Brain Research and Poker

Save for Later

A while back I wrote about Type 1 and Type 2 mistakes in poker for TPE. It was an idea that came to me after reading Michael Schermer’s book, The Believing Brain, which falls into a genre that is extremely interesting to me, the human brain and brain research, and something I find extremely beneficial to my poker game.

As a fifteen year veteran of this game it should come as no surprise that whenever I read a book dealing with brain research I’m often struck by how applicable the findings are to poker (often times you’ll find poker-specific experiments, interviews, or anecdotes in these books as well), it’s simply the way my brain digests new information and how I reference the new information.

The bad news is I probably have a bit too much poker on the brain (anyone else find themselves doing seat of their pants calculations on the percentage you can walk across different streets without looking and without getting hit or am I the only one?); the good news is it often leaves me with a lot of food for thought and a lot of material to try to use at the poker tables.

I’ll share a few of the poker connections I’ve found below, and offer a further reading section throughout this article for those of you whose curiosity is piqued by the different topics I touch on –these books will make you a better poker player and give you a better understanding of yourself and your opponents.

Cognitive Biases and Informal Fallacies

While there are many types of fallacies, the most often used definition of an informal fallacy is an argument where the details (even though they seem logical) don’t prove the conclusion. A simple example is, Mike and Diane live together therefore Mike and Diane are married.

What makes informal fallacies so easy to fall victim to at a poker table is that the reasoning can make perfect sense, such as, “he raised from early position, so he must have a good hand.” Furthermore, it can even be proven correct when your opponent flips over pocket Aces. But correct or not, the reasoning is still faulty. In this instance we all know there are many factors beyond position that come into play when trying to determine the strength of a player’s hand.

That being said, we often draw these same flawed conclusions.

Additionally, fallacies and biases often go hand in hand, with our biases often leading us to fall victim to informal fallacies.

Biases are what cause us to react the way we do. They are crucial in that they allow us to make the snap decisions about people and things that keep us from spending hours and hours on mundane tasks. And yes, we all have them, don’t kid yourself into thinking you’re the one person in the world who is completely unbiased.

There are so many cognitive biases that apply specifically to poker that I could write dozens of articles on them all, but for now here is a quick list of some of my favorites:

• Anchoring – relying too heavily on a single piece of information
• Endowment Effect – placing a higher value on something you already possess –for instance money you have already put in the pot
• Hindsight bias – when you formulate your opinions based on what happened and deduce that a difficult problem was actually easily solvable –this is why you shouldn’t put the hand results with your hand history.
• The illusion of control –overestimating your ability to control the things happening around you; you know, like your opponents. Unfortunately they are not puppets dancing at the end of your strings.
• Just world bias – the feeling you are “owed” something, or that you hitting a two-outer is just justice being served.
• Restraint Bias – Overestimating your ability to show restraint in different situations. This one is for all you tilters out there who say you don’t tilt!

And then there are also biases like the Dunning Kruger Effect, Loss Aversion, Group Attribution Error, Projection Bias, and so on.

If you ever want to spend a few hours learning about yourself and people’s motivations just hit up this list on Wikipedia, start at the top and Google each one for research papers and scientific articles, it will be a truly eye-opening experience.

We are all biased, but a lot of us don’t know it

This is actually a tough one to come to grips with personally, and will help explain why arguing politics, religion, or any other sensitive topic is usually fruitless –unless you’re like me and you like lively debates and aren’t necessarily trying to convince the other person.

As Michael Schermer puts it, people have certain beliefs and seek out evidence that corroborates their beliefs while discarding anything that contradicts it –the latter part about cherry-picking evidence also happens to be a cognitive bias, perhaps the king of cognitive biases, Confirmation Bias.

The bad news is that there is very little you can do to change this trait, we actually need it to survive, but the good news is that by recognizing you are likely coming from a biased position you force yourself to be a bit more open to criticism or other schools of thought.

Think of it this way, a polling firm that is aware of its bias, and conducts a survey that produces the results they expected is more likely to discount their results than a firm who thinks they are completely fair.

Carrying on with this train of thought, the next time someone tells you they look at things from all angles I suggest you walk away and end the conversation, because you are talking to someone who is likely hyper-biased, but even worse, doesn’t know it.

If you don’t think you’re biased, or if you think there are people who are unbiased, then why do scientists (who are propped up as independent, critical thinkers) need to perform double blind studies? Because it’s impossible to keep you biases out of anything.

As I explained above, we formulate our opinions then seek out data to corroborate it. So even if you read an article on Obamacare from The Nation and another one from The Blaze, you’re going to discount the information in one and use the details in the other to bolster your preconceived beliefs on the matter.

The only way to counteract this is to know you are biased. To force yourself to say, “Am I really examining the evidence in an unbiased fashion?”

You’ll still be biased of course, but at least you’ll be aware of it.

Illusions

In the fascinating book The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us, authors Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, detail six types of illusions people fall victim to: three of which are attention, memory, and confidence. And all three of which can be applied to poker.

For instance, the illusion of memory could lead us to mistakenly recall how a hand played out, leaving out a crucial piece of information or changing a card or the action; the illusion of attention could cause us to overlook a certain aspect of a hand because we were too focused on something else like looking for a tell; and the illusion of confidence could cause us to overestimate our skills and underestimate those of our opponents.

Some more food for thought books

How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Brain Rules by John Medina

The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver