Synopsis of The Psychology of Poker. Poker demands many skills and strategies. To be successful, you must be able to master all of them and then apply them at the appropriate times. They include proper hand selection, appropriate aggression, bluffing, semi-bluffing, understanding tells and telegraphs, choosing the right games, and reading hands. The 2016 World Series of Poker is coming to a close. There is only one final table left, where nine of the most skilled poker players will battle for the US$8 million prize. The World Series of Poker tournament officially kicked off last May 31, 2016 in the Entertainment Capital of the World.
Jason Zweig’s Your Money and Your Brain cites research that suggests that fear is much more common and has much greater effects than most poker players believe.
Poker players rarely discuss fear. It doesn’t fit our preferred image. We want to believe that we’re unemotional, rational decision-makers who objectively analyze risks and rewards, then make EV-maximizing decisions. That’s the ideal, but – because of our fears (and other emotions) – we often can’t do it.
You, me, the best pros, the tightest rocks, and the wildest maniacs are sometimes affected by our fears, even if we are unaware of them, even if the risks are trivial. The better players are less affected by fears, but nobody can completely escape their effects.
Subliminal Risks
Poker Winners Are Different Dina. Schoonmaker And Company
Wikipedia defines “subliminal stimuli” as ones “below an individual’s threshold for conscious perception… functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies show that subliminal stimuli activate specific regions of the brain despite participants being unaware.”
These brain regions naturally react to powerful, conscious dangers, and the reactions to subliminal “threats” are generally the same, but less intense. You can be frightened by something and react to your fears, but not know how you feel or how you’re reacting. You think you’re being rational and analytic, but you’re reacting – at least partially – to your fears.
Because money is so important to us, “losing money can ignite the same fundamental fears you would feel if you encountered a charging tiger, got caught in a burning forest, or stood on the crumbling edge of a cliff.”
The fear of losing money is obviously less intense than the fear of dying, but all fears have the same general effects: They make us less objective, less concerned with our decisions’ long-term consequences, more concerned with escaping the pain of the fear.
Many fears are reactions of our primitive brain, not our rational one. My earlier articles said our primitive brain evolved hundreds of thousands of years before our rational brain, and it reacts much more quickly and can be much more powerful. The evolutionary explanation is obvious: If we didn’t react quickly to dangerous situations we would have died.
Today we rarely face life-threatening dangers, but evolution is extremely slow. Our brains operate essentially the way they did 100,000 years ago. Then life-threatening dangers were everywhere, and our primitive brain still affects our decisions, even when we are unaware of our feelings. Zweig wrote: “Of the most frightening aspects of fear is that we can be driven by subliminal fears without knowing that we are afraid.”
Trivial Risks
Who’s afraid of losing $1?
Far more people than you believe.
I didn’t believe it either until I read about an experiment that suggested that the fear of losing that $1 caused irrational decisions. I said “suggested” because the sample was small, and the subjects may not have known how to calculate EV.
“A team of researchers designed a simple game… Starting off with $20, you could then risk $1 on a coin flip (or pass and risk nothing). If the coin came up heads, you would lose $1; if it came up tails, you would win $2.50. The game ran for twenty rounds.”
“The researchers tried the game on two groups: people with intact brains (normals) and people with injuries to the emotional centers of the brain… (patients).”
The only rational decision is to bet every round, but the fear of a trivial loss caused the normals to bet only 58 percent of the time. The fear reaction was stronger if they had lost the previous round: They bet only 41 percent of the time. “The pain of losing $1 discouraged the normals from trying to win $2.50.”
The patients “bet their dollar ….in 84 percent of the rounds, and even when the previous flip had cost them $1, the patients took the next bet 85 percent of the time…” In other words, brain-injured people acted much more rationally than normal people, probably because they weren’t afraid.
Because it’s so easy to calculate the EV, poker players would probably bet more often than either group, but I’m confident that some of them wouldn’t maximize their EV by betting every time.
“The lesson? … The fear of losing always lurks within your normal investing [or poker playing] brain… believing that you are fearless is very different from being fearless.”
Inaccurate Estimates Of Odds
Poker Winners Are Different Dina. Schoonmaker And Associates
In that experiment everyone knew the exact odds, payout, and EV. When playing poker, we don’t know our opponents’ cards or what they will do. Our fears – at and away from the tables – are based, not on reality, but on our perceptions and beliefs.
When we have complete information, it’s easy to calculate EV: “take an average of all possible results weighted by the likelihood of each one.” (Miller, Sklansky, and Malmuth, Small Stakes Hold’em, p. 19). If we inaccurately estimate the odds, we will make bad decisions. Unfortunately, we often make huge mistakes.
Zweig wrote: “If we were strictly logical, we would judge the odds of a risk by asking how often something bad has actually happened under similar circumstances. Instead… we tend to judge the probability of an event by the ease with which we can call it to mind.”
Because airplane crashes are so scary and easy to visualize, millions of people are afraid of flying, but “the odds against dying in an airplane crash are roughly six million to one… adjusting for the distance traveled, you’re about 65 times more likely to die in your own car than in an airplane.”
He concluded: “We underestimate the likelihood and severity of common risks, and we overestimate the likelihood and severity of rare risks.” Because we estimate probabilities so poorly, ‘We are often most afraid of the least likely dangers, and frequently not worried enough about the risks that have the greatest chances of coming home to roost.”
Poker Winners Are Different Dina. Schoonmaker And Friends
Other Irrational Reactions To Fear
Zweig discussed only the average reaction to risks and fears, but these reactions vary enormously. We’ve all played with rocks and maniacs, extreme risk-avoiders and risk-seekers. You probably aren’t either extreme type, but even moderate amounts of either tendency will cost you money.
In How To Beat Killed Hold’em Games I explained why such different reactions are costly: “Both reactions are emotional, and poker punishes all emotional reactions. If you avoid or seek risk for emotional reasons, you will certainly make expensive mistakes. The best attitude toward risk is to treat it dispassionately, to calculate the odds and your EV, and then make the decisions that maximize your EV.”
Final Remarks
If you’re open-minded, this article should have suggested that you may, repeat may, have a problem with fear. No matter how much you’ve studied poker, no matter how well you compute the odds, your brain can’t act completely rationally. When it sees a situation that might be risky, it reacts at least a little irrationally, even if you don’t feel afraid or fully understand the risks.
The obvious question is: How can you reduce these irrational reactions to fears? My next column will answer that question.
My thanks to Preston Oade and Arthur Reber for comments that greatly improved this column. ♠
Poker Winners Are Different Dina. Schoonmaker And James
“Dr. Al” (alan_schoonmaker@yahoo.com) coaches only on psychology issues. For information about seminars and webinars, go to propokerseminars.com. He is David Sklansky’s co-author of DUCY? and the sole author of four poker psychology books.
'Many experts estimate that — because of the rake, tips, and other expenses — 85-90 percent of all cardroom and online players are long-term losers.' So one reads on the first page of Poker Winners Are Different, the latest from Dr. Alan Schoonmaker, author of four books on industrial psychology (in which he holds a Ph.D.) as well as numerous poker articles and three other books that focus on psychological issues in poker.
What distinguishes that relatively small percentage of poker players who are not losing, particularly those who manage to do better than just eke out a small profit, but win consistently? That's the question Schoonmaker spends the remainder of his book answering, with the result being an insightful catalogue of qualities characterizing both poker winners and losers. Poker Winners Are Different additionally offers a great deal of practical advice for identifying and addressing those areas in one's own psychological makeup in need of attention before one can become part of the small percentage of players who profit over the long term.
It should be noted that Schoonmaker dutifully adds to the above-quoted statement the disclaimer that 'no solid data' exists to do more than estimate percentages of winners and losers in poker, although he does cite a source reporting that two online poker sites' managers once revealed only seven and eight percent of their players, respectively, finish the year with a profit. Of course, most poker players know intuitively that assertions about the relative paucity of winners are most likely true. Indeed, anyone who has played poker for even a short amount of time understands that even if players' claims sometimes suggest otherwise, there are many more losers than winners, and among the winners very few who win consistently over the long term.
Poker Winners Are Different Dina. Schoonmaker And Family
Schoonmaker sets out with the premise that while players' relative skill levels certainly differ, 'in most games the skill differences between players are much smaller than the differences in their motives, discipline, thoughts, reactions to feelings, and decisiveness.' One can only improve one's poker skills so much, says Schoonmaker, with one's 'natural ability' often determining just how skillful a player one can become. However, one can improve significantly in those other areas of one's behavior and personality that have such a profound effect on one's bottom line at the tables. Thus those are the areas to which Schoonmaker gives the most attention in Poker Winners Are Different.
As is true of Schoonmaker's other books, one finds the author well-versed in ongoing conversations about the many psychological issues he has chosen to tackle. Such an approach most certainly stems from Schoonmaker's academic background, distinguishing his writings from many other poker books with regard to the author's awareness of what others have written. Schoonmaker frequently quotes others' books, articles, or observations (offered in online forums, discussion groups, private emails, and elsewhere) to help support or clarify his many observations. A clear benefit from such a methodology is the way the reader comes away from Poker Winners Are Different not just having learned Schoonmaker's current thoughts regarding these issues, but also with a good idea of what the poker community at large has had to say about them, circa early 2009.
Following an introductory part, Parts 2-5 of the book concentrate on various ways winners successfully 'get the best of it' by controlling their focus, their thought processes, the information they transmit, and their reactions to feelings. Part 6, the last, then shifts to consider how winners subsequently 'make the most of it' by acting decisively.
The book's chapters separately highlight various qualities possessed by winning players, with chapter titles identifying the distinct qualities discussed within each, e.g., 'Winners Focus on Other People,' 'Winners Are Brutally Realistic,' 'Winners Prepare Thoroughly,' 'Winners Depersonalize Conflicts,' 'Winners Pay Their Dues,' and the like. While each chapter helpfully outlines the particular trait exhibited by the winning player (and methods by which one can learn to exhibit the trait more effectively oneself), there also come contrasting sketches of the losing player who lacks the trait being discussed. For example, in the chapter explaining how 'Winners Concentrate Intensely,' Schoonmaker explains how winning players 'rarely think about anything that won't help them win,' but also identifies ways losing players often 'tune out' or otherwise find it difficult to keep their attention directed toward gathering information needed to play more successfully.
The ongoing contrast between winners and losers recalls other, non-poker texts which similarly function as guidebooks for psychological training or 'self-help,' especially those books that particularly examine how psychological issues tend to affect one's financial well being. T. Harv Eker's Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, a nationwide bestseller published in 2005, springs to mind. Eker's book includes a list of distinctions between 'rich people' and 'poor people' — e.g., 'Rich people focus on opportunities. Poor people focus on obstacles' — a list that Schoonmaker's dichotomy of winning and losing poker players in some cases uncannily echoes.
As Schoonmaker has done in his previous books, he again here incorporates activities for the reader designed to help one apply the advice he shares. To that end, nearly every chapter (save the last) concludes with questions asking the reader to decide 'How Do You Rate?' with regard to the issue just discussed. The reader is invited to record answers to these questions in the final chapter, then to review those answers in order to identify potential problems preventing one from winning. Schoonmaker then offers a multi-step program for addressing those problems one at a time.
Poker Winners Are Different Dina. Schoonmaker And Trump
Some readers will likely resist doing the exercises and the work of self-assessment. As Schoonmaker himself admits near the end of the book, a friend of his cautioned him as much, telling him 'Most people won't do all the work you recommend.' To this warning, Schoonmaker has a ready reply: 'He is right, but most poker players are losers. And the biggest reason they lose is that they won't pay their dues. If you really want to be one of the few winners, you have to work.'
To be honest, I found myself resisting the self-ratings at first, though eventually I realized Schoonmaker was helping me consciously acknowledge certain areas where my motives and discipline did not resemble that of winners. Anyone who reads Poker Winners Are Different and takes its advice seriously — that is, who reads attentively, performs the recommended exercises, and does the work — will surely gain at least some practical benefit or self-insight that can be applied toward the improving of one's game. And, as a result, become 'different' from that large percentage of non-winners who don't.
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