How many card combinations in poker can a player be dealt at the start of a hand? There are 1,326. The number matters less than two of its properties: it is finite, and every combination inside it means one thing only. These are exactly the two conditions a linguistic model requires to be applied to a code — and they are the reason poker can be broken down, and measured, the way words are.
- Poker has a code, and codes can be broken down
- From Leibniz to Hjelmslev
- The two conditions that make the model applicable
- 1,326 possible combinations
- A pair of aces is only a pair of aces
Poker has a code, and codes can be broken down
In the previous article we saw how much information each phase brings in a hand. What remained open was how that value is built: with which instrument, that is, one moves from a deck of cards to a quantity.
The instrument comes from an unexpected field. In Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language there is a group of researchers who study communication according to the principles of Feature Semantics.
The linguistic characteristics of Texas Hold’em poker allow those same principles to be applied: to process and quantify the information progressively revealed over the course of a spot and, in relation to it, to assign an index of the potential skills involved. It is the bridge between a card game and a measurement.
From Leibniz to Hjelmslev
Feature Semantics has a precise genealogy, and it begins long before modern linguistics. It originates in the componential analysis of Leibniz, which makes it possible to break meaning down into its elementary components.
The method was later applied successfully by the Russian linguist Trubetzkoy, who used it to break down the vowel sounds of language: no longer whole words, but the minimal units sounds are made of.
The refinement comes with the Danish linguist Hjelmslev and his model of Necessary and Sufficient Conditions, CNS for short. It is the model that establishes when a breakdown of meaning is legitimate — and, as a consequence, when it can be applied to any code at all.
The two conditions that make the model applicable
Like every model that tries to explain communication, Feature Semantics and CNS have their limits: they do not exhaust a field that remains complex. But they prove perfectly applicable to the linguistic system and the communicative dynamics of live Texas Hold’em poker.
Applicability, however, is not taken for granted: the model sets two preliminary conditions, and both have to be met.
The study reports them in Anolli’s formulation: “meaning is decomposable into semantic traits in its formation; the number of semantic traits constitutes a limited inventory”.
The first asks that sense can be taken apart into pieces. The second that those pieces be countable: not infinite, not open. It is the point where many natural languages struggle, and where poker does remarkably well.
1,326 possible combinations
The linguistic code of Texas Hold’em poker meets both prerogatives perfectly, and the first one is verified by counting.
The game develops through the random combination of 1,326 possible combinations, and the order in which they are arranged carries no importance at all. One thousand three hundred and twenty-six is a number large enough to make the game unpredictable, but it is a number: the inventory is closed and can be counted all the way through.
That is the difference between a measurable system and one that is not. A limited inventory can be walked through entirely; on an open inventory nothing can be calculated.
A pair of aces is only a pair of aces
The second condition concerns meaning, and it is where poker behaves better than almost any natural language. Compared with the CNS model, every combination has a meaning that is unique, absolute and precisely determined by its constituent components.
A pair of aces means solely and exclusively a pair of aces, with no possibility of ambiguity. The same holds for any other combination: none of them can mean two different things depending on the context, as happens constantly to words.
With that settled, the purpose of these tools can be stated. It is to break down into elementary units of meaning, not further decomposable, the components of a word or, more generally, of a code: units which, combined with one another, generate new words and new meanings according to the grammar that governs them. It is the premise on which the Skill Poker Index is built, and the reason the study can move from cards to numbers.
What remains is to identify, in poker, what that elementary unit is: the smallest part of the deck that cannot be broken down any further, and how much information it can express on its own. That is the next step.
