’m saying? Mr. 1% gets to stay in FOR FREE. And right now, there’s absolutely no mechanism to force them to call a bet for more than 1% of the pot.

    That’s why America is in trouble, and why the Republican Party is able to continue to be bogfarking insane.

  12. 12.

    Calouste

    @Inventor: No, pot committed means that it is actually your best chance to throw good money after bad, because you don’t have much left anyway. In the sunk cost fallacy you can do something useful with the money you have left, maybe something completely different. In the narrower world of a poker game (and electoral politics) you can only do a few different things with the money you have, and folding and then winning  if your opponent has 5-10 times as many chips is exceedingly unlikely. Might as well take a 100-1 gamble at that point.

  16. 16.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    Barrett high-court vote against Obamacare not as certain as Democrats claim

    WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett’s comments suggesting she backed challenges to the Obamacare healthcare law do not ensure she would vote to invalidate it in an upcoming case, despite Democrats’ claims to the contrary.

    With the Republican-led Senate moving to confirm Barrett to a lifetime position on the Supreme Court within weeks, she could be on the court’s bench for oral arguments on Nov. 10 in the case in which some Republican-dominated states led by Texas and backed by President Donald Trump’s administration are seeking to invalidate the law.

    The appointment of Barrett, an appeals court judge and former law professor, would give the court a 6-3 conservative majority. But the ruling might not be on ideological lines, and the law is unlikely to be struck down, legal experts said, with even some lawyers who backed previous Obamacare challenges saying the lawsuit lacks merit.

    “The case law cuts pretty decisively against the claims made by Texas,” said Jonathan Adler, a professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law who favored past Obamacare lawsuits.

    […]

    But critics of the lawsuit said that there is no reason why the rest of the law should be struck down even if the tax penalty provision is now deemed unconstitutional.

    The challengers “have a very uphill battle” on that point, said noted Supreme Court lawyer Paul Clement at an event last week hosted by Georgetown University Law Center. Clement represented the Obamacare challengers in the 2012 case.
    In recent cases with conservative justices in the majority, the court has declined to strike down an entire statute just because one part was unlawful.

    “Constitutional litigation is not a game of gotcha against Congress, where litigants can ride a discrete constitutional flaw in a statute to take down the whole, otherwise constitutional statute,” conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a ruling earlier this year that some commentators said foreshadowed how he would approach the Obamacare case.

    Based on Barrett’s record as an appeals court judge, it is unclear how she would address the specific legal issue in the case even though she voiced support for the previous Obamacare challenges.

    As an alternative way of deciding the case, the court could instead find that those bringing the lawsuit do not have legal standing to bring the case on the basis that the challengers cannot show that the eliminated tax penalty causes them any harm.

    Despite the positive outlook for Obamacare, Nicholas Bagley, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School critical of the lawsuit, said the replacement of Ginsburg with Barrett probably does at least increase the chances of the law being struck down.

    “I think the lawsuit probably doesn’t have a good chance of succeeding,” he said, “But it’s worth worrying about a small risk.”

    Buried all the way at the bottom of the article. Was written by a Lawrence Hurley. Is this guy normally a hack?

  18. 18.

    sanjeevs

    There’s no penalty for being wrong if you’re a Republican. There’s only a problem if you’re out of step.

    Mike Pence was a committed Bush supporting congressman throughout Bush’s Presidency. In the debate he attacked Biden for taking the longest time to recover the economy since the Depression.

  19. 19.

    West of the Rockies

    Poker is alright, but I prefer fizben.

    As for Trump and 20 days, he’s doing absolutely nothing to win votes, just producing more of the same old stale rallies, sour insults, and rotting invective.  The loser stink has become putrescent.

  21. 21.

    Roger Moore

    @Calouste:

    Another critical point in poker is that money in the pot is not a sunk cost.  A sunk cost is one that can’t be recovered.  While the hand is still in play, the money you’ve bet is anything but a sunk cost.  It’s part of the stakes for the hand, so you can recover it and more by winning.  The only way it makes sense to treat it as a sunk cost is that it doesn’t really matter how the money currently in the pot got there.  It doesn’t matter how much of the money came from people currently in the hand (including you) and how much from people who have folded; all that matters is the size of the pot and how much each player has left.

  22. 22.

    prostratedragon

    @Inventor:  Kind of, but I think this is a special case where you’ve already anted into the game and the pot now exceeds what you have left by enough that the expected value of winning, even under small odds, is greater than what you keep by folding. Since the option value is positive at that point you stay in. And it would have to be a potential last bet, since if you lose you’re out.

    With the sunk cost fallacy you’re making ante decisions  to get back what has already been lost, and in general have enough left that continuing to chase the loss could lead to a death spiral, but retain the option of not putting the ante. I think.

  23. 23.

    Mike in NC

    “Sunk Costs” are what happens when a bunch of drunken MAGAts stage a Trumpy boat parade and swamp each other’s boats.

  26. 26.

    prostratedragon

    @prostratedragon:  (Lost my edit window) Another aspect of sunk costs has to do with resources that have no other use. If you have a dedicated buggy whip machine and no alternative uses for whatever keeps it going, then you continue making buggy whips as long as there’s enough of a market to keep things in the black. A reputation that has already become a thing of shreads and patches anyway might be analogous to a buggy whip machine.

  28. 28.

    LongHairedWeirdo

    @Roger Moore: Er, I’ll disagree with you. The money you’ve put into the pot *is* a sunk cost. You can’t get it back – you might, however, win the hand, and therefore the pot.

    That’s why I mentioned the calculation: you should call if the odds of winning the pot, times the value of the pot, is *at least* equal to the bet to you. (You may have occasion to raise in this situation, as well – but it’s never unreasonable to call.)

    Note that when I say “odds”, I’m implicitly including the non-statistical odds; not just the odds your hand will win, but also the odds that you can run a bluff, or recognize a bluff. Of course, the question of whether you *really* have a 25% chance of winning, or more, or less, is what makes the difference between a good poker player, and an optimistic loser (or a pessimistic loser, for that matter – folding early is a loss, too!).

  29. 29.

    LeftCoastYankee

    Oh crap I lost my comment from actually trying to use a fucking laptop on my lap.

    Take 2:

    I think the difference between “pot committed” and “sunk cost fallacy” (in a poker or game analogy), is with “sunk costs” there is an ability to stop playing.  This however requires admitting lose/defeat in an effort to cut your losses (and fight another day).

    “Pot committed” really s/b more applicable to the actual politicians.  You win or you lose, so if you’re losing anyway (and can’t “lose more”), throw everything at the effort.

    For pundits (like the quoted commentator above), the idea that riding a stupid idea to end because your “pot committed” to me illustrates the fact there is no accountability for these clowns for being wrong.  If there was, “pot committed” would be a bad strategy.

    Kind of telling that he assumes it is the way it is and not the way it should be, IMHO.

  30. 30.

    Barbara

    Most analogies break down. The real “cost” for a Republican politico in publicly changing their mind on Trump is in the post-election game of musical chairs that they will face in employment opportunities. The safe thing to do is to keep your current friends as happy as possible and be a loyal follower.

  31. 31.

    Jay

    @Barbara:

    there are three different kinds of current ReThug.

    those who have realized that the base are MAGAt’s and are in it for the votes and the Grift.

    The Never Trumpers who imagine that there is sane , not Foxified/Winger/Nazi/QAnon/ReThugs out there that will let them rebuild the Party. Sorry, too much Flavouraide has been swallowed, for too long, you can’t rewind Jonestown.

    The ReThugs on the Reich Wing Billionaire Gravy Train who don’t groke that a less than 1% vote, does not result in an EC win, but they will keep trying as long as the Wingnut Welfare keeps flowing.

  33. 33.

    LongHairedWeirdo

    Damn. I wish I could get someone to ask a question in the hearings. “Donald Trump promised to appoint justices determined to overturn Roe Vs. Wade. Have you discussed the issue with him, and given him any assurances, explicit or implicit? Or did he lie when he said he would only appoint someone (like you, for example) determined to make that ruling?”

  36. 36.

    Mary G

    Wow. Polls still haven’t closed because of long lines in Harris County (#Houston), but with 128,000 voters and counting we have surpassed the entire state of Georgia’s first-day turnout yesterday. Our old record was 68k. Just remarkable. ?✔️??— Zach Despart?️ (@zachdespart) October 14, 2020

  38. 38.

    Jay

    @LongHairedWeirdo:

    as a supposed “Originalist” who holds to the Founding Fathers view,

    where women couldn’t hold office, vote and were the property of their husbands,

    Why is she seeking office when according to her views on “law” she should be staying at home, obeying her husband, and raising kids.

     

    Christofacist Hypocrite.

  40. 40.

    Redshift

    @LeftCoastYankee:

    For pundits (like the quoted commentator above), the idea that riding a stupid idea to end because your “pot committed” to me illustrates the fact there is no accountability for these clowns for being wrong. 

    Best explanation I ever read about punditry is the it’s hit-based, like video games and movies. You don’t succeed by making predictions of likely outcomes, because everyone can do that. You succeed by making unlikely predictions, because the uninteresting times you were wrong will get no coverage, but if you get one “hit” where you predicted something no one else did, everyone will remember it and you can ride it a long time.

    Shorter version: ignore pundits

  43. 43.

    Viva BrisVegas

    Isn’t the problem not that Republicans are “pot committed”, but that they get to play the game with matches while everybody else is forced to play with cash.

    If they lose, they lose their matches. If they win, they get the cash.

    There are always plenty more matches.

  45. 45.

    James E Powell

    Because of they have the support of billionaires and because they own FOX, Sinclair, right wing radio, newspapers, and dominate social media, Republicans are confident that no matter how much of a disaster this election might turn out to be, they will be back in two years, four years max, and everything will be blamed on Biden & the Democrats. It will be like none of them ever knew Trump. They are certain that they will be back in charge in a short time.

    Based on our experience, can anyone be sure they’re wrong?

  46. 46.

    Geminid

    I drove across eastern North Carolina yesterday, on my way to camp at Huntington Beach  State Park. (It’s 20 miles south of Myrtle Beach SC; great place.) I caught three political radio ads. One was Cal Cunningham, talking about his military service and experience fighting corruption. Said he was going to Congress to fight for all North Carolinians. Another had a woman ominously talking about how dishonest and untrustworthy Cunningham was. The third was a woman talking ominously about how corrupt Tom Tillis was. I also saw a large home made sign for republican candidate for Governor Dan Forest. It said,”Dan Forest. Jobs. Not Mobs.” Forest is losing to Democrat Roy Cooper. And from what I’ve read, Cunningham still leads Tillis. It just is not a good year to be a republican incumbent. And while republicans can try distractions like infidelity and antifa, Cooper and Cunningham are on the right side of issues that matter in North Carolina.

  47. 47.

    geg6

    @Jay:

    This was all over the local news last evening.  Baldwin is a burb of Pittsburgh.  Quite a nice place.  People are not happy about this idiot. No ballots found, thankfully.

  48. 48.

    WereBear

    @James E Powell:

    Based on our experience, can anyone be sure they’re wrong?

     
    Yes. Trump Effect.

    Everything he touches turns to shit. On a reality show they can stop the cameras, clean him up, edit it until they get what they want.

    This is reality itself.

  49. 49.

    Dopey-o

    @Viva BrisVegas:

    Isn’t the problem not that Republicans are “pot committed”, but that they get to play the game with matches while everybody else is forced to play with cash.

    If they lose, they lose their matches. If they win, they get the cash.

    There are always plenty more matches.

    And if they lose, they will burn it all down.

  50. 50.

    boatboy_srq

    “Excess mortality” is, for too many, 2020-speak for “decreasing the surplus population.” Unless/until it affects Reichwingnuts directly and personally, COVID is nothing more than a population control working to thin the ranks of Those Other People™.

  51. 51.

    SW

    Stupid.  There is no moral component to a game of poker.  As we get closer to 11/4 Republican operatives who wish to have a post election future would do well to check their poker instincts at the door and just start looking at the odds. If you’re a grunt in this shit-show it is time to bail.

  52. 52.

    JAFD

    @Dopey-o: Well, there are actual losers.  A good friend of mine went to law school with ambitions to become a judge.  Settled with her husband in one of the Philadelphia suburban counties where the GOP had run things since the Whigs, and since judges in PA are elected, became a ‘minor party functionary’.

    In past couple of years, control of that county’s government has shifted from GOP to Democratic,  the local GOP is no longer one that could back Arlen Specter for Senate,  and she’s thinking her life’s ambition may become quite impossible, and much of her efforts have been wasted…

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