During my few years as a poker pro, I have become fascinated with how the human brain works. Specifically, I have enjoyed learning about the subconscious and conscious mind and how we go about making decisions.
It turns out that there are many biases hard-wired into our brains that act to hamper our success as poker pros. An excellent video series on cardrunners titled “Brain Fail” discusses many of these tendencies and how they affect our decision making processes.
- Loss Aversion – Loss aversion refers to people’s tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains. Some studies suggest that losses are twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains.
- Apophenia – Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. Many problem gamblers fall prey to apophenia. Casinos even exploit this tendency by displaying the previous 20 spins on the roulette wheel, for example.
- Information Bias – An example of information bias is believing that the more information that can be acquired to make a decision, the better, even if that extra information is irrelevant for the decision.
- Self Serving Bias – This bias occurs when people attribute their successes to internal or personal factors but attribute their failures to situational factors beyond their control.
Despite all of these hard wired biases, studies have shown that our unconscious mind can greatly aid our decision making process, specifically when we are presented with a complex decision involving large amounts of data.
In one experiment , Damasio gave subjects four decks of cards. They were asked to flip the cards, picking from any deck. Two decks were rigged to produce an overall loss (in play money), and two to produce a gain. At intervals, the participants were asked what they thought was going on in the game. And they were hooked up to sensors to measure skin conductance responses, or SCRs (which are also measured by lie-detector machines).By the time they’d turned about 10 cards, subjects began showing SCRs when they reached for a losing deck — that is, they showed a physical reaction. But not until they had turned, on average, 50 cards could they verbalize their “hunch” that two decks were riskier. It took 30 more cards before they could explain why their hunch was right. Three players were never able to put their hunches into words — yet they, too, showed elevated SCRs and they, too, picked the right decks. Even if they couldn’t explain it, their bodies knew what was going on.
- Usually when I’m playing heads-up, I am focusing 95% of my attention on that single match so am much more keyed into the game flow and the timing of my opponent’s actions.
- Usually my heads-up opponent is one-tabling vs me, so the timing of his actions are much more reliable in terms of timing ‘tells’.
- In 6-max games, I am usually multitabling and not paying as close attention to my opponents and the timing of their actions.
- In 6-max games there are obviously way more opponents to pay attention to.
I think I can improve my instincts in 6-max play by paying closer attention to the game flow and how my opponents are playing RIGHT NOW. I think I fall prey a little bit to the information bias in that I try to use stats to inform almost every one of my decisions. It is really difficult for me to pay much attention to game flow when I am constantly clicking on my opponents’ HUDs. I am interested to hear what you other poker pros have to say about this.
I leave you with this hilarious video from JimmyLegs which perfectly demonstrates the information bias. Make sure you check out the player names – pure brilliance!
When I first started playing online in 2000 I played a very straight-forward game, ie about 18-20% starting hands and was pretty agressive up to the turn. Most of the time math made the decisions from there. Online tells were pretty speculative with slow internet speeds. Although this is a ridiculously simple strategy I showed a 3.5 bb/100 over about 30k hands. I was attentive in every hand wether involved or not. When I got more involved in 2002 and got stat trackers and played multi table I watched my profit margin dwindle to about .5 bb/100. It’s hard to say wether either of those are simply normal deviation since it’s not a huge number of hands but I really felt like I left alot of money on the table due to lack of information about my opponents. I finally had to give up on online play due to an extended down-swing and the uncertainty of getting money out.
I really believe the information bias was my downfall. I would fall into the same habbits of believing that since I had and informational advantage over some weaker opponents past decisions that it would translate into perfect decisions on my part even those I was only devoting at best 10% of my attention to the current game. Playing poker for a living is super hard to do in the best of times, but overload yourself with counless decisions per hour and your going to leave substantial profits in your opponents stacks. By the end of my online play I was pretty weary of the game and playing not to lose. That killer instinct of maxing out a profit on every situation had left me and I knew it was time to hang it up. I still love the game but only play infrequently in live games and tend to do pretty well with the Sam straight forward strategy I used 15 years ago. If I ever do decide to take the game back up more seriously I would definetely stick to single table and play a limit that can offer a decent hourly return.
Nice post Ryan. I’ve read quite a few books on this and related subjects. I wish I could remember them all but Blink and Fooled by Randomness come to mind.
I fall into the trap of being too stat reliant all the time. I find when I’m playing my best, I’m always paying close attention to what’s happening in all my games. Particularly remembering specific situations I’m involved in, how I played in them, and how my opponents played in them. I think most opponents remember what happened most recently and place a lot of emphasis in that and as a result leave themselves open to exploitation.
Something that helps me a lot with game flow is to take notes. It’s a pain and difficult with several tables going but what it does for me is keeps fresh in my mind what my opponents are doing. Even if the note won’t help me in the distant future, I find a lot of times it helps me in my current session make a better decision. When I’m just sort of playing on auto-pilot and only relying on my stats, I miss a lot of things and end up making worse decisions.
I don’t know what your setup is. I lie on my couch most of time and my wireless keyboard is invaluable for note taking. God forbid I’d have to sit up an type 🙂