Texas Hold em and Toussaint L'Ouverture

Jacob Lawrence, General Toussaint L'Ouverture

This is a thought that came from late night reading of Madison Smartt Bell's biography and watching televised tournament poker.

Texas Hold em tournaments give huge prizes to the players who make the final tables, and consequently draw very good players. The game is deceptively simple, but players are successful by their effective use of tactics. The great player understands the probabilities that his/her hand will fill, and if it fills will beat other hands at the table. The great player reads his/her opponents at the table, and makes good judgments as to what their bets mean about their hands. The great player adjusts his/her tactics to both the current situation at the table and the stage of the tournament. Most important for the point of this posting, the great player varies his/her own play so that it is very hard for opponents to draw correct conclusions about his/her hand from his/her behavior and bets.

Toussaint L'Ouverture, who rose to rule Haiti at the time of its revolt against France and slavery, faced a most difficult competition among his contemporaries. Not only were there political and military leaders from France, Spain and England, but also white, colored and black leaders of many indigenous factions all competing for power. Toussaint's competition, however, was one in which losers frequently were killed.

Toussaint was amazingly effective in moving his troops so as to appear where they was not expected. He confounded politicians. He was exceedingly difficult for his contemporaries to read and to predict his responses to their moves. Bell mentions that Toussaint often hid his own influence behind the acts of his subordinates. He was so successful as to rise from slavery to dictatorial power in his own land and world fame.

Bell suggests, and it seems reasonable, that Toussaint was both a Catholic and a follower of Haitian Vodou. One of the key tenets of Vodou is apparently that the individual can channel different loa, or otherworld spirits, at different times. Bell then assumes that Toussaint confounded his peers by channeling different loa at different times, sometimes channeling a warlike loa and sometimes a loa more favorable to diplomacy, sometimes a loa disposed to act precipitously and sometimes one which acts with deliberation.

If, as seems likely, Toussaint's Haitian peers believed that unpredictably he channeled different loa at different times, that would make it difficult for them to predict his next act, or to interpret the meaning of recent acts. Indeed, were he himself to believe this, it might help him to vary his behavior by assuming one or another personal chosen unconsciously for the circumstances.

However, a good military leader in a period of revolutionary conflict and insurgency would be even harder to read and predict than a good tournament Texas Hold em player in a big game. Toussaint by all accounts was great at the game of revolutionary war and insurgency. One suspects that he was just very gifted in ways that would have been familiar to Renaissance Italian or ancient Persian leaders who dealt in shifting alliances and societies in which deceit and betrayal were survival skills. Indeed, his contemporary Napoleon was no mean player in the games of military and political deceit.

One wonders whether American political and military leaders are as good at these games as are the leaders of indigenous factions in Iraq and Afghanistan.