Putin is playing poker, not chess

 Putin Plays Poker, Not Chess

Russia and the West are at war. The delicate dance that leads into conflict between nuclear powers, is a form not of chess but poker. Putin is used to lying and taking advantage of others. He was shocked when the West offered him the largest raise of his life. Now, what? The game theory and the poker concept "pot odds", both point to higher escalations. These can be prevented by not engaging in negotiations and focusing instead on deterrence.

The vast majority of nuclear power don't make war on each other. It is clear that NATO is at war with Putin's Russia since February 24th. While this war is partially limited in that NATO military personnel will not engage directly if NATO territory is attacked by NATO, it is an unlimited war because no military or financial options are available and Putin's government is now in a position of existential threat.

I believe that this unexpected outcome is due to a series of mistakes by both sides. I claim that neither Putin, Zelenskyy or Macron intended for it to happen. They all wanted to avoid this outcome which would be suboptimal for all their interests. But, once this stage has been reached, all actors will be likely to be trapped in further escalations over the coming days. This cycle of escalations cannot be stopped by Western leaders switching from negotiations to deterrence. To understand this paradoxical state, we need to explore different gaming metaphors.

Vladimir Putin is an accomplished poker player and a sportsman. As a judo instructor, he is well-trained in finding weaknesses in his opponent and then exploiting them to get a knockout. He has been a well-known practitioner of poker-like diplomacy and counterinsurgency for many U.S. presidents. He has been repeatedly confirmed that brinkmanship works and there are no signs that his preferred strategy will ever fail over the years.

Buoyed from his previous success, Putin believed that he could read Biden’s tells even better than Zoom. With dreams of greatness and calculations about his declining hard power, Putin wanted to take one more big pot before it was too much. Putin has also learned that by being unpredictable and bully, he is more able to cow opponents. The game theory explains that wild aggression, which can be feigned or committed to psychopathy, can give poker players a significant advantage against "circumspect" players. A rational actor acting as a massively deranged psychopath will win against an actor who is more reflective and rules-based. The hothead approach to high-stakes gambling can have disastrous consequences. Even if it is played well, the expected value (EV) will be higher than the other. This is what makes it gambling.

Diplomacy is a game of iteration, in which players adjust their strategies in response to feedbacks from their adversaries as well as their analysis of the risk and preferences of other players. Putin has rightly understood that Western leaders and populations are "war weary" due to the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan. This has been what Putin has correctly read as the root cause of our default "appeasement reactions" to Russian aggression. This has prompted him to go further and to adopt a more hot-head style of his gameplay. In 2014, he annexed Crimea because of the insufficient Western support for his unprovoked aggression towards Georgia in 2008. Putin believed that he could deploy mercenaries and barrel bombs to maintain Assad's power, despite Obama not enforcing "the red lines" regarding Syria's chemical weapons usage in 2012-13. He was right. Playing Poker