Sometimes in a poker hand, you find yourself with no good choices. You’ve invested a lot of money in the pot. But then your opponent unexpectedly makes a large bet and you have a marginal hand. Your options — folding, calling and reraising (as a bluff) — are all money-losing plays.1 But you have to pick one of them, and it’s a matter of finding the least-worst outcome. It’s the situation every poker player hates the most.
President Trump finds himself in a similar predicament on health care, now that GOP leaders have announced they’re delaying a vote on the House GOP’s bill to repeal and replace Obamacare and seemingly have no clear plan to secure the votes for passage. Trump has a series of bad options for how to proceed: CONT.
Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight