Archive for July 26th, 2010

A Brief Look At The Psychology Of Poker

Monday, July 26th, 2010

It’s amazing how the most basic of human functions are able to control the conscious mind. Scientific experiments on mice and pigeons and more recently cuttlefish have shown that they can be taught to react to a specific sign with a specific behavior, much like Pavlov’s dogs. Ring a bell and our animal friend will expect food. They become so conditioned to believing this through repetition that they always expect the same result.

Even more important, the study shows that once an individual is thoroughly conditioned to trust the sign, they will not search for other variations of possible occurrences similar, but a shade different, to the one in which they are so habituated to believe. So a mouse who has thoroughly got the message that a falling rock means food, and if that incident doesn’t occur, there is no food, he will take it that all other signs except for the falling rock indicate no food. To him there are no other possibilities and he will not look for them.

There have been times I am sure that you have been made suddenly aware of a realization that never occurred to you before. Something like the CEO of Ford is one of the finest executives in the country. Is he? Or is he simply Henry Ford’s great grandson?

This phenomenon is reminiscent of the Rashomon effect. I call it that because in the classic movie, there were several witnesses to an event. Each witness saw the event from solely his own perspective and reality and each witness related differently what he had seen, yet they all saw exactly the same event. We will now return to our poker analogy. A group of players are taking a break and discussing another player (who is not present) who to their minds is a real loser and wonders why he is still in the game. They agree on this and swear each other to secrecy so they can go back to the table and fleece the guy. By revealing to each other the particulars as to how the outsider was playing, they discovered they each saw a completely different bit of behavior. One noticed that every time outsider had a good hand, he makes the bet and balls his hands into fists, never doing so with a bad hand. The other notices when outsider has a bad hand, he plays with his chips in a most annoying way, without doing this in any other situation.

So that the terrible player in seat 4 has at least two tells to betray him, but each pro has only discovered one. But where is written that there is never more than one tell to discover? Both of the better players had discovered sure tells and that surety blocked their superior minds from registering any additional clues.

A good player will not consider this realization trivial. He will take advantage of it by learning to be flexible in his observations and keep his mind active throughout play. By classifying other players habits and behaviors as to high and low importance, he is increasing his odds of winning.

The author of this article plays online poker and gets Rakeback at Absolute Poker where they offer the highest Absolute Poker Rakeback.

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