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Texas Dolly thanks New Yorker Malcolm
As if we needed more evidence of Gladwell-mania, Blink has made its way into the poker world. Congratulations to "steely" for providing the worst poker advice I have ever read, imploring his readers to think less at the poker table.
Steely treats experience-based instinct as mysterious, claims quasi-psychic powers and suggests that a player should follow his gut even if (s)he knows that it is the statistically wrong play. Somewhere in Las Vegas, Doyle Brunson is laughing and calling a contractor to add another wing to his house.
Bluffing in poker always throws a wrinkle into mathematical analysis, so a certain amount of guile and guile-detection is necessary. Still, the best advice I have ever heard about dealing with bluffing comes from tournament poker expert Dan Harrington:
The big mistake that most players make in this situation* is not calling or folding, but calling or folding quickly. Their nerves fail them and they say either "He's got [the nuts]" or "Nobody bluffs me off aces - I'm calling". Here's a better thing to say: "I've invested $10,000 and several days of my time in this tournament - I can afford to spend a few minutes and think this through."
In other words, the best players benefit from thinking more, not less. When playing high stakes poker, your money can be gone in the blink of an eye, so take your time. The cards aren't going anywhere.
(via Kottke)
* For poker junkies, "this situation" is facing an all-in raise on day two of the World Series of Poker holding Ad Ac on a flop of 9h-5c-2s. Non-poker junkies can ask a poker-playing friend what that means. See Harrington On Hold 'em at 131.
Posted by Charles Star on 08/05/2005 | Permalink
Comments
Gladwell just told the same bullshit to the people responsible for our food safety: "Championing the power of intuitive thinking and insight, Gladwell argued that people "have a sense of correlation between the quality of data and the quality of the answer." But too much data can interfere with insight, he said."
Posted by: max | Aug 5, 2005 2:32:01 PM
I've read both Gladwell's books because I was curious what he would contribute to that very interesting realm of the human identity, decision-making. But I was disappointed by his GQ style summeries of other people's work. He seems quite content to let the matter rest by saying "Yep, there IS a vague part of our identity that is VERY crucial to decision-making... but we don't really know what it is!" To his credit, he shows the difference between intellectual and emotional decision-making but fails to mend that torn relationship. And that's that? Come on Gladwell, I mean, what a capitalist creep!
Posted by: CronenbergDatesGladwell | Aug 7, 2005 9:14:23 PM
Hadn't heard of this book before, but I think I'll pick it up. Cognitive psychologists have investigated this sort of thing under various names -- instinct, implicit learning, implicit judgment, fluency, etc. In general, the idea is that, through repeated exposures to instances/events that have some similar characteristics (and dissimilar ones too), the consistent aspects become encoded and stored and become more easily accessible. When a new instance/event is presented, we process the familiar aspects very quickly, and we can make judgments much more quickly. Feels mystical, looks magical -- is just our brains being so fucking awesome.
But poker is such a good application for this research. Very nearly chose it as my dissertation application. /cog psych student
Posted by: affableamerican | Aug 10, 2005 4:39:04 PM
It's surprising that he spoke at the Institute of Food Technologists.
When it comes to food safety, the last thing we need to do is think less, because germs live in places that we don't realize, and they are unlikely to live in other places that we think may be gross.
Just see if you can think of anyone who has given oral sex to somebody on the first date, and if that same person would send back food that had a hair in it.
That's what intuition, minus cognition, gets you.
Posted by: Cody Wilmer | Aug 17, 2005 1:12:17 PM
