A Brief Look At The Psychology Of Poker

It is surprising to discover how thoroughly our basic functions sometimes control our conscious minds

. Scientific studies have shown that mice and pigeons, and recently other animals such as cuttlefish, can be taught to react to a specific arbitrary sign with a specific set of behaviors: animals learn to expect food at a sight or sound, and learn to receive food by manipulating a lever, ringing a bell, or pecking a certain spot. Through habituation, they are conditioned to consistently believe that specific phenomena or actions regularly lead to the same specific results.

Additional studies have shown that once this conditioning is thoroughly ingrained, the subject will not seek to learn more possible variations of the same phenomenon. So, once the cuttlefish understands that a certain sign, say a red square, means food is on the way and a blue circle means no food, it has already come to the conclusion that that only a red square means food. It is stuck with this one experience and ventures no further.

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 our loser outsider has two ways of conveying his hands, but each of our smug insiders have only discovered one. They stopped at only one notion.

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.

by: Thomas Kearns

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