Why Bad Caveman Make Good Poker Players

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This is something of a food for thought column.

A healthy dose of skepticism at the poker table will definitely help you pick off a bluff, but 50,000 years ago a healthy dose of skepticism could turn you into a meal. This is why most people are wired to believe that a shadow cast by the moon is really an intruder, or that a strange noise is not just the house settling, while less people are willing to question and investigate.

Behavioral scientist Michael Schermer calls these “thinking errors” and breaks them down into two types:

• Type 1 Error: believing a falsehood
• Type 2 Error: rejecting a truth

It’s my belief that really skilled poker players tend to be more prone to making Type 2 errors, and while this is helpful at a poker table where people are actively trying to deceive you, it’s not such a great trait if you are a hunter out in the savannah and mistook the rustling of a saber tooth tiger for a flock of birds –which may explain why poker is such a difficult game to master even if you really dedicate yourself to it.

Since Type II errors meant death, this trait (this healthy dose of skepticism) isn’t a prominent part of the current human genome, but it does still persist, and it’s the players who would make really bad cavemen that have an edge at the poker tables. On the savannah they would end up as lunch, but at a poker table they are the alpha hunters.

Avoiding Type 1 Errors

Even the most skeptical among us fall victim to Type 1 Errors.

Every time you post a Facebook meme without fact-checking it (“Today was the day Marty McFly went to in the future”), and every time your opponent tricks you into calling or folding based on the story he is telling with his bets and raises you are making a Type 1 Error.

Obviously, nobody will ever be 100% accurate in these spots, but if you find yourself often deceived and want to improve in this area the first step is realizing you’re probably a bit too believing, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Basically, if really good players are able to manipulate you into doing their bidding you should work extra hard on taking your time when making decisions and being more critical when making your decisions.

Avoiding Type 2 Errors

Type 2 Errors are quite different in that you can actually put too much thought into a decision, essentially breaking the principle behind Occam’s razor (where among competing hypothesis the correct answer is usually the simplest).

I fall victim to this way of thinking quite often, because I’m always looking for the motive behind the action, and if I dig deep enough I end up with several conflicting motives (none of them correct) and totally confused, when the actual answer is my opponent in the hand went all-in because he flopped the nuts!

What I’ve come to realize over the years is that most of my decisions should be made rather quickly, and I should trust my instincts when something doesn’t pass the smell test –and by trust my instincts I mean spend extra time piecing together the hand, not make willy-nilly decisions.

How do I know which type of errors I’m prone to commit?

While this is purely anecdotal, I have a strong suspicion that the players who seem to have an uncanny ability to make hero calls “AND” big laydowns would make poor cavemen.  And players who constantly see monsters under the bed are more apt to make Type 1 errors.

The reason I emphasized the word “AND” above is because your run of the mill fearful players can make big laydowns, and maniacs can make hero calls, but few players are able to do both.

A Poker Example of Type 1 and Type 2 errors

Here is an example of this from a recent tournament I played:

The Setup:

I am one of the chip-leaders and have about 90BB’s in the mid stages of a poker tournament; the villain in this hand has about 80BB’s.

I’ve played with villain a handful of times and have never seen him get too far out of line, and find him a bit on the passive side and straightforward. Overall, I feel I have a good read on his play.

The Hand:

There is an incredibly loose limper UTG+1, I raise to 4BB from UTG+2 with AhQh, villain calls from the button and the limper calls as well.

The flop is the very dreamy Qx9h5h giving me TPTK and the nut flush draw. The friendly neighborhood limper checks and I bet 7BB; which is where things start to get strange.

After a second of deliberation villain sticks his entire stack in the middle (mind you, there is only about 20BB in the pot and he’s facing a 7BB bet); the friendly neighborhood limper folds; and it’s on me…

From my previous encounters with villain I’d assume he’d only do with this with a set; two pair is unlikely given the texture and he can’t have a pair and flush draw. Any other draw he might hold I feel he would have just called with and from playing with him he likes to call with hands like AQ (which I would have expected him to 3-bet pre-flop) or KQ here.

Basically, my initial thought was he had pocket 9’s or pocket 5’s; no other hand made sense for this player. I should add that his demeanor and body language were screaming confidence. When the bet happened I was 90% folding based on all the information I had at hand. I would be calling about 70BB to win 90BB.

If I was prone to making Type 1 errors I would have begrudgingly folded, believing his story.

But for whatever reason, something just didn’t sit right with me about this hand. I viewed villain as a reasonably good player who would want to get more value out of a set, so the massive all-in just didn’t make sense, but it also didn’t make sense that this somewhat passive player would jam a very healthy stack in the middle without the near-nuts.

So then I started to think that maybe the range I’m putting him on is just too narrow; maybe I’m missing something that would explain the bet. Could he have played AA or KK this way pre-flop? Is he capable of bluffing in this spot? Why the massive overbet, is he trying to avoid a 3-bet shove from me? He’s good enough to know I don’t stack off light, right? See how Type 2 error makers can confuse themselves?

Normally, considering my situation and my level of uncertainty I would probably fold and move on (making a stand like this in the middle stages of a tournament on a hunch is not my modus operandi) but my Spidey sense was tingling, so I decided to do something I rarely do, and I tanked.

After about a minute of deconstructing the hand I decided this was indeed a spot where I would make a stand, because nothing about it made any sense. My opponent was so far out of his comfort zone (I’d never seen him make a non-standard bet before) with this kind of play that he had to have a hand that didn’t make sense. In the end I settled on two things:

#1 – he’s not on a stone cold bluff

#2 – he doesn’t have a set

In the end I called his all-in and watched him roll over Pocket Tens. And if you saw that coming after I said he moved all-in than you’re a hell of a poker player!

Had I folded I would have been making a Type 1 error, and had my read on my opponent not been as good (and he actually had a set) I could have easily talked myself into a Type 2 error.