赌士列传：斯杜。恩戈
yijun
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中文称喜欢赌博的人为赌徒，通常是含有贬义的。带徒的词儿如匪徒、暴徒、狂徒还有叛徒，连学徒都算上，不是脑子不够就是品行不端，要不就是本事不够，
总之是哪欠点什么。英文中与赌徒相应的gambler就好听多了，基本上是个中性词。著名赌徒、两届WSOP世界冠军刀友-不让孙(Doyle
Brunson)就自豪地说"I am a gambler, I will always be a gambler, I
can not be anything else"
。我要谈到的赌徒，都是扑克玩家，至少不缺脑子，德也不比普通人缺，所以我要为其正名，不用赌徒这个词儿。下棋的称棋士，习武的称武士，打仗的称战士，赌博的不妨称博士。但现而今博士这个词也被人糟蹋得不行了，骗子一大堆不说，当官的有钱的都能随便成为博士。所以，还是不与之同流合污的好，称赌士更牛逼。
言归正传。在群星灿烂的扑克界，如果问谁玩是最佳扑士，虽然Doyle
Brunson, Johnny Chan, Phil Ivy, Daniel Negreanu, Chip Reese
等都会有不少拥趸，但无疑多数人会把选票投给斯杜-恩戈(Stu
Ungar)。如果再问谁是最天才的选手的话，则毫无疑问非恩戈莫属，所有其他的人都望尘莫及。恩戈在扑克上的辉煌战绩令人难以置信。同样令人难以置信的是他在生活中却是一个不折不扣的失败者。不但生活自理能力近乎弱智，几度从百万富翁变成身无分文无家可归的流浪者，且染上了吸毒的恶癖，并最终为此而中年丧命。别人赌博是为了赢钱，恩戈则相反，赢钱的目的是为了赌博。终其一生恩戈对钱缺乏应有的尊重，从没把钱当钱，而是只看作赌博的工具。对于他来讲，生命的意义就在于赌博。扑克、金(gin，一种用扑克牌玩的游戏，有些类似麻将的玩法。两个人玩，每人手里发10张牌，通过吃、碰而成牌)、21点、体育比赛、跑马赛狗，没有他不玩的。还一次没摸过球杆就敢跟人赌高尔夫球，当然输一大堆钱了。
先让我们来看一下恩戈在扑克比赛上的成就，就知道他在牌上是多么牛逼了。现在扑克比赛多得让人忙不过来，每年1万美元以上报名费的比赛就有三四十个。但WSOP(world
series of poker)
的冠军是含金量最高的比赛，不但奖金远远超出任何其它体育比赛(今年的冠军是一千二百万)
，而且名载史册，是公认的世界冠军。在2003年以前，扑克比赛还不是很多，WSOP更是一年一度的扑克武林大会。自1970年开办以来的37届比赛中产生了31位世界冠军，其中只有4个人拿过不止一次世界冠军。德州多利刀友-不让孙和早年移民美国的广东人东方快车章尼-陈(Johnny
Chan) 各自称雄两次，恩戈和章尼-冒斯(Johnny Moss)
分别夺冠三回。冒斯虽然也很厉害，然而其三次夺冠的含金量是根本不能和恩戈相提并论的。1970年的首届比赛，除了互相赌钱之外并没有奖金，也没有比赛，只是7个高手互相过招，然后投票推举，大家一致推举冒斯为冠军。后来冒斯又于1971和1974年两次夺魁，但参赛人数分别只有6人和16人。恩戈于
1980、1981和1997三次问鼎成功，参赛人数分别是73、75和312人。在很长一段时间里，除了WSOP之外的最大比赛是超级碗杯赛。历史上只有一个人在这两项比赛中都得过冠军，这个人就是恩戈，而且他在两个比赛中各拿了三次冠军！！由于他荒唐的生活方式，或是由于穷困不堪没钱比赛或是由于其它原因，恩戈从扑克圈子里消失了很多年。终其一生，恩戈参加五千美元以上报名费的扑克大赛不过三十多次，他竟然拿了十次冠军！牛逼到令人无法相信的程度。
在扑克比赛中的辉煌战绩使恩戈在凌烟阁上标名(在拉斯维加斯马蹄赌场的Hall
of
Fame墙上悬挂着历史上最伟大赌士的照片)。然而，扑克却还不是恩戈最擅长的游戏，他的强项是金。在恩哥早年的职业赌士生涯里，他主要是靠玩金来赚钱。后来打遍天下无敌手，已经没有人再和他玩了，不得已才走上玩扑克的康庄大道。著名扑克和金的双料高手比利-巴克斯特(Billy
Baxter)曾这样评价他"恩戈是一个伟大的扑克玩家，也许是有史以来最伟大的。但说到金，那恩戈无可争议地是最有史以来最伟大的玩家，甚至永远也不会有人能超越"。恩戈自己也曾经跟人说过"五十年内或许有人能在豪胆游戏中赶上我，但我无法想像到任何时候会有人能在金上比我玩得更好"。因为金远没有扑克流行，所以尽管他在金上才能已经出神入化所向披靡，即使世界最强手跟他玩也要"让子"--比如可以看一张底牌之类的，但使他声名远播的还是扑克。他的故事已拍成电影，写成传记。
斯杜-恩戈，1953年出生于纽约一个犹太家庭。其父老恩戈是从匈牙利移民到美国的。虽然小学都没读完，但老恩戈不乏犹太人的精明，从开杂货铺到开酒馆兼坐庄开赌，三十多岁就积累起了百万家财。男人有钱易学坏并非中土特色，放之四海而皆准。恩戈之母菲并非老恩戈的原配，而是二奶转正。菲也是个好赌的人，而且是臭棋瘾大死输不赢的那种。虽然老恩戈对小恩戈严加管束不许学赌，怎奈小恩戈乃是千年不遇的赌博大天才，跟牌有关的游戏，一看便会，一学就灵，且耳濡目染，少年的恩戈就和赌博结下不解之缘。据说十岁时就赢得了一个金比赛的冠军。恩戈12岁时，老恩戈心脏病发作撒手归西，恩戈成了无拘无束的小鸟，混迹于纽约各地下赌馆，如鸟投林。两年后更辍学专赌，14岁就成了职业赌士。这期间他结识了纽约黑道上的人物拉马诺。这个拉马诺也不是凡人，应该算儒匪吧。在他50岁生日之前，有22年是在监狱里度过的。倒也不是虚度，拉马诺在监狱里自学桥牌而后成为大师，更在狱中练成了一门独步江湖的硬功夫：把韦氏大词典背得烂熟。你随便挑一个单词，他不单说出在某页，而且能一个不漏给出该词的所有解释。出狱后他常以此和人设赌，无往不胜。拉马诺看上恩戈，一方面爱才，看准以后有利可图。另一方面也是义气，他从前跟老恩戈有一定交往，见了这个没爹的天才小子，就将其收入门下，对其照顾呵护形同义子。有一次恩戈和一个叫大卫的人赌牌，对手输得恼羞成怒，提起椅子砸向恩戈。好在恩戈逃得快，没有受伤。数天之后大卫被人击毙。拉马诺还把恩戈引见给黑道大佬。有此一层关系，尽管恩戈直到去世仍是个身高不过一米六，体重不足90斤的小瘦猴儿，倒也没人敢欺负。后来恩戈到拉斯维加斯，欠了当地黑道老大的钱逃之夭夭，比赛期间被杀手在厕所里擒住，也只是令其交出拿了冠军的五万奖金来还债，没有要他的命，也是碍着拉马诺等纽约黑道人物的面子。
在认识罗马诺(上文误译为拉马诺，改过)以后，两个人经常讨论各种游戏的玩法，老罗深感此子不凡，日后必成大器。恩戈虽然也玩些别的游戏，但主要还是金。恩戈在牌上的天分，我估计比李昌镐在围棋上的天分还高，根本就是无师自通。而且他跟个楞头青一样，只要进了赌馆，逮谁拉谁赌，也不管对手是谁，混不吝。有些江湖上成了名的好汉稀里糊涂成了他的刀下鬼，还不知道这毛头小子是谁呢。不久，恩戈就名声在外成了江湖上人们经常谈论的神奇小子了。钱赢的太容易使他有些厌倦，拔剑四顾，竟没有人能陪着走上三个回合，好生郁闷。于是，老罗就给他安排找了一个一流高手普莱斯。在约好的地点见面，普莱斯还有些纳闷，怎么对手还带着孩子来玩呀？一介绍才知道对手是这个小毛孩子，大人是个保镖。
"你想玩多大的？"普莱斯问。
"多大都行，你说吧。"恩戈回道。人小口气可不小。
两人商定500美元一盘。三盘过后，普莱斯输了一千五，知道这孩子比李元霸还恶，根本没有取胜的机会，于是起身告退。
这下子恩戈的名声更响了，却惹恼了两位英雄。一个绰号布朗克斯快车，另一个人称"Leo
the Jap"
。我不知道这个该怎么译，就叫他猎獒吧。这两位是当时纽约金界公认的两大高手，都是传奇人物，已经多年没有人敢跟他们玩了。忽然间哪冒出个小孩子小母牛拿倒立牛逼冲天了，而且天天听人嚷嚷耳朵都灌满了。卧榻之侧，岂容他人乱搞？于是一有人撮合，两人马上应战，但要求赌注大些，不跟小孩子瞎闹着玩。赌局很快敲定，两人轮番上阵。快车先上，不到半小时输了一万，输得心服口服。猎獒随后上场，虽然挺得时间长些，结果却是一样的，俯首称臣。
十六岁的恩戈，已经打遍纽约无敌手。偶有从外地飞来的挑战者，也无不落马而走。恩戈在牌桌上是一个不折不扣的冷血杀手。不同于其它职业赌徒，为了长远多赢钱，有时会故意输一些。一旦坐在牌桌前，恩戈就只知道赢，斩尽杀绝地赢。对他来讲摧毁对手的自尊比赢钱还重要。他曾跟人说过他的对局感觉"比赛之前对手衣着光鲜，头发整齐，面带微笑，目光自信。在对局中当我看到他们领带甩到脖子后，领扣解开，双手把头发扯乱，脸色发青，眼光中充满痛苦绝望，那个感觉，太鸡巴牛逼了(it
is fucking
beautiful)!"。他与加拿大高手哈里-斯丹一战震动江湖，令闻者不寒而栗。
哈里是加拿大的世界级职业高手。说世界级不是随便说的，这个哈里真是满世界飞来飞去跟人玩金。而且衣轻裘乘肥马，出行赴赌必住高档宾馆，西服革履发亮脸光，就跟参加国际会议一般。当有好事者撮合其赴纽约挑战恩戈时，听说对方是一个16岁的孩子，哈里并没多大兴趣，除非赌注足够大他才会考虑。中间人一番活动，终于赌注大得使哈里有足够的兴致出场了。这一场赌局轰动武林，引无数闲人凑热闹。鹿死谁手，大家纷纷下注，赛前赌盘开出5-2，赌哈里赢的远多于恩戈。恩戈觉得这样的赌盘简直是对他的羞辱，急不可待地要用成绩证明自己。双雄见面，哈里伸出了手，恩戈很随便地握了一下，眼睛都没往哈里脸上看。这又使哈里冒火儿。还没交手，两人先斗上气了。接下来的四小时彻底改变了哈里的一生，这个世界级的高手被完全摧毁，彻底崩溃了：比分是
27比0。所有观战的人像被雷劈了一样呆立在那里，无法相信会是这样的结局。具体赌注是多大我不知道，没查到，估计至少是10万以上，恩戈从老罗那里分到了3万5。输钱还可以找地方赢回来，可是精神垮了就没地方修理了。是夜之后，哈里绝迹赌博江湖，再也没人见到他了。而胜利者恩戈，再也难找到挑战者了。
几年之后，恩戈到拉斯维加斯发展，也是竭泽而渔很快就断顿了。当时很多人认为丹尼。罗宾逊是玩金的世界第一高手(他也是著名的扑克高手)
，和恩戈赌了一晚输了10万，之后也挂起了免战牌。后来恩戈实在耐不住寂寞，跟他商量让先对局，允许罗宾逊看底牌，但依然是一面倒恩戈赢。真的是再也找不到人玩了。天无绝人之路，忽然发现拉斯维加斯有玩金的比赛。不跟我赌，比赛是公开的，总是可以参加吧。从1978年初到1979年底，恩戈打了五次上百人参加的金比赛，三次夺得冠军！另外两次也都在前4名，其中一次是不知何故最后一天的比赛没露面弃权了。以后呢？下一次比赛报名的时候，恩戈被保安请出谢绝参加。理由很简单，你要报名很多人就不报了，赌场就没法赚钱了。
有一次比赛剩下最后两人，冠军奖金5万，亚军2万五。对手跟恩戈商量"你想怎么分？"。比赛进行到最后阶段因为奖金差别很大，通常选手都会商量私分，以减小风险，比如你拿4万我拿3万5。因为第二的奖金是稳保的，一般的办法是根据当时筹码按比例分割冠亚军奖金之差这部分剩余价值，在此基础上有一些讨价还价的余地。恩戈的回答让人忍俊不禁"怎么分？你看这样如何，咱把第一第二的奖金放一块，谁赢了就把这7万5全鸡巴拿走。"他就这么牛逼。事后别人问，他说"他一点获胜的可能都没有，我为什么要跟他分？"
yijun
yahoo玩过几天)
，有一次恩戈听说backgammon世界三强之一的罗格-楼(Roger
Low)
正在拉斯维加斯，他就托人下战书要跟人家比，而在此前他只不过才和业余选手玩过几次而已。罗格接受了比赛请求。结果虽然是罗格赢了，但后来罗格回忆道"我非常吃惊他变得多么厉害。每一局、每一小时你都能感觉到他的明显进步，这是我玩backgammon以来看到的最令我吃惊的事情"
。他学扑克不久，就一屁股坐到当时拉斯维加斯最大的赌桌上去跟人玩无限豪胆(no
limit holdem) 。当时那个赌局的常客Johnny Moss, Chip Reese,
Doyle Brunson, Puggy Pearson, Amarillo Slim Preston, Bobby
Hoff等都是扑克的超一流选手，很多人拿过世界冠军，在当时扑克江湖的地位无异于东邪西毒南帝北丐。他们像野狼一样等待迷途的羔羊送上门来，主要的财源来自于花钱买感觉的富商、坏来坞影星、毒品贩子等。恩戈不管这些，他急不可待地要跟最高水平的人较量。去了看人家正玩着呢，恩戈问到："喂，喂，你们这是玩的什么？"
"无限豪胆。"一人答道。
"坐下玩吧，你看这有空位子。"另一个人说。
"可是我以前从来没玩过这个呀"
。他说的是实话。此前他玩的扑克是梭哈。他也知道这帮人盼着他坐下来挨宰呢。但他还是从兜里摸出一捆儿钱来，两万美元。坐下不到15分钟，这两万就输光了。恩戈返回去到他在赌场的保险箱又取些钱回来接着练，小心但勇猛。这一坐连续玩了36个小时，他不但赢回原来输的两万，还赚了两万七。Amarillo
Slim Preston (1972WSOP冠军)
后来说"我用个什么招儿，这小子立刻就学会，他凭直觉就明白我为什么会那样玩。我从来没见过谁学东西这样快。"
1980年的WSOP报名费为1万美元的主赛是恩戈第二次打比赛，这之前他只打过一个40人参加的比赛得了第34名，不到一小时就出来了。当时一万美元不是小数目，没几把刷子的人是不会参加的。恩戈顺利杀进前六名。决战前夜，他把好消息告诉给纽约的罗马诺。当时老罗已患了心脏病，但他告诉恩戈要赶下一班飞机到拉斯维加斯给恩戈加油，他要见证这一历史时刻。恩戈倍受鼓舞，第二天以他凶狠的割喉战法一步步走向终点。最后一个对手是扑克教父、名满天下的两届WSOP冠军刀友。不让孙(Doyle
Brunson)。这名不是白叫的，扑克界有句名言"就是桌子对面坐的是我妈，我也要把她赢光"
。妈且不让，更别提孙子了。别说，这老头去年(2005年)
以七十多岁高龄还拿了一个好几百人参加的WPT大赛冠军。在最后决战到来之前。这两人在前三天的比赛里坐在同一桌很长时间。刀友跟人说道"在我的扑克生涯里，我从来没见过任何人在一个比赛里能边打边长本事的，可这小子把我们这些高手和WSOP这么重要的比赛当成了他的训练营"
。刀友慨叹为什么第一天的比赛没人把这小子踢出去，养虎遗患哪。
最后时刻到来了。恩戈手里拿到同一花色的4和5，两张小牌。盲注是3000/
6000。刀友只在加3000跟恩戈的6000大盲注。然后桌上开出来不同花的A-2-7。恩戈过(check,
就是不加注的意思)
，刀友瞄了瞄桌上的牌，甩出1万7。恩戈想了想，跟1万7。
第4张转牌，一张小3神奇地落到桌上，恩戈成了顺子！现在该做的就是怎样钓鱼请君入瓮了。一般人会再过，等老刀下注再加码。但这样很可能会使刀友这只狡猾的老狐狸溜走。恩戈一直打得很猛，蒙的很多。他知道、刀友也知道。恩戈数出4万筹码推了出去。他知道刀友有牌一定会反击的。刀友稍停顿了几秒钟喊道"全进！"一大群围观的人围得更进一步、屏住呼吸。恩戈从椅子上跳了起来喊道"我跟！"。人群发一声喊骚动起来。最后的时刻来到了，究竟是老刀三次加冕还是恩戈初尝禁果成为历史上最年轻的世界冠军，马上就要揭晓了。恩戈翻开了自己的牌，刀友摇了摇头也翻了过来，是A-7！两对！虽然恩戈领先，但老刀还没棺材定钉，如果最后一张是A或者7那么他的富豪死(full
house) 就赢了恩戈的顺子了，概率是 1/11，
9%。人群又恢复了寂静，发牌员用手敲了敲桌面，轻轻地把最后一张牌开出，是一张小2！恩戈赢了。接下来自然是被人群包围回答记者提问。最后一个问题是
"你一下子赢了这么多钱，你打算用它来干什么？"恩戈回答的很干脆"Gamble
it!", 就是一个字：赌！
当天晚上出去撮一顿庆祝，老罗一高兴吃得太多，回到旅馆有些不适，当夜心脏病发，抢救无效，没能回到纽约跟朋友吹牛自己如何慧眼独具，就客死异乡在赌城拉斯维加斯归天了。恩戈的心情却从天上又落回到地上，悲恸不已，比死了亲爹妈还难过。真的，老恩戈死时，小恩戈一个眼泪渣都没掉。虽然才12岁，他对他爹没好印象，用他自己的话说，他爹就是操来操去(fucking
around)
的一个人。他妈也是好吃懒作吸毒嗜赌还死输不赢。老罗倒是曾待他像亲儿子。客观地说，老罗虽是黑道上人物，但还是个挺有同情心的人，经常把钱借给明知道有借无还的穷人，
他自己的俱乐部雇了很多白拿工资没什么活干的老弱民工。
如果说这次拿世界冠军，还有很多人不服，觉得这小子就是交狗屎运撞上了，那么一年以后就没人不服了。1981年，恩戈卷土重来，又一次登上了冠军宝座。
扑克比赛的一个最重要因素是读，读牌读人，也就是从牌局的进行过程、对手的历史表现、位置、筹码、比赛阶段和对手的动作、表情等诸多因素对对手的牌加以推断。在这方面，恩戈是小母牛瘸条后腿牛逼都邪门了。
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如果说这次拿世界冠军，还有很多人不服，觉得这小子就是交狗屎运撞上了，那么一年以后就没人不服了。1981年，恩戈卷土重来，又一次登上了冠军宝座。一个年轻人连拿两次世界冠军，马蹄赌场的老板比尼恩看到了卖点，这是宣传WSOP的好机会。电视报纸纷纷报道，恩戈一下子成了大明星，一时间风光无限。
毫无疑问，恩戈是一个大天才。有非常之人，然后建非常之功。他在扑克上取得的成就也是无数人梦寐以求的。他是一个伟大的赌士，然而却不能算是成功的赌士。如果就其一生而论，甚至可以说他是一个失败者。他天性好赌，什么都赌，而且还是自杀型赌徒，有多少钱赌多少。在这一点上，只有1982年世界冠军杰克-斯特劳斯和他半斤八两。这位斯特劳斯有句名言"当一天狮子就比当一辈子绵羊强"
。既然是赌，当然就有输有赢。如果想长期赢钱，真正靠得住的还是技术含量高的金和扑克，还有21点在当时也还有利可图，其它主要凭运气的、赌球拳击跑马赛狗都靠不住。虽然恩戈在体育赌博中也曾有过一赢上百万的时候，他更多的时候是输。有人算过，说是恩戈赢的钱加起来大约有三千万，但临死之前穷困潦倒靠半借半乞过活。认识他的很多人都说，钱在恩戈的眼里是这个世界上最便宜的东西。两次世界冠军的奖金在他手里也没攥多久就折腾光了。自古英雄多好色，恩戈也不例外。成了世界冠军之后更有了本钱，都不用他去找，自有美女来找他。知道他有钱，有些人事后说自己怀孕了恩戈的孩子，管他要钱。怎么知道知孩子是不是他的？这对于恩戈来讲不是难事。就像牌桌上读对手手里的牌一样，恩戈说"我从她的动作和表情一看，甚至在电话里一说话，我就知道她肚子里是不是我的孩子。不过这无关紧要，是不是我都会把钱给她的"
。还真绅士。
可能因为家庭环境影响，再加上从少年起就一直在赌场摸爬滚打，恩戈的生活自理能力非常糟糕。除了赌博收入，恩戈一辈子只挣过300美元的工资，是电视台采访给的工资。一辈子跟银行没来往，即便有上百万，也是放自赌场的保险箱里。他的理由很简单：如果我半夜要钱，银行不开门，我拿什么赌？他认为别人把钱放银行里是脑子有毛病。在他死前很多年里，他也没有家庭住址，吃住在赌场，或是在朋友家里混。参加比赛、领奖时要填家庭住址，他填的住址是：没拉直
(Mirage)
赌场扑克室。第一次得世界冠军领奖时，他身上没有任何证件，甚至连社会安全号码都没有，现去政府申请的。这样一个三无人员，要在中国肯定得给收容了。
从二十多岁起，恩戈开始沾染毒品，但还是好奇性的偶一为之。他妈菲和他姐姐珠迪都吸毒，他知道她们的惨样，本来对毒品还是很反感的。但他生活的圈子使他很容易沾染这东西，到三十多岁他已经成瘾难以自拔了。毒品不单让他腰包空虚，更让他身体空虚，吞噬着他的生命和自尊。他的身体越来越差，牌上表现也受影响，以至留下终生遗憾。
转眼到了1990年的WSOP冠军赛。他自己已经掏不出1万报名费，不得不找人挺了。比利-巴克斯特出钱给他报上了名，说好赚了钱对半分。比赛第一天进展顺利，恩戈的筹码从一万长到了七万，形势大好。众所周知，一旦恩戈手里的筹码多了，那对同桌的其他人来讲就意味着一场浩劫就要发生。恩戈说过"从
5万筹码到夺取冠军比从1万打到5万容易多了"
。第二天在一手决定性的牌中，恩戈的三个10被对手等到了卡张顺子，输了一大堆筹码。尽管如此，到当天结束他的筹码还在前几名。
第三天比赛开始了，赛场里却不见恩戈的踪影。往他房间打电话，没人接听。比利急得上树爬墙。左等不来，右等不来，比利赶紧跑到恩戈住的赌场，叫上保安冲倒恩戈的房间，打开房门一看被眼前的景象惊呆了：恩戈只穿着内裤卷曲在地上，已经没了知觉，就剩一口悠乎气还没断了。赶紧送医院抢救。比利焦急的在医院等待奇迹的发生，希望恩戈能重新站起来回到马蹄赌场的WSOP赛场。耽误两三个小时还能往回扳(扑克比赛中，如果对手不在场，牌也照样发给他，然后算他交枪。每一圈他也得付大小盲注，直到筹码被吃光为止，就算出局了)
。终于，医生告诉他这是不可能了，至少得一两天以后才能出院。比利恨得后槽牙嘎崩响"这个王八蛋！"一跺脚回到了马蹄赌场，心有不甘地看着恩戈的筹码被蚕食着，甚至问能不能自己上场替他玩。这当然被拒绝了。冠军的奖金是一百万哪，现在还剩下二十多人，这么重要时刻这小王八犊子掉链子，气死人不偿命，比利发誓永远也不再挺他了。令比利的没有想到的是，尽管最后两天的比赛恩戈没有参加，但由于他的筹码很多，蚕食干净也需要很长的时间，恩戈最后竟然得了第九名！奖金是两万五千多。尽管跟百万大奖失之交臂，毕竟还赚了一万多，没有亏本。这让比利稍微有所安慰，发的誓言就不那么算数了。
后来恩戈一直为这件事羞愤难当，不知道自己抽了多少嘴巴子。钱是小事，名节亏得太大。在恩戈输得没钱的时候，曾经别人出钱他去赌，这在圈子里是很常见的，没甚不妥。对手曾经私下贿赂他，答应给他几十万，要他故意放水。对于一个输光了的赌徒，几十万块钱的诱惑力是巨大的。然而恩戈拒绝了这项交易。他说"我这辈子不能给任何人吹牛的权力，说他在牌上打败了我。我无法面对这样的事实。如果我做了，我这辈子都不敢在镜子里看自己一眼"
。他对冠军的名分那是"相当地"看重的，生命的意义在于赢，不是钱。当年的冠军被伦敦来的伊朗人曼苏尔-迈特漏比(Mansour
Matloubi)
夺得。曼苏尔牌风超级凶猛，人们纷纷议论其彪悍可比恩戈。恩戈正在那懊悔得此情无计可消除回首恨依依呐，听到这话越发不堪恼恨，不由迁怒于曼苏尔。当即找人投资(没钱还是不行啊)
，向曼苏尔发出战表：一人出五万，一对一单挑比试无限豪胆，赢者全收，你是战也不战？曼苏儿也不是吃素的：怕你何来？战！双方约好在四皇后赌场的扑克经典赛期间一比高低。
这一战到十几年后的今天还不时有人谈论。从这场比赛的最后一把牌人们可以领略恩戈高超的胆略和不可思议的读牌能力。扑克比赛的一个最重要因素是读，读牌读人，也就是从牌局的进行过程、对手的历史、位置、筹码、比赛阶段和对手的动作、表情等诸多因素对对手的牌加以推断。在这方面，恩戈是小母牛瘸条后腿牛逼都邪门了。
比赛开始，二人掏出赌金，把十万美金码在桌上。每人领5万筹码。双雄对决，观者如堵，这样的比赛谁不愿看？一上来曼苏尔胆大艺高牌也顺，很快将恩戈逼入绝境。看起来比赛很快就要结束，恩戈来电了。一通反扑，失地尽收，还领先一些。恩戈6万，曼苏儿4万，然后到了这把青史留名的一手牌。还是让当时在场观战的海尤茅斯(1989年WSOP冠军)
讲一下这手牌的经过吧：
恩戈以1600赌注开局，曼苏儿跟。然后抚老婆(FLOP)
三张牌是
3-3-7，三样花色。曼苏儿过，恩戈下注6000，曼苏儿又跟了6000。第四张转牌来了个老K，两个人都过，没有下注。第5张河牌来了张Q。桌上的牌是3-3-7-K-Q。嗅感到恩戈的牌不硬，曼苏儿把剩下的大约3万2千全推了上去。恩戈盯着曼苏儿看了十秒钟，说到"你手里的牌不是4-5就是5-6，我跟你。"然后亮出了自己的牌：9-10。啊？？？这都敢跟？没有一个人敢相信自己的眼睛。而曼苏儿的牌就是4-5。谁都没对牌，但恩戈的3-3-K-Q
-10赢了曼苏尔的3-3-K-Q-5。
是曼苏儿打错了吗？这牌要是专家来评，百分之百得赞美曼苏儿有胆有识。那么哪错了呢？没错，只是共军太厉害了！这种牌，9-10，除了不会玩的二傻子，谁敢跟哪？不是跟白送钱一样吗？可是恩戈就敢，因为他有充分的自信把你的牌读死了。
曼苏儿愣愣地坐在椅子上，看着天花板，半晌回不过神来。"我被彻底碾碎了。那一刻感觉就像推土机从我身上轧了过去。我依然喜欢恩戈，但是这他妈到底是怎么回事！(原话：I
still love Stuey, but what the heck is going on!)
"曼苏儿说道。"这样的牌都敢跟，碰上这样的对手你只有交枪"
。自此之后曼苏儿真的再也没有跟恩戈单挑过。
yijun
table, 通常9 或10人)
，也是他第8次夺得冠军。在最后一桌选手的心理压力非常大，因为每前进一步奖金都相差很大，而此时盲注又非常高，不能坐等好牌，赌的成分加大。所以心理素质和牌感起着关键作用。9次进局竟然8次夺冠，可见恩戈在比赛里是一个怎样可怕的对手。
恩戈另一样天赋是拥有超人的记忆力。玩21点数牌对他来讲是小菜一碟，拉丝维加斯所有的赌场都拒绝接受他玩21点。在他输干爪的时候，他曾经设赌接受任何人的挑战：把两副牌放一起，像玩21点那样一张一张把牌发出，发到半道停住，他能够准确报出剩下的52张牌都是什么。赌注一万美元。然而从来没人跟他赌，人们毫不怀疑他有这个本事。后来大款赌士鲍勃-司徒派克(Bob
Stupak)
跟他说"我知道你牛逼，咱们这样赌吧：玩6副牌，如果你能一张不错报出剩下的156张牌，我给你10万；如果你报不出，你给我一万。怎么样？"
恩戈接受了这个赌局并准确无误地报出了156张牌。说到这了，这个司徒派克也是个趣人，他设这个赌实际上也有要帮恩戈一把的意思。司徒派克18岁的时候离开老家痞子堡，自己一个人跑到拉斯维加斯闯世界。先是在夜总会唱歌，又想歪点子卖哭胖(折价券)
等，一点一点发了起来，终于自己开了赌场。今年他还竞选内华达州副州长。三个候选人的另外两个都是共和党的，其中一个是他前女朋友。最后他和她都落选了。司徒派克也是一个优秀扑士，现在也还经常参加比赛。他曾经设赌比一对一无限豪胆，赌注一万，接受任何人挑战。恩戈跳上擂台把他打了下去。比完之后两人去柜台换筹码。见柜台前排起了长队，老派克心生一计，对恩戈说"咱俩玩这个吧，把筹码扔向几米外的墙根儿，谁扔的离墙最近谁赢"
。恩戈说"干"
。于是两人在众目睽睽之下玩起了这儿童游戏。随着筹码撞墙满地乱滚，两个大老爷们厥着屁股满地追，玩得不亦乐乎。玩了一会儿，老派说"一百一盘儿不过瘾，咱五百一盘儿吧"
，恩戈还是"干！"
。再玩一会儿，老派说"一千一盘儿得了"
，恩戈依旧"干！"
。他哪里知道，老派不单从小爱玩这个，长大成人还经常在家自个儿练习。等排到柜台，老派已经把比赛输的1万块全赢回来了。恩戈只说了一个字"
操！"
玩扑克有时候运气背了那是真背，什么都输，输了就难免怨天尤人。我自己也有这个经历。以前在圣路易斯的赌场玩的时候，每次一个老太太发牌我都输，后来她一来我就离席不玩了。很多人经常把怒气发到发牌员身上，在这一点上恩戈更是恶名远扬。有一次他对一个发牌的大嫂嘴里不干不净，大嫂可能也是个可杀不可辱的女中豪杰，对恩戈说道"再又五分钟我就休息，你有种咱俩到停车场去，看谁弄死谁！"
恩戈大丢面子，说了一句"你以为我会跟老娘们儿决斗吗？"
就闭上臭嘴再不胡咧咧了。还有一次在1981年WSOP比赛前，一次恩戈输恼了居然往发牌员脸上淬了一口痰。这就不是一般的差劲了。马蹄赌场老板老比尼恩决定禁止恩戈到马蹄赌场来玩，这也就意味着不让他参加WSOP比赛，尽管他是当时的世界冠军。后来还是小比尼恩在老子面前一力求情，才使老头回心转意，要不然恩戈1981年就没机会拿冠军了。一个发牌员回忆说"大家都说恩戈的记忆力多么惊人的牛逼，可他从来记不住任何一个发牌员的名字。在他嘴里我们所有的发牌员的名字是一样的，都叫傻逼"
。
赢了四皇后比赛之后没过多久，恩戈又把钱折腾没了。老婆离婚带着女儿搬到佛罗里达去了。输急了把房子抵押借贷，付不出抵押贷款房子也卖了，最后还是一干二净。更糟糕的是他越来越离不开毒品，身体越来越糟。也打牌名义借来的钱，也大都吸鼻子里去了。能借钱的朋友都借遍了，知道他把钱用来买毒品，大家再也不愿给他钱了。这样德性，连出钱挺他的主儿都找不到了。这样穷困潦倒，有几年的WSOP他都没参加。
1997年5月16日。
第28届WSOP冠军赛将于中午12点开始比赛。早晨人们看到恩戈还在马蹄赌场扑克室里踅摸着什么。这时的恩戈，看上去还不如流浪汉。浑身脏忒兮兮散发着酸臭味儿不说，由于长期吸食毒品，鼻孔已经明显塌陷。脸色五光，皮肤似乎碰一下都要掉渣。总之，用候跃文的话说就是"盖张纸都苦得过儿了"
。就这惨样，他老人家不知哪来了灵感，居然要死要活想参加比赛。他已经两天两夜没睡觉了。把认识的人都求遍了，还是没人愿意出钱挺他。求爷爷告奶奶总算凑了一千多块钱，够打一个单桌卫星赛了(10个人坐一桌比，第一名获得参加冠军赛1万元比赛的席位)
，赶紧找桌子坐下，所有的希望都在这一锤子了。要不说人要倒霉喝凉水都塞牙呢，到了最后就剩一个对手了，两人筹码差不多，恩戈的AQ对对手的Q7全进了。眼看要赢到手了，最后一张河牌来了个7。这次恩戈倒没骂发牌员傻逼，他已经无话可说，站起来一声没吭走了。
比赛再有20分钟就开始了，哪里去弄一万美元去？恩戈又想到了比利。虽然之前已经求过被拒绝了，可实在没别的辄，还得求他。找到了比利，一声带着近乎绝望的哀求，使比利有些不忍。虽然眼前恩戈的惨样根本没什么戏，而且眼看他困得眼睛都睁不开了。可是毕竟朋友一场，混到这个地步，比利这个"不"
怎么也说不出口。一咬牙"得了，不就一万块钱吗，比这更蠢的糟蹋钱的事也不是没干过，就当打水漂吧"
。恩戈欢天喜地终于最后一个报上了名。然而比赛开始后恩戈却像熬干油的灯一样老要灭火，一会儿打盹儿胳膊肘捣空，一会儿人歪到椅子下。也在比赛的比利不时走过来贴着他耳朵骂到"狗杂种，别睡觉！"。中间休息的时候，恩戈对朋友迈克(现在Travel频道作扑克解说的那位)
说"我顶不住了，要死了"
。就是这样一种状态下比赛，第一天结束的时候312个参赛者还剩下77个，恩戈以4万多筹码暂列第7。当天夜里他睡了一个好觉，第二天早上像换了新电池一样又活蹦乱跳了。第二天结束剩下27人，恩戈以23万筹码排在第二位。第3天结束就剩下六个人了，恩戈以一百多万筹码遥遥领先，其他人都在70万以下。最后的决赛，给ESPN作解说的海尤茅斯甚至说出了这样的话"这是一场争夺第二名的比赛"
，言下之意无人能阻挡恩戈夺冠。事实上也正是如此，在阔步十六年后，恩戈第三次戴上了冠军的金手链。当然还有一百万美元的奖金。
几天前还是人人避之犹恐不及的流浪汉，现在又风光地在人群簇拥中到了电视台的摄像机前。为ESPN采访的是戈比。开普蓝(Gabe
Kaplan) 。戈比是
影星也是职业扑克玩家，跟恩戈相识多年。戈比比较含蓄地问道"你在十六年前拿冠军的时候还很年轻，这十六年在生活中走了很多弯路。现在你已经四十三了，这次你的生活会有所改变吗？"恩戈答道：
"我希望如此吧。你知道，我以前干了很多蠢事，但我可以告诉你一个事实：在牌上没人能打败我，打败我的是我自己，我的恶劣习惯"
。戈比的最后一个问题是"你现在能把六年前管我借的三百块钱还我了吗？"
以后的事证明恩戈还是恶习难改。一百万奖金和比利各分五十万。还完几年来的欠账以后只剩下大约20万。他又住到赌场里两个来月不出门，天天狂赌，又输干爪了。98年夏天WSOP比赛比利高兴地出钱为他报了名。可他的身体条件已经糟糕到无法比赛，在最后关头放弃了。之后的几个月，他大部分时间是住在一家便宜旅馆里，天天的生活就是憋在屋里睡觉细毒看毛片。旅馆费是迈克给付的。曾三次因携带毒品被警察抓走，都是朋友出钱交保领出来的。
1998年11月22日，斯杜-恩戈被发现死在拉斯维加斯绿洲旅店的16号房间。直接死因是心脏病。一个曾经赢过上千万的伟大赌士，赤条条走了，没带走一个筹码，
也没有留下一分钱的遗产。留下的是一些不寻常的故事给后人评说。古来圣贤皆寂寞，唯有"瘾"者留其名。
帖子写到这里，故事就算讲完。一声长叹之余，本还想发几句不知所云的感慨。想了半天，竟觉得说出来那不挨那，取古人一句话足矣：天地不仁，以万物为刍狗。
插一腿
2006年11月24日
yijun
插一腿
在写恩戈之前，我原打算给每个扑克大牛来一篇列传。现在感觉写不动了。虽然在扑克上面名利双收的牛人不少，但跟恩戈比起来，都还是正常人，没那么多传奇故事。因此写出来肯定不吸引人，这个列传写下去难免就越写越没劲了。我现在只好先提醒一下读者，以后人物之传，大体也就是类似扑克简历了，趣味不大。如果你身在北美每周都有机会在电视上看扑克节目的读者来说，就权当背景介绍了。
近年来一个大牛人搅得扑克界骚动不已。虽然他不是职业扑士，但关于他的行踪报道比任何其他扑士都更吸引眼球。不但报纸杂志报道，网站博客追踪，他的故事还被写成了书。这个牛人名叫安迪-毕尤(Andy
Beal)。
安迪-毕尤何许人也？牛人也。安迪也是1953年生人，跟斯杜-恩戈同龄。大学没读完，就退学不念做起了生意。先是做房地产，几年以后用挣来的三百万美元注册成立了一家银行---毕尤银行。然后主要投资低价购买别的银行收不回来的贷款，大赚，家财数亿。后来又私人独资出两亿美元开发火箭搞航天，大亏。9-11后在航空业极不景气的时候，他逆流而动大量投资，又大赚。这两天我在网上搜了搜，发现财经报刊以前对他已经有很多报道。
虽然连个学士学位都没有，安迪同志却对数论研究情有独钟，是个货真价实的民间科学家。像中国的业余猜哥为哥德巴赫猜想废寝忘食一样，他也曾为费马大定理的证明萦损愁肠。不过猜哥们都是徒劳无功还耽误了过日子，安迪同志却是发了财之后为富不淫才攀登科学高峰的。他虽然没证明什么，但不算徒劳，有毕尤猜想在数学史上可以留下名姓。该猜想是说：
如果A的x次方加上B的y次方等于C的z次方(A,B,C,x,y,z
都是正整数，且x,y,z都大于2)
，则A，B，C必有一(大于1的)公约数。
他十几年前就已通过美国数学学会悬赏，第一个证明或证伪这一猜想的人可得10万美元。
大约是2000年前后，安迪同志开始玩扑克，经常从德州达拉斯飞往拉斯维加斯，去比拉揪赌场玩有些豪胆(limit
holdem)。先开始玩
80/160(前两轮以$80为单位下注，后两轮以$160为单位下注，每一轮最多可互相加倍到4注封顶)
的，很快又玩
400/800的。玩了不久感觉良好，就找人要一对一单挑玩
5万/10万甚至10万/20万的，这是以前从来没有过的豪赌。拉斯维加斯那几个顶尖扑克玩家虽说每个人也有几千万的家财，可这么高的风险还是难于承受。扑克虽然技术成分很高，但短期内还是运气成分更重要，谁也没有必胜的把握。玩10万/20万的，意味着每一手牌出入都有几十万，最多一把能输240万，而每一小时平均要打七八十手牌。一天下来输上千万也不奇怪。这些高手们当然有不愿意放给这么一条大鱼，赌本不足可以凑。于是这些世界顶尖高手们，还有些其他投资者合伙投资，轮番上阵跟安迪豪赌。两三年时间里，安迪去比拉揪豪赌很多次，具体战绩如何没有一致的说法。按照安迪自己的说法，承认通算下来他是输家，但他对多数人是净胜，对少数对手净负。而高手这一边输钱的当然不自己往外嚷嚷，赢钱的不吹憋不住。比如刀友-不让孙的儿子踏得-不让孙就对纽约每日新闻
(New York Daily
News)说他赢了两千零五十万。局外人一般也会过高估计高手的优势，觉得高手灭业余的是天经地义的事。事实则不这么简单，尤其当赌注高到一定程度双方承担风险能力又很不对称的时候，技术也会变形。何况安迪也是个聪明人，通过自己研究模拟也自有一套战法。
在这场豪赌闹到轰轰烈烈进入高潮之前，双方的最后一次较量是2004年5月，玩了两天10万/20万，安迪赢了一千万。
后来有人把他和这些高手之间的豪赌写成了一本书，还有纽约每日新闻等媒体进行了报道，网上的论坛里也有不少谈论。大概这些传闻都把安迪写成了烧钱的富翁吧，安迪觉得有损自己的光辉形像，不由大怒，于是于2004年9月份在最权威的扑克杂志《牌手》(CARDPLAYER)上的向高手们公开叫板发出战表。这封公开信写得颇有性格，我不嫌麻烦全译出来，其大意如下：
安迪-毕尤从德克萨斯州达拉斯的办公桌致书刀友-不让孙(Doyle
Brunson)，奇扑-瑞兹(Chip
Reese)，踏得-不让孙(Todd-Brunson)，沾泥佛-哈蒙(Janiffer
Harman)，豪窝得-来得弱(Howard Lederer)，朝-蒋(Chau
Giang)，白瑞-格林斯坦(Barry
Greenstein)，泰德-佛瑞斯特(Ted Forrest)，噶斯-汉森(Gus
Hansen)，李-塞乐姆(Lee Salem)，章-黑泥杆(John
Hennigan)，明-辣(Ming La)，赖尤-伯曼(Lyle
Berman)，费油-哀威(Phil Ivy)，章尼-陈(Johnny
Chan)，还美得-大肆特妙吃(Hamid
Dastmalchi)(插注：这些人都是比拉揪赌场世界最高扑克赌局的常客，几乎就是现金赌局的武林精英)
：
我近日从纽约每日新闻读到一段故事，不公正地丑化了我在比拉揪赌场之"大赌局"
的扑克经历。该文既不谈我于2004年5月12、13两日在史无前例的10万/20万大赌局中赢了千万有余，也没有提及你们中的多数人和我过招几小时后都净输很多钱这一事实。我承认通算下来我在比拉揪是输钱了，虽然所输数字经常被夸大和误导。
这些故事已成渔夫寓言，随着故事的一次次讲述鱼变得越来越大。我在四年里和世界最强扑士讨教输钱了，胡以为怪？是尔等拒绝在先前赌限上继续博戏，要求降低赌限。而我没兴趣跑那里去玩小钱，胡为怪乎？我的兴趣一直在于和最强者博戏的智力挑战，所涉赌注应使游戏双方都很在乎。我和世界最强者玩了史上最大赌局，我赢了。在此赌局中我度过了美好的时光，但是出于时间和旅行的考虑我没什么兴趣再去那玩了。
你们可以说我浅薄(比这难听的我也听过)
，但我相信在高额赌注下一对一单挑我对你们中的大多数人都具有优势。为正试听，我现在向你们发出挑战，你们要么雄起捍卫、要么闭嘴别提你们所谓的"职业牌艺"。到达拉斯来跟我每天玩四个钟头，我会陪你们玩下去，直到一方把钱输光或者哭着叫叔叔。如果你们的牌艺真像你们吹的那么牛逼，如果你们真的从我这赢了像你们吹的那么多钱，那么你们应该有足够的赌资乐颠儿颠儿来跟我玩10万/20万的对局，来赢更多的大钱。我还可以再加一条：你们可以自己带着独立的发牌员来，带着你们的扑克牌来。如果愿意每天你们可以选一个地方玩。你们应该提供一个不少有6人的上场名单，我再从这个名单中选一人对句。旁观者应被允许观战以为见证，以免对局成为另一个渔夫寓言。
我的钞票告诉我你们会拒绝应战，那么这也就说明了一切。如果你们应战，接下来的赌局会说明一切。应与不应，我都会免于再读渔夫寓言了。
俗人爱看热闹中外皆然。这封信一经登出，立即扑克界内外引起极大关注。高手一方当然不能认忪，两周之后的下一期《牌手》杂志马上刊发了刀友-不让孙的回信。这封回信也写得煞是有趣，我也再不厌其劳地译出来：
刀友-不让孙从内滑达州拉斯维加斯的办公桌致信安迪-毕尤：
我对你在公开信中颇具敌意的语气甚感惊诧，它不能反映那个赢得我们尊敬与羡慕的爷们儿的真实形像。虽然我还没和其他有关之人商量，但我确信我可以代表他们的大多数人讲话。
首先，我愿意对流传的"渔夫寓言"
表示歉意。我想你知道我们对和别人谈论咱们的赌局一直是很关心的。我想你也知道媒体报道时会是怎样扭曲事实的。我曾经在电话中跟你谈过有两个作家要把"大赌局"写书的事。当你让我把你的电话号码给他们的时候，似乎你已不在乎隐私了。你甚至想让其中一个作家在下次对局时观战。
至于你的挑战，我承认你的钱比我们所有人的加在一起还多，因此我们为什么要卷入一场赌资不足的博戏呢？我们是职业赌士，我们知道赌资不足的劣势。所以，我们提出如下建议：
1． 我们筹集四千万赌资，跟你的四千万存在一起。
2．
咱们玩3万/6万的。如果一方输了一半赌资，该方可以要求将赌限提高到5万/10万。有句老话说得好：怎么进去怎么出来。
3． 我们选择上场牌手和上场时间。
4．
我们希望在世界赌都拉斯维加斯玩。我们大部分人都住在这里，去达拉斯不跟你赌的时候我们能干嘛？这一点可以商量，但上述三点无商谈余地。
安迪，当我写这段结束此信的时候，我忍不住笑出声来。如果比尔盖茨到达拉斯去要跟你赌掷硬币，掷一次一百万，每天玩四个钟头，直到一方把钱输光或者哭着叫叔叔，你会跟他玩吗？我的钞票告诉我你会拒绝应战。
刀友-不让孙敬上
此后双方迟迟不能打成协议，主要是安迪嫌赌限赌资都太小。虽经《牌手》杂志老板白瑞-输慢(Barry
Shulman)
居中撮合，还是好事难成，大家都以为没戏了。过了一段时间，大概还是心痒难忍，安迪却突然又发了一封公开信，基本上接收了刀友回信的建议，只作了一些不大的修改。这封信也很逗，不过太长了些，我就挑着译一部分：
收信人：还是上面列那一串高手名单
发信人：安迪-毕尤
相关事项：扑克友谊赛
好了好了，刀友，我接受你们每方四千万赌资冻结(插注：直到一方输光为止)
的挑战，仅做以下一些修改。
我已经戒扑克一年多了，但我实在厌烦反复看到鱼变得越来越大的吹牛逼的渔夫寓言了。我才读过一本新书的手稿，此书同样重复这些滥故事。。。为避免产生新的渔夫寓言，我们要把对局准确地记录下来。
或许很多人会问，为什么有人会玩这样的比赛？难到不能有别的事情更好地使用你们的时间和金钱吗？我首先想到的是引用回答为什么有人喜欢登山、跳伞的一句老话"任何一个提出这样问题的人都永远也不可能理解它的答案"。不过我接着想到的还是试图解释一下。因为这个比赛有趣而刺激，它将展示一个业余选手可以跟职业高手开战进而或者引发实质性的战斗(插注：意思是高手赢了赌资充足就可以玩得更大)
或者赢得一场战争(插注：意思是我赢了你们就没钱跟我玩下去了)
。这样的比赛也比为了捍卫尊严每人走开20步后转身射击的决斗更人道：我可以捍卫我讲述的渔夫寓言而不必杀死一个人。至于"更好地利用时间和金钱"
，最好的答案是：大约一千五百万美元将以所得税的形式跑到全世界最大的慈善机构美国政府那里去了。如果你们对这个答案还不满意，这个如何：我们就是一群没什么好事干的傻逼。
以下的修改对双方都很公平：
1．
按你们说的玩3万/6万，但输过一半的一方可以要求玩5玩/10万。各方在美国五大银行中开一账户存入四千万赌资，存款人、银行、赌场一起签署一个协议书，获胜一方将获得全部存款和所增利息。
2． 。。。
3．
如果你们随意指派上场牌手，就可以逸待劳，这对我是不公平的。我只加一点要求：你们的对局者必须赢或输超过八百万才可以换人。
4． 。。。
5． 。。。
6． 。。。
7．对局将被录像，所有对局者签字同意。我负责一切相关费用也拥有版权。反正你们这些人参加大比赛时候被录像也是没有补偿的，这没什么区别吧？我知道这听着有些荒唐，但我不会对一般公众发布，除了立此存照我也不打算拿这些录像去干什么(如果我赢了我或许会改变主意！)
。。。
此后，不知何故双方又是长时间没有后续动作。直到2006年2月双方终于又坐到了牌桌前。我估计还是安迪放下了身段做了不小的让步，因为最后还是他飞到拉斯维加斯去比的。这次比赛是在才开张不久的豪华的韦恩(Wynn)
举行的。比赛期间韦恩赌场扑克厅拉起了围栏，闲杂人等谢绝入内，只有双方队员工作人员和作证的作家卖客-克瑞格在场。经过一番讨价还价，赌限为5万/10
万。
2月1日：第一位上场的是一对一单打独斗专家踏得-不让孙。经过五个小时的激斗，安迪赢了一百万。
2月2日：第二位上场的是巾帼英雄沾泥佛-哈蒙，到晚饭时休战，沾泥佛赢一百万。饭后戴维-格瑞(David
Grey)
和泰德-佛瑞斯特轮番上阵，结果把沾尼佛赢的一百万又给吐撸回去了。双方当日战平。
2月3日：泰德继续上阵。安迪玩得异常强悍，然而泰德不为所动。直到双方鸣金收兵，泰德大胜，缴获四百五十万。
2月4日：泰德重又披袍上马，双方战至掌灯时分仍不分胜负，收兵。
2月5日：踏得-不让孙上阵，但双方交手没几个回合就息鼓罢战了。这一周下来安迪总共损兵3百万。
当晚，安迪飞回德州，走时也没说是否还回来再战。但之后他的发言人令人吃惊地宣布安迪不再玩扑克了。这令媒体和闲人都大感困惑，但对此踏得-不让孙却在一个网站上说道"安迪以前也有过类似声明。他是一个怪人，说不定明天又飞回拉斯维加斯了，也可能我们永远再也见不到他，谁知道了。"
果不其然，回去几天舔干了伤口，2月11日安迪打张机票又飞回拉斯维加斯。次日烽烟再起。
2月12日：沾泥佛再度出马，踏得在旁边观敌料阵。本来她一度领先两百万，但最后却以损失五百万收场。安迪大胜。
2月13日：踏得上阵，本来到临结束前一小时还领先二百五十万，孰知晚节不保。最后一个小时安迪反攻倒算，结束时收复全部失地还多赢一百二十万。
2月14日：泰德抖擞精神，一鼓作气杀敌七百五十万，将前两天的己方损失都捞了回来。可哪里知道安迪好戏重演，在最后两小时天助人牛，将7百五十万被掳走银两全数劫回，还反抢了三百五十万。
2月15日：一袋烟的功夫安地就把泰德所剩不多的残兵败将给收容了。职业高手们的一千万赌资三天多时间悉数阵亡。
因为第二天高手们都要去洛杉矶参加大比赛，安迪也返回了达拉斯。走之前还没忘了夸奖几句职业高手们的牌技和优雅风度。
数天之后，安迪又杀回韦恩赌场。这回高手一方出场的费油-哀威。这个费油可不是一般的牛，是太牛了。费油是黑人选手，绰号老虎，媲美高尔夫球选手伍兹。他在大比赛中多次夺得冠军，在电视上频繁亮相。难得的是他在现金赌局上也是顶尖高手。如果从现在在世的朴士中选最牛逼的选手，不论让专业小圈子还是业余大众来选，费油绝对在前3名之内。费油今年才27岁，在扑克上不但博得响亮名头成了电视明星，而且也赢得万贯家财。牌技好，人品也好，无不良嗜好，绝对是一杰出青年。
费油与安迪大战三天未下鞍，没有换人。这次两人从3万/6万打起。第一天，费油收获两百万。第二天，安迪再损四百六十万。第三天两人开始玩5万
/10万的，安迪曾一度领先两百万，但午饭过后费油抖擞神威，运气也好，要风来风要雨下雨，刚刚下午一点，费油就把桌上的全部筹码收到胸前，两人就站起来握手结束了战斗。这一天费油进账一千万！三天吃了安迪一千六百六十万，的确够费油的。
之后安迪飞回德州，又声明不再玩扑克了，有更重要的事做。虽然至今也没听说他又出山，可就像踏得说的，他说不定哪天又重现江湖，谁知道呢。
插一腿
2006年12月8日
Tianqinglaaaaa
Tianqinglaaaaa
beginning and ending of life--aging and related:
one article, most interesting about isolating contributing factors, loopholes in logic and alternative possibilities, is:
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A Surprising Secret to a Long Life: Stay in School
James Smith, a health economist at the RAND Corporation, has heard a variety of hypotheses about what it takes to live a long life — money, lack of stress, a loving family, lots of friends. But he has been a skeptic.
Yes, he says, it is clear that on average some groups in every society live longer than others. The rich live longer than the poor, whites live longer than blacks in the United States. Longevity, in general, is not evenly distributed in the population. But what, he asks, is cause and what is effect? And how can they be disentangled?
He is venturing, of course, into one of the prevailing mysteries of aging, the persistent differences seen in the life spans of large groups. In every country, there is an average life span for the nation as a whole and there are average life spans for different subsets, based on race, geography, education and even churchgoing.
But the questions for researchers like Dr. Smith are why? And what really matters?
The answers, he and others say, have been a surprise. The one social factor that researchers agree is consistently linked to longer lives in every country where it has been studied is education. It is more important than race; it obliterates any effects of income.
Year after year, in study after study, says Richard Hodes, director of the National Institute on Aging, education "keeps coming up."
And, health economists say, those factors that are popularly believed to be crucial — money and health insurance, for example, pale in comparison.
Dr. Smith explains: "Giving people more Social Security income, or less for that matter, will not really affect people's health. It is a good thing to do for other reasons but not for health."
Health insurance, too, he says, "is vastly overrated in the policy debate."
Instead, Dr. Smith and others say, what may make the biggest difference is keeping young people in school. A few extra years of school is associated with extra years of life and vastly improved health decades later, in old age.
It is not the only factor, of course.
There is smoking, which sharply curtails life span. There is a connection between having a network of friends and family and living a long and healthy life. And there is evidence that people with more powerful jobs and, presumably, with more control over their work lives, are healthier and longer lived.
But there is little dispute about the primacy of education.
"If you were to ask me what affects health and longevity," says Michael Grossman, a health economist at the City University of New York, "I would put education at the top of my list."
Graduate Student Finds Answer
The first rigorous effort to decide whether education really changes people so they live longer began in a most inauspicious way.
It was 1999 and a Columbia University graduate student, Adriana Lleras-Muney, was casting about for a topic for her doctoral dissertation in economics. She found an idea in a paper published in 1969. Three economists noted the correlation between education and health and gave some advice: If you want to improve health, you will get more return by investing in education than by investing in medical care.
It had been an inflammatory statement, Dr. Lleras-Muney says. And for good reason. It could only be true if education in and of itself caused good health.
But there were at least two other possibilities.
Maybe sick children did not go to school, or dropped out early because they were ill. Or maybe education was a proxy for wealth, and it was wealth that led to health. It could be that richer parents who gave their children everything, including better nutrition, better medical care and a better education, had children who, by virtue of being wealthy, lived longer.
How, she asked herself, could she sort out causes and effects? It was the chicken-and-egg problem that plagues such research.
The answer came one day when Dr. Lleras-Muney was reading another economics paper. It indicated that about 100 years ago, different states started passing laws forcing children to go to school for longer periods. She knew what to do.
"The idea was, when a state changed compulsory schooling from, say, six years to seven years, would the people who were forced to go to school for six years live as long as the people the next year who had to go for seven years," Dr. Lleras-Muney asked.
All she would have to do was to go back and find the laws in the different states and then use data from the census to find out how long people lived before and after the law in each state was changed.
"I was very excited for about three seconds," she says. Then she realized how onerous it could be to comb through the state archives.
But when her analysis was finished, Dr. Lleras-Muney says, "I was surprised, I was really surprised." It turned out that life expectancy at age 35 was extended by as much as one and a half years simply by going to school for one extra year.
Her prize-winning paper appeared in Review of Economic Studies. And she ended up with a job as an assistant professor at Princeton. Now, others papers have appeared, examining the effects of changed laws on compulsory education in Sweden, Denmark, England and Wales. In every country, compelling children to spend a longer time in school led to better health.
"You might think that forcing someone to go to school who does not want to be there may not be the same thing as going to school because you want to," Dr. Lleras-Muney said. "That did not seem to be the case."
Not everyone was convinced.
Victor Fuchs, a health economist at Stanford, points out that it is not clear how or why education would lead to a longer life.
And, he said, there are other mysteries. For example, women increased their years of schooling more than men have in recent decades. But men are catching up with women in their life spans.
And it might be expected that after a certain point, more years of school would not add to a person's life span. That, however, is not what the data shows. The education effect never wanes. But most researchers say they are swayed by Dr. Lleras-Muney's work and the studies in other countries. That, though, leaves the question of why the education effect occurs.
Dr. Lleras-Muney and others point to one plausible explanation — as a group, less educated people are less able to plan for the future and to delay gratification. If true, that may, for example, explain the differences in smoking rates between more educated people and less educated ones.
Smokers are at least twice as likely to die at any age as people who never smoked, says Samuel Preston, a demographer at the University of Pennsylvania. And not only are poorly educated people more likely to smoke but, he says, "everybody knows that smoking can be deadly," and that includes the poorly educated.
But education, Dr. Smith at RAND finds, may somehow teach people to delay gratification. For example, he reported that in one large federal study of middle-aged people, those with less education were less able to think ahead.
"Most of adherence is unpleasant," Dr. Smith says. "You have to be willing to do something that is not pleasant now and you have to stay with it and think about the future."
He deplores the dictums to live in the moment or to live for today. That advice, Dr. Smith says, is "the worst thing for your health."
An Observation on the Street
In the late 1970's, Lisa Berkman, now a professor of public policy at the Harvard School of Public Health, took a part-time job at a San Francisco health care center. It drew people from Chinatown and the city's Italian neighborhood, North Beach, as well as from the Tenderloin district, a poor area where homeless people lived on the streets and mentally ill people roamed. And she noticed something striking.
"In Chinatown and North Beach, there were these tightly bound social networks," Dr. Berkman recalls. "You saw old people with young people. In the Tenderloin, people were just sort of dumped. People were really isolated and did not have ways of figuring out how to make things work."
A few years later, she was haunted by that observation. She had entered graduate school and was studying Seventh-day Adventists when she began to wonder whether the standard explanation for their longer lives — a healthy, vegetarian diet — was enough.
"They were at decreased risk from many, many diseases, even ones where diet was not implicated," Dr. Berkman says. And, she adds, "it seemed they simply had a slower rate of aging."
Seventh-day Adventists, like the people in Chinatown and North Beach, had "incredibly cohesive social networks," Dr. Berkman notes. Could that be the clue?
Thirty years later, studies have borne out her hunch.
The risks of being socially isolated are "phenomenal," Dr. Berkman says, associated with twofold to fivefold increases in mortality rates. And the correlations emerged in study after study and in country after country.
Yet, Dr. Berkman adds, there was that perennial question: Did social isolation shorten lives or were people isolated because they were sick and frail and at great risk of death?
She knows that sometimes ill health leads to social isolation. But, Dr. Berkman says, the more she investigated, the more evidence she found that social isolation might also lead to poor health and a shorter life by, for example, increasing stress and making it harder to get assistance when ill.
But researchers also warn that their findings that education and, to a lesser degree, social networks, may directly affect health do not necessarily mean that other hypotheses would also hold up. The cautionary tale, health economists say, is the story of the link between health and wealth.
Over and over again, studies show that health is linked to wealth. It even matters where a person lives.
For example, in a new analysis of Medicare beneficiaries, Stephanie Raymond and Kristen Bronner of Dartmouth College find that the lowest death rates are in the wealthiest places. So in San Francisco, with a per capita income of $57,496, just 4.16 percent of Medicare beneficiaries die each year. But in Tuscaloosa, Ala, whose per capita income is $24,257, the annual death rate was 5.97 percent.
Race was not a large factor.
"If you control for where people live, the disparities between black and white mortality rates become much smaller," said Jonathan Skinner, a Dartmouth health economist.
An obvious explanation is that wealth buys health. And it seems plausible. Poorer people, at least in the United States, are less likely to have health insurance or access to medications.
But Dr. Fuchs says, then why don't differences between rich and poor shrink in countries where everyone has health care?
"All you have to do is look at the experience of countries like England that have had health insurance for more than 40 years," he says. "There is no diminution in the class differentials. It's been the same in Sweden. It's true everywhere."
In fact, Dr. Smith says, the wealth-health connection, at least among adults, goes in the wrong direction. It is not that lower incomes lead to poor health so much as that poor health leads to lower incomes, he found.
A Skewing of the Numbers
Sick people tend to have modest out-of-pocket medical expenses, but often are unable to work or unable to work full time.
The result can be a drastic and precipitous and long-lasting drop in income. As the ranks of middle- and upper-income populations become depleted of people who are ill, there is a skewing of the data so healthy people are disproportionately richer.
That effect emerged when Dr. Smith analyzed data from the National Institute on Aging's National Health and Retirement Survey, a national sample of 7,600 American households with at least one person aged 51 to 61.
If someone developed cancer, heart disease or lung disease — which will affect about a fifth of people aged 51 to 61 over the next eight years — the household's income declined by an average of more than $37,000. And its assets — its wealth — fell by $49,000 over the ensuing eight years, even though out-of-pocket medical expenses were just $4,000.
Dr. Smith also asked whether getting richer made people healthier, an effect that could translate into a longer life. It does not, he concluded after studying the large increases in income during the stock market surge of the 1990s.
"I find almost no role of financial anything in the onset of disease," Dr. Smith says. "That's an almost throw-you-out-of-the-room thing," he confesses, but the data, he and other economists insist, is consistent.
Income, says Dr. Preston, "is so heavily influenced by health itself."
Much More Than Genes and Luck
As director of the National Institute on Aging, Dr. Hodes often speaks to policy makers, giving briefings on the latest scientific findings. But, he and others say, all too often there is a disconnect.
There are some important findings: Health and nutrition early in life, even prenatally, can affect health in middle and old age and can affect how long people live.
For the most part, genes have little effect on life spans. Controlling heart disease risk factors, like smoking, cholesterol, blood pressure and diabetes, pays off in a more vigorous old age and a longer life. And it seems increasingly likely that education plays a major role in health and life spans.
And then there is the question of what to do. It might seem logical to act now, pouring money into education or child health, for example.
But scientists often say they would like good evidence beforehand that a program that sounds like it would make a difference, like keeping students in school longer, really works. And if the goal is longer and healthier lives, is that the most cost-effective way to spend public money?
There are just so many questions remaining, says Richard Suzman, a program director at the National Institute on Aging. Even studies showing that, for many people, the die may be cast early in life, do not reveal how best to make changes.
"We have only a vague idea of when and where early experience links to old age or when and where to intervene," Dr. Suzman says.
"When it comes to changing things," says Dr. Skinner, the Dartmouth economist, "we are in uncharted territory."
Tianqinglaaaaa
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Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don't
Correction Appended
I was a free man until they brought the dessert menu around. There was one of those molten chocolate cakes, and I was suddenly being dragged into a vortex, swirling helplessly toward caloric doom, sucked toward the edge of a black (chocolate) hole. Visions of my father's heart attack danced before my glazed eyes. My wife, Nancy, had a resigned look on her face.
The outcome, endlessly replayed whenever we go out, is never in doubt, though I often cover my tracks by offering to split my dessert with the table. O.K., I can imagine what you're thinking. There but for the grace of God.
Having just lived through another New Year's Eve, many of you have just resolved to be better, wiser, stronger and richer in the coming months and years. After all, we're free humans, not slaves, robots or animals doomed to repeat the same boring mistakes over and over again. As William James wrote in 1890, the whole "sting and excitement" of life comes from "our sense that in it things are really being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago." Get over it, Dr. James. Go get yourself fitted for a new chain-mail vest. A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control.
As a result, physicists, neuroscientists and computer scientists have joined the heirs of Plato and Aristotle in arguing about what free will is, whether we have it, and if not, why we ever thought we did in the first place.
"Is it an illusion? That's the question," said Michael Silberstein, a science philosopher at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. Another question, he added, is whether talking about this in public will fan the culture wars.
"If people freak at evolution, etc.," he wrote in an e-mail message, "how much more will they freak if scientists and philosophers tell them they are nothing more than sophisticated meat machines, and is that conclusion now clearly warranted or is it premature?"
Daniel C. Dennett, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Tufts University who has written extensively about free will, said that "when we consider whether free will is an illusion or reality, we are looking into an abyss. What seems to confront us is a plunge into nihilism and despair."
Mark Hallett, a researcher with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said, "Free will does exist, but it's a perception, not a power or a driving force. People experience free will. They have the sense they are free.
"The more you scrutinize it, the more you realize you don't have it," he said.
That is hardly a new thought. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, as Einstein paraphrased it, that "a human can very well do what he wants, but cannot will what he wants."
Einstein, among others, found that a comforting idea. "This knowledge of the non-freedom of the will protects me from losing my good humor and taking much too seriously myself and my fellow humans as acting and judging individuals," he said.
How comforted or depressed this makes you might depend on what you mean by free will. The traditional definition is called "libertarian" or "deep" free will. It holds that humans are free moral agents whose actions are not predetermined. This school of thought says in effect that the whole chain of cause and effect in the history of the universe stops dead in its tracks as you ponder the dessert menu.
At that point, anything is possible. Whatever choice you make is unforced and could have been otherwise, but it is not random. You are responsible for any damage to your pocketbook and your arteries.
"That strikes many people as incoherent," said Dr. Silberstein, who noted that every physical system that has been investigated has turned out to be either deterministic or random. "Both are bad news for free will," he said. So if human actions can't be caused and aren't random, he said, "It must be — what — some weird magical power?"
People who believe already that humans are magic will have no problem with that.
But whatever that power is — call it soul or the spirit — those people have to explain how it could stand independent of the physical universe and yet reach from the immaterial world and meddle in our own, jiggling brain cells that lead us to say the words "molten chocolate."
A vote in favor of free will comes from some physicists, who say it is a prerequisite for inventing theories and planning experiments.
That is especially true when it comes to quantum mechanics, the strange paradoxical theory that ascribes a microscopic randomness to the foundation of reality. Anton Zeilinger, a quantum physicist at the University of Vienna, said recently that quantum randomness was "not a proof, just a hint, telling us we have free will."
Is there any evidence beyond our own intuitions and introspections that humans work that way?
Two Tips of the Iceberg
In the 1970s, Benjamin Libet, a physiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, wired up the brains of volunteers to an electroencephalogram and told the volunteers to make random motions, like pressing a button or flicking a finger, while he noted the time on a clock.
Dr. Libet found that brain signals associated with these actions occurred half a second before the subject was conscious of deciding to make them.
The order of brain activities seemed to be perception of motion, and then decision, rather than the other way around.
In short, the conscious brain was only playing catch-up to what the unconscious brain was already doing. The decision to act was an illusion, the monkey making up a story about what the tiger had already done.
Dr. Libet's results have been reproduced again and again over the years, along with other experiments that suggest that people can be easily fooled when it comes to assuming ownership of their actions. Patients with tics or certain diseases, like chorea, cannot say whether their movements are voluntary or involuntary, Dr. Hallett said.
In some experiments, subjects have been tricked into believing they are responding to stimuli they couldn't have seen in time to respond to, or into taking credit or blame for things they couldn't have done. Take, for example, the "voodoo experiment" by Dan Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard, and Emily Pronin of Princeton. In the experiment, two people are invited to play witch doctor.
One person, the subject, puts a curse on the other by sticking pins into a doll. The second person, however, is in on the experiment, and by prior arrangement with the doctors, acts either obnoxious, so that the pin-sticker dislikes him, or nice.
After a while, the ostensible victim complains of a headache. In cases in which he or she was unlikable, the subject tended to claim responsibility for causing the headache, an example of the "magical thinking" that makes baseball fans put on their rally caps.
"We made it happen in a lab," Dr. Wegner said.
Is a similar sort of magical thinking responsible for the experience of free will?
"We see two tips of the iceberg, the thought and the action," Dr. Wegner said, "and we draw a connection."
But most of the action is going on beneath the surface. Indeed, the conscious mind is often a drag on many activities. Too much thinking can give a golfer the yips. Drivers perform better on automatic pilot. Fiction writers report writing in a kind of trance in which they simply take dictation from the voices and characters in their head, a grace that is, alas, rarely if ever granted nonfiction writers.
Naturally, almost everyone has a slant on such experiments and whether or not the word "illusion" should be used in describing free will. Dr. Libet said his results left room for a limited version of free will in the form of a veto power over what we sense ourselves doing. In effect, the unconscious brain proposes and the mind disposes.
In a 1999 essay, he wrote that although this might not seem like much, it was enough to satisfy ethical standards. "Most of the Ten Commandments are 'do not' orders," he wrote.
But that might seem a pinched and diminished form of free will.
Good Intentions
Dr. Dennett, the Tufts professor, is one of many who have tried to redefine free will in a way that involves no escape from the materialist world while still offering enough autonomy for moral responsibility, which seems to be what everyone cares about.
The belief that the traditional intuitive notion of a free will divorced from causality is inflated, metaphysical nonsense, Dr. Dennett says reflecting an outdated dualistic view of the world.
Rather, Dr. Dennett argues, it is precisely our immersion in causality and the material world that frees us. Evolution, history and culture, he explains, have endowed us with feedback systems that give us the unique ability to reflect and think things over and to imagine the future. Free will and determinism can co-exist.
"All the varieties of free will worth having, we have," Dr. Dennett said.
"We have the power to veto our urges and then to veto our vetoes," he said. "We have the power of imagination, to see and imagine futures."
In this regard, causality is not our enemy but our friend, giving us the ability to look ahead and plan. "That's what makes us moral agents," Dr. Dennett said. "You don't need a miracle to have responsibility."
Other philosophers disagree on the degree and nature of such "freedom." Their arguments partly turn on the extent to which collections of things, whether electrons or people, can transcend their origins and produce novel phenomena.
These so-called emergent phenomena, like brains and stock markets, or the idea of democracy, grow naturally in accordance with the laws of physics, so the story goes. But once they are here, they play by new rules, and can even act on their constituents, as when an artist envisions a teapot and then sculpts it — a concept sometimes known as "downward causation." A knowledge of quarks is no help in predicting hurricanes — it's physics all the way down. But does the same apply to the stock market or to the brain? Are the rules elusive just because we can't solve the equations or because something fundamentally new happens when we increase numbers and levels of complexity?
Opinions vary about whether it will ultimately prove to be physics all the way down, total independence from physics, or some shade in between, and thus how free we are. Dr. Silberstein, the Elizabethtown College professor, said, "There's nothing in fundamental physics by itself that tells us we can't have such emergent properties when we get to different levels of complexities."
He waxed poetically as he imagined how the universe would evolve, with more and more complicated forms emerging from primordial quantum muck as from an elaborate computer game, in accordance with a few simple rules: "If you understand, you ought to be awestruck, you ought to be bowled over."
George R. F. Ellis, a cosmologist at the University of Cape Town, said that freedom could emerge from this framework as well. "A nuclear bomb, for example, proceeds to detonate according to the laws of nuclear physics," he explained in an e-mail message. "Whether it does indeed detonate is determined by political and ethical considerations, which are of a completely different order."
I have to admit that I find these kind of ideas inspiring, if not liberating. But I worry that I am being sold a sort of psychic perpetual motion machine. Free wills, ideas, phenomena created by physics but not accountable to it. Do they offer a release from the chains of determinism or just a prescription for a very intricate weave of the links?And so I sought clarity from mathematicians and computer scientists. According to deep mathematical principles, they say, even machines can become too complicated to predict their own behavior and would labor under the delusion of free will.
If by free will we mean the ability to choose, even a simple laptop computer has some kind of free will, said Seth Lloyd, an expert on quantum computing and professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Every time you click on an icon, he explained, the computer's operating system decides how to allocate memory space, based on some deterministic instructions. But, Dr. Lloyd said, "If I ask how long will it take to boot up five minutes from now, the operating system will say 'I don't know, wait and see, and I'll make decisions and let you know.' "
Why can't computers say what they're going to do? In 1930, the Austrian philosopher Kurt Gödel proved that in any formal system of logic, which includes mathematics and a kind of idealized computer called a Turing machine, there are statements that cannot be proven either true or false. Among them are self-referential statements like the famous paradox stated by the Cretan philosopher Epimenides, who said that all Cretans are liars: if he is telling the truth, then, as a Cretan, he is lying.
One implication is that no system can contain a complete representation of itself, or as Janna Levin, a cosmologist at Barnard College of Columbia University and author of the 2006 novel about Gödel, "A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines," said: "Gödel says you can't program intelligence as complex as yourself. But you can let it evolve. A complex machine would still suffer from the illusion of free will."
Another implication is there is no algorithm, or recipe for computation, to determine when or if any given computer program will finish some calculation. The only way to find out is to set it computing and see what happens. Any way to find out would be tantamount to doing the calculation itself.
"There are no shortcuts in computation," Dr. Lloyd said.
That means that the more reasonably you try to act, the more unpredictable you are, at least to yourself, Dr. Lloyd said. Even if your wife knows you will order the chile rellenos, you have to live your life to find out.
To him that sounds like free will of a sort, for machines as well as for us. Our actions are determined, but so what? We still don't know what they will be until the waiter brings the tray.
That works for me, because I am comfortable with so-called physicalist reasoning, and I'm always happy to leverage concepts of higher mathematics to cut through philosophical knots.
The Magician's Spell
So what about Hitler?
The death of free will, or its exposure as a convenient illusion, some worry, could wreak havoc on our sense of moral and legal responsibility. According to those who believe that free will and determinism are incompatible, Dr. Silberstein said in an e-mail message, it would mean that "people are no more responsible for their actions than asteroids or planets." Anything would go.
Dr. Wegner of Harvard said: "We worry that explaining evil condones it. We have to maintain our outrage at Hitler. But wouldn't it be nice to have a theory of evil in advance that could keep him from coming to power?"
He added, "A system a bit more focused on helping people change rather than paying them back for what they've done might be a good thing."
Dr. Wegner said he thought that exposing free will as an illusion would have little effect on people's lives or on their feelings of self-worth. Most of them would remain in denial.
"It's an illusion, but it's a very persistent illusion; it keeps coming back," he said, comparing it to a magician's trick that has been seen again and again. "Even though you know it's a trick, you get fooled every time. The feelings just don't go away."
In an essay about free will in 1999, Dr. Libet wound up quoting the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, who once said in an interview with the Paris Review, "The greatest gift which humanity has received is free choice. It is true that we are limited in our use of free choice. But the little free choice we have is such a great gift and is potentially worth so much that for this itself, life is worthwhile living."
I could skip the chocolate cake, I really could, but why bother? Waiter!
Correction: January 4, 2007
An article in Science Times on Tuesday about
the debate over free will misstated the location of Elizabethtown
College, where Michael Silberstein, who commented on free will and
popular culture, is a science philosopher. It is in Pennsylvania, not Maryland.
