102 | Maria Konnikova on Poker, Psychology, and Reason

The best chess and Go players in the world aren’t human beings any more; they’re artificially-intelligent computer programs. But the best poker players are still humans. Poker is a laboratory for understanding how rationality works in real-world situations: it features stochastic events, incomplete information, Bayesian updating, game theory, reading other people, a battle between emotions and reason, and real-world stakes. Maria Konnikova started in psychology, turned to writing, and then took up professional-level poker, and has learned a lot along the way about the challenges of being rational. We talk about what games like poker can teach us about thinking and human psychology.

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Maria Konnikova received her Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University. She is currently a contributing writer for The New Yorker. She is the author of two bestselling books, The Confidence Game and Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes. Among her awards are the 2019 Excellence in Science Journalism Award from the Society of Personality and Social Psychology. She is a successful tournament poker player and Ambassador for PokerStars. She is the host of The Grift podcast. Her new book is The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win.

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0:00:00 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone, welcome to The Mindscape Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll. Long-time listeners will know that one of the topics I’m very interested in here on the podcast is thinking rationality, how human beings cogitate to make decisions about the world, and even longer term listeners will know that I love using the game of poker as a model for thinking about human rationality.

0:00:21 SC: Of course, poker is a very finite, well-defined game, you know what the rules are, you know what the rewards are. But it models a lot of the circumstances that are very important when we’re making hard decisions in our everyday lives. Poker is a game of incomplete information, we don’t know what our opponents have. It’s a game where there’s randomness involved, you don’t know what the next card is going to be. It’s a game where there probably is a strategy which will at least guarantee you won’t lose over the long term but you might not know what that strategy is, you have to be a good Bayesian, you have to do your best to model your other opponents, etcetera.

0:00:57 SC: And perhaps most of all, poker is a game where even if you know cognitively, consciously what the best strategy is, sometimes it can be hard to obey, to follow that best strategy, you can be what in poker terms is called “on tilt”. Your emotions can get in the way and your rationality can suffer thereby.

0:01:17 SC: So the perfect person to talk about all these ideas with is Maria Konnikova, today’s guest. Maria got her PhD in Psychology at Columbia University, starting with Walter Mischel, who was very famous for the Marshmallow Test. You know, when you give a small child a marshmallow and ask them if they can avoid eating it while you step out of the room, and the claim is that whether or not the kids can avoid just eating the marshmallow predicts success later in life.

0:01:43 SC: But Maria decided not to go the academic route, instead becoming a writer, and she became a very successful staff writer at The New Yorker, and then decided that what she really needed to do was up her rationality game, and the best way to do that was to learn to play poker, and not because she was a poker hobbyist, she literally, as she says, didn’t know how many cards there were in the deck. But on the basis of her psychology degree and her work as a writer, she managed to convince Erik Seidel, who is one of the world’s leading poker players to coach her with the idea that she would get good enough to play in the World Series of Poker.

0:02:17 SC: Turns out she did way better than that, not only did she appear in the World Series, she’s won hundreds of thousands of dollars playing poker. Joined team PokerStars as a poker ambassador and has been very successful overall in the tournament circuit. All of the stories told and the lessons for rationality psychology and human life are summarized in her new book, The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win.

0:02:42 SC: I think that this podcast is not about poker really, we use poker as an example, but it’s not teaching you how to play poker. You’re not gonna learn how frequently to three-bet or whether you should worry about getting check raised or anything like that. It’s about human beings, how they think, how they reason, and in the laboratory of playing poker. So you’ll learn a lot about human beings, maybe even be inspired to go play a few hands of poker while you’re at it.

0:03:07 SC: Don’t forget, there’s plenty going on. If you wanna go beyond just listening to the podcast, you’re welcome to visit the website preposterousuniverse.com/podcast, where every podcast has show notes, links to people’s books and also full transcripts of the podcast. You can also support the podcast on Patreon. You go to patreon.com/seanmcarroll. And in return for pledging a dollar or $2 per episode of the podcast, you get to listen to the episodes ad free and you also get to ask questions every month as part of a monthly Ask Me Anything.

0:03:37 SC: So there’s a lot going on during quarantine, during lockdown here involved with the Mindscape podcast. I hope that this podcast is doing its tiny little part to keep us all sane and distracted from what’s going on all around us. And with that, let’s go.

[music]

0:04:09 SC: Maria Konnikova, welcome to the Mindscape podcast.

0:04:12 Maria Konnikova: Thank you so much for having me, Sean.

0:04:14 SC: So I guess, the obvious question is, you have a PhD in psychology, you have a staff writer job with one of the most prestigious publications in the world, what is it that inspired you to say to yourself, “You know what I really wanna do is to play poker at a high level?”

0:04:31 MK: This was not something I had ever seen coming, and had you asked me five years ago, “Will you ever be a professional poker player, will you ever be playing poker on any level whatsoever?” My answer would have been, “Ha ha ha.” Because it’s not a lifelong passion of mine, it’s not like I’ve been poker player from childhood, playing with my friends, playing with my family, which a lot of professional poker players did do, by the way. If you look at a lot of their stories, you see that they started when they were absurdly young. That’s not my case. What brought me to poker was actually just a completely tangential direction.

0:05:12 MK: My last book had come out, The Confidence Game, and it was doing well, I was doing a lot of media for the book, everything was great. And then a few months after the book came out a lot of things just all of a sudden went wrong all at once. I had a major health problem that has still not been diagnosed, it was some sort of autoimmune thing where all of my hormones just went completely out of whack, and I became allergic to just everything.

0:05:44 SC: Oh my goodness.

0:05:45 MK: Like I couldn’t wear clothes, basically. And yeah, it was pretty bad. My body would just break out in hives randomly. I visited all these specialists, no one knew what was going on. And this lasted for quite some time. I was just on these horse doses of steroids and eventually it went away. But to this day, we have no idea what happened.

0:06:05 MK: Then my grandmother died, and it was very sudden, just a total freak accident. My mom lost her job, my husband lost his job, just all of these things happening one after the other, after the other, and none of them are things that we really have any control over, and it really made me just pause and start questioning, you know, what do we really control? What role does chance play in everyday life? And I decided that that’s what I wanted to write about, that I wanted to do a book about this. But as you know, you’ve written books, that’s not really a topic for a book.

0:06:44 SC: Right.

0:06:45 MK: That’s just some…

0:06:47 SC: It’s a theme, yeah.

0:06:47 MK: Grand inquiry into the nature of chance. And I’m not Schopenhauer, I’m not gonna do a philosophical treatise. So I started reading about chance and someone said, “Hey, you’re interested in chance, you should check out game theory because that’s actually a way to look at chance in a really organized way.” So I started reading John von Neumann’s Theory of Games. John von Neumann is the father of game theory. And learned that he was not just a poker player, but that poker was the inspiration for game theory. And that Von Neumann very strongly believed that poker was strategically a really wonderful match for strategic decision making in life in general, as a game of incomplete information. And it was the game that most fascinated him because he didn’t really love chess, he thought that it was boring because ultimately it was very solvable, there was always a right move and a wrong move.

0:07:45 SC: Right.

0:07:46 MK: And he didn’t like gambling. He hated casino games like roulette, etcetera, because not solvable at all, it’s just gambling. But poker, he felt was kind of in-between where you had incomplete information, but you could very strategically make good decisions, but all the while there wasn’t quite a solution, so he said, “I’m gonna solve this.” I started becoming fascinated by, “What is this poker thing? Why did someone as brilliant as Von Neumann think that this held the key to so much?” And so I started reading about poker and some light went off and that brought me to The Biggest Bluff. I decided, “You know what, this is gonna be the book. I’m gonna learn to play poker. I’m gonna get someone really good to coach me. I’m gonna immerse myself in it, and we’ll see what happens.” And of course, I could never have predicted that I would have actually become good and gone pro. That was not part of the plan. It was supposed to be just a one-year immersion, and it went in a very different direction.

0:08:50 SC: And not only did you come from not having grown up playing poker, but you literally, according to the book, anyway, didn’t know how many cards were in a deck.

0:08:58 MK: Oh, that is true. That is a true story. In my first meeting with Erik Seidel, who’s one of the best players in the world, and became my coach, my mentor, and now is just a good friend. We met over breakfast, and he was very hesitant because he doesn’t coach people, he’s never coached people before. And what intrigued him was that I wasn’t a poker player coming in to him looking to get better, I was someone with a clean slate. And he realized just how clean when I said, “Well, I know some things, like I know that there are 54 cards in a deck.” And he just kind of looked at me and I said, “What? Did I say something funny? Did I say something wrong?” [chuckle] And he to this day, he will not let me live that down, and he just jokes over and over. He says, “You know, one day those jokers will jump out of the deck and that will be your day to shine.”

0:09:50 SC: There are 52 cards in the deck, for those of the audience members who are not themselves poker players or card players. Yeah, the jokers don’t count. But yeah, I’ve heard also the story of Von Neumann, one of the great mathematicians and physicists of the 20th century and his interest in mixed games and the balance between randomness and control. But your interest, I guess at the time, at least at the beginning was like you said, not to become the world’s best poker player, but to sort of think of poker as teaching you something about life more generally. Is that safe to say?

0:10:26 MK: Yes, that’s exactly right. I wanted to use poker as a kind of metaphor for life to really think through how do we figure out what that line is between what we can control, the decisions we can control and the things we can’t, the cards, the outcome, the other players, kind of the things that we don’t necessarily have direct control over. As time went on, I actually realized that in some ways, poker was a much better metaphor for life than I could have ever imagined. And that it was also a perfect learning laboratory, because I came from an academic background, I have a PhD, not just in psychology, but I studied the psychology of decision-making specifically under conditions of risk and uncertainty.

0:11:10 SC: Wow.

0:11:10 MK: Which is very similar to a poker environment. But what we do as psychologists is we identify all of these problems, all of the ways that people screw up when they’re making decisions, the way that they’re irrational, but there aren’t that many solutions. I mean, even someone like Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel prize for his work in this, and if anyone knows decision biases, it’s Kahneman, but even he acknowledges that he still exhibits a lot of the same biases and that it’s really, really hard to fight them. And as I started playing poker, I had this light bulb moment when I realized this is actually a perfect way to work through these biases and emerge on the other side, a better, less biased decision-maker because poker actually forces you to sample probabilities over and over and over and you get to learn, what does 2% feel like? What does 10% feel like? You get to…

0:12:11 SC: Exactly.

0:12:11 MK: Learn all of these things that in day-to-day life we never get to experience. And so it forces you to be more precise in your thinking, and it does so in an environment that’s controlled. It’s not life. Life is messy, life is noisy, there’s noisy feedback, you can always say, “Oh, it’s not my fault, it’s the fault of this or that,” and poker is much cleaner because it’s a game, it’s simpler. And so you can actually work through a lot of these kinks. And what I found as I started playing was that all of a sudden I was making better decisions away from the poker table, even when my poker playing was still not very good.

0:12:50 SC: Well, I thought it’s very interesting, at the end of the book, you mentioned that Nassim Taleb of Black Swan fame thinks that the kind of thing you’re doing by learning poker and imagining you can apply it to real life, is not a good idea because he thinks that the games are too simple to model reality.

0:13:05 MK: Absolutely, he calls it the ludic fallacy, and he says, “Don’t do this, it’s a fallacy.” And whenever you have a Nassim Taleb fallacy, you have to kind of start saying, “Oh-oh, [chuckle] am I screwing up? Am I doing something wrong?” And I think that he’s absolutely right, that poker is too simple, it’s not life, but I think that that’s where its strength lies, because you can test out so much without the fear of the worst possible outcome, because the worst possible outcome in poker is that you go broke. Again, if you’re playing cash, however much you bought in for that you lose it all. If you’re a crazy gambler, you might actually go broke. But probably unless you’re involved with some shady elements, you’re not gonna die.

0:13:56 SC: Yeah, hopefully. [chuckle]

0:13:58 MK: Hopefully. We hope. And there’s only so much that can happen. It’s not like life where anything can happen at any given moment. And so I think that that frees you up to explore, to actually explore different elements of how you can be. You can learn what does it feel like to be more aggressive? What does it feel like to do this? You can experiment, you can kind of play around with that. You can play around with different decisions and you can see the immediate feedback in a way that you don’t often get a chance to see in life. So I think the simplicity actually makes it a much more powerful teaching tool and one that ultimately can be incredibly applicable to life because of the fact that it’s stripped from a lot of those externalities that we experience in any other situation. That is messy. I totally agree with Taleb, that life is messy, that again, can’t model it perfectly, but I just don’t see that as a drawback. I see it as a strength.

0:15:00 SC: Yeah. No, as a physicist, I’m completely on your side in this difference because of course, you look at simplified Spherical Cow models to get sort of a feeling for the basics, and then you can try to tweak it and try to apply it to the messy real world. And the thing that fascinates people about poker is just like Von Neumann would have said it’s in that balanced region where there is randomness, you just can’t help it, you can do everything right and lose terribly, the variance is large. But it’s also clearly skill, right? And you can see that, “Well, there’re certain people who keep appearing at the winner’s circle in these tables.”

0:15:37 MK: Absolutely, absolutely. And the way that I actually explain to people who think, “Oh, so, you’re a gambler.” And I say, “No, I’m not a gambler, I’m a poker player. It’s two very different things. And poker is a game of skill.” And the way that I explain the difference between gambling, even like blackjack, where you can have a mathematical edge, but you’re still gambling. And poker, is that in poker, I can have the best hand and lose, and I can have the worst hand and win. And that’s a very skillful element, and in no other game in the casino is that the case. And so that to me is just the epitome of skill. And sure, in the short term, luck is huge. I could sit down with the best player in the world and beat him, and that’s not because I’m suddenly the best player in the world, it’s because I got very, very lucky. But if that same player and I were to play together 400 hours, 1,000 hours, 10,000 hours, the longer the horizon, the more clear it becomes that they are the better player. I won’t get lucky over the long term, the variance is going to catch up with me.

0:16:47 SC: Yeah, and I think that I like the example that you give, that human beings are bad at randomness. We should talk a lot about the different biases that people have, ’cause we make mistakes in trying to be rational at the time, and poker does sort of make us face up to them, but one of them is this difficulty in understanding what 2% means. Like you said, I remember even in the last election when people like Nate Silver were saying, Donald Trump has a 30% chance of winning, and then he won, and people said, “Well, you see he was wrong, ’cause there’s 70% chance that Clinton was gonna win.” But 30% chances happen all the time, I mean, even 2% chances happen all the time, right?

0:17:29 MK: Absolutely. Absolutely, it’s huge, it’s huge. People gave Nate so much crap for that. And I wanted to say, “Guys, look at how good his model was.” I mean, 30%, that’s enormous.

0:17:42 SC: That’s enormous.

0:17:43 MK: It’s just, I mean, 30% is just… It’s a hop, skip and a jump from 30 to 50.

0:17:49 SC: Right.

0:17:51 MK: And people just… I think one of the other things that poker has really taught me is that is to be more comfortable with uncertainty because the human mind… This is something that I’ve talked about a lot. It’s something that as a psychologist, I focus on a lot, the human mind just hates uncertainty. We’re very averse to it. We like to resolve it. We don’t like to be in this gray world. We like black and white. We like yes and no. We like to put labels on things. We like to be sure of something.

0:18:26 MK: It’s funny because my last book was about con artists, and the way that con artists often get people to fall for what they’re selling, is they give them certainty, they give them actually a story that makes sense, they give them explanations that makes sense. When people want them, they tell them what they want to hear. And that’s just not the way the world works. Uncertainty is a huge part of everyday life, and we never know everything, and poker just if you’re going to be good at poker, you have to become comfortable in the world of uncertainty. You have to become comfortable knowing that you’re never going to have all of the information and that can be… That’s a scary thing. That’s a scary proposition in a lot of ways.

0:19:11 SC: And probably you’re well aware of this from your psychology background, but one of the things human beings like to do is after the fact, they will come up with a story to why that thing had to happen. If whatever happened was just sort of predestined and it’s hard to just say, “Well, that’s the way the cookie crumbled that particular time.”

0:19:30 MK: Absolutely, absolutely. We have so much hindsight bias in the way that we analyze information that when… One of the things that I learned, while playing poker that I’ve then applied to other areas of life that I really just encourage people to do if they want to make better decisions, is keep track of your thinking in the moment. So that you have a tool to protect yourself against hindsight bias, so when… For instance, when I’m playing and I know that I’m going to have to talk through a hand with my coach, I think through my rationale “I’m raising here because X, Y and Z,” and I have to keep that in mind, it not only forces me to slow down and actually think through this decision and be reflective about it rather than reflexive about it and just do it because “Oh, this seems like a good place to bet.”

0:20:24 MK: But then it also gives me something to go back to and say “Did I make the decision for the right reason?” Because if the decision worked out, it’s so easy to say “Yeah, of course, I made it right for the right reasons.”

[chuckle]

0:20:36 MK: And it’s so powerful to do that because in life, we so often just say “Oh well, I knew that, but I did it because of blah, blah, blah,” and you didn’t know that, you’re actually rewriting history.

0:20:47 SC: All the time.

0:20:49 MK: Yep.

0:20:50 SC: And one of the things that von Neumann proved, I’m not gonna get exactly the theorem correctly, but a game like poker does have an optimal strategy, it has a strategy where in principle, if you played this way, no one else would consistently beat you, but no one knows what that is. So we have on the one hand, the sort of mathy problem of in one situation what should you do if you were perfectly rational? And then we have the psychology problem of, “Can I bring myself to be perfectly rational in this situation?” And how do you balance trying to learn those two things?

0:21:28 MK: Yeah, it’s a difficult thing to balance. And I don’t think we’re there yet. I don’t know when we’ll be there yet. One of the things that I love is that to this day, von Neumann was so far ahead of his time, but to this day, poker hasn’t been solved.

0:21:47 SC: Right.

0:21:47 MK: Go has been solved, so many things have. And poker I actually talked to some AI researchers while I was researching the book, to get a sense of what they were thinking, and I had no idea, I knew that there were AI teams working on no limit hold ’em, but I didn’t know that poker was actually the paragon of AI problems, that it was what people used to test AIs against to try to see how does this work. And even when they can get something close, it breaks down multi-way against many people, because as you were saying, there is this problem of how rational do I wanna be. There’s a constantly moving rationality because it’s different to say, “I can’t be exploited” and to say “I’m going to win.”

0:22:34 MK: Right. You want to play, so if you know who you’re playing against, the best strategy for you is not the game theoretical optimal strategy because you want to be exploiting the weaknesses in the people you’re playing against.

0:22:47 MK: Absolutely. Absolutely, but if you’re playing against someone who’s also very good and who understands that, then they might start exploiting you in turn, and you just have this constant dance back and forth, and then you start thinking “Oh, did they do this so that I would start exploiting them,” because they knew I would, so that then they could put me in this horrible situation where they’re going to counter exploit me much worse?

0:23:11 SC: Right.

0:23:11 MK: And it’s just this constant iterative analysis, that’s why it’s so human, that’s why it’s so difficult, that’s why it’s so fascinating and beautiful in the end.

0:23:22 SC: And the particular way that we fail to be rational at the poker table is called going on tilt, right? When something happens to you, and the poker players know that sometimes you’re not at your best, and I actually… I think even though I’m a big fan of poker and I’ve read lots of books about it, yours might have been the first book that pointed out you can go on tilt in a positive way. Like things are going too well for you and you become to think that you’re a genius as well as things are going terrible and you just become bitter.

0:23:51 MK: Yeah, absolutely. People do tend to think of tilts in a negative way and I think the reason that I was able to, or that I thought of it in a much broader way, is that because my background isn’t just decision-making. My advisor in graduate school was Walter Mischel, who people might know as The Marshmallow Guy, he was the man who had the Bing marshmallow studies, how long can you wait for a marshmallow? And he followed these preschool kids for decades. And showed that the amount of time that they waited actually predicted a lot of other things in life, and he called this delay of gratification. And I was Walter’s last grad student, and I had a chance to work with some of the old Bing students and to learn a lot about what self-control looks like and what emotion looks like and what tilt, even though I didn’t know the word tilt at the time… It’s a beautiful word, right?

0:24:52 SC: Perfect. Yeah.

0:24:52 MK: Shouldn’t we… I feel like we should use it in every context. It’s so good and it can be so evocative, and it can be used in as every single part of speech, which I love. It’s a perfect four letter word.

[laughter]

0:25:08 MK: But anyhow, after that ode to the word tilt, I saw that it could actually… That that emotionality could be from a very positive source. It’s not that the kids were mad at the marshmallow or whatever it was they wanted. It was wonderful, they craved it, it was a very positive emotion. But it impaired their thinking and impaired their decision-making because they were in such an excited state, so when I learnt the notion of tilt, I was already looking to see, “Oh, well, I know that emotions can actually be positive and negative, and if it’s an emotion, and if it’s an emotion that’s incidental rather than central to this decision, then it’s going to make me less rational.”

0:25:55 MK: And then it’s going to make me take a decision, make a judgment that I wouldn’t otherwise make because I’m relying on an emotion that has nothing to do with it. And so in poker when most people think tilt they think, “Oh, the angry guy.” The person who’s losing and who’s just getting mad at everyone and who’s fuming and who just says, “Oh fine, you can’t bully me around anymore, watch this.” But there’s also the player who is winning and who thinks this is amazing. Like, “I can do no wrong.” As you said, “I’m a genius.” People always become geniuses when they’re winning.

0:26:33 SC: Oh yeah.

0:26:34 MK: It’s just… It’s crazy. They just suddenly… They know everything. And so if you’re making decisions because you think you’re on a roll, or if you’re making decisions because you feel like you’re owed the chips because everything’s just going your way, and so you say, “Oh, I’m just gonna call with these two cards because I’m hitting everything.” If you start making decisions like that you’re also on tilt because you’re also no longer thinking through things in a rational way, and you’re letting completely incidental things color how you’re processing the current situation. Just like probability doesn’t have a memory, your stack of poker chips doesn’t have a memory. It doesn’t know that you’ve just won a hundred big blinds or whatever it is.

0:27:18 MK: There’s no momentum.

0:27:20 MK: Exactly, exactly. They’re just chips. And we just… We love imbuing all sorts of things with personality and with meaning and with intention but… So it’s just noise. It’s just stuff that does not care about us. It has no emotions, it has no memory, it doesn’t care whether we’re winning or losing. The deck doesn’t care, it’s gonna be the deck.

0:27:46 SC: But nevertheless, I agree with all of these things, and yet I like you and everyone else in the world who has played poker has these experiences where immediately after you do something, or at least 10 seconds after you know like, “Wow, that was a really irrational thing to do.” And you can know what the rational thing to do is and yet you don’t do it. And I guess my two questions, very tiny questions… I’m sure you can answer very quickly. Number one, why does that happen? Do we do things that part of our brains certainly know this is irrational. And number two, are there practical strategies that you learned from poker or from this journey you were on for doing that a little bit less?

0:28:31 MK: Yeah, there’s a big difference between theory and execution, and there are a lot of steps in between. So I find myself still… Many, many times I can see myself from the outside, I know what the correct move is and I don’t make it. Because usually it’s an emotional reason. I’m scared. I don’t think it’s going to work. I don’t want to lose a lot of chips. I don’t want to take on the risk, I’m feeling risk averse. Or I’m feeling very risk seeking, and even though I know I should fold and I know the correct decision here is that I don’t have the best cards I’m just mad at this person, they’re just rubbing me the wrong way and I wanna do it anyway and so I do it. And right away I say, “Oh my God, I know I should fold right now.” So it happens in both directions. And usually it’s an emotional reason.

0:29:23 MK: And sometimes it’s also an execution problem where you just… You theoretically know, but you don’t trust yourself enough. And so in poker… And I think this is true everywhere in life, if you’re not feeling it it’s not going to work because people can see that. They can sense weakness, they can sense hesitation, they can sense when you’re bluffing in a sense even if you’re not bluffing. So in a negotiation, if you say, “Well, I want a raise,” but they can see that you’re really scared and you’re scared of saying that. And that you’re not gonna walk away and you’re not going to get that raise.

0:30:02 SC: Yeah.

0:30:03 MK: And it’s something where there’s a disconnect between what you know you should do, what you actually do and then if you do it and that disconnect is still there it’s still not going to work. So you need to have everything be in sync. And that’s difficult. So I think the way that one does that is first through practice. So you have to just do it over and over and over. People who study too much theory of anything, whether it’s in poker or in some other arena and don’t actually practice, don’t actually do these things, don’t actually put themselves out there and play hands, whether it’s actual hands or metaphorical hands, without that practice you’re not going to be able to get comfortable. You’re not going to be able to execute under pressure.

0:31:00 MK: What you’re trying to do is get it into that part of your brain where it becomes almost instinct, where it becomes something that’s easy for you to do. It’s like when you’re learning any new skill. Think about something like… Well, this is a horrible example for me because I don’t know how to drive. But think about what I imagine learning how to drive is for most people. That at the beginning, you have to try to coordinate everything, everything is kind of a little scary. You really have to pay attention to everything, and then at some point it all goes on autopilot, so to speak. And things become much easier and then you can also start executing things that you couldn’t do before, like three-point turns, which I still… I’m not quite sure what they are but I know they’re scary.

0:31:52 SC: But this makes sense… This makes sense in sort of Kahneman’s distinction between System 1 and System 2, right? Where I think it’s System 1 is all the automated subconscious things going on and system two is your conscious cognition that takes a lot of brain power to focus on, and so what you’re saying is, what we can try to teach ourselves to do is to move as many processes from System 2 into System 1, right? Make them subconscious. And then, that leaves system two with its very precious, finite amount of brain power to think about the important cases that are not automatically solved by our newly found instincts.

0:32:31 MK: Exactly, exactly. A lot of it comes down to that, and a lot of it comes down to realizing when we need to put system two online. When I was just starting to play poker, it was really hard for me to execute any sort of meaningful bluffs because I was just So worried about paying attention to everything. And it’s also because I had a very good teacher who would tell me, “I need you to pay attention to the stack size as I need you to pay attention to how many times this person has raised in the last 10 hands or 100 hands or whatever”, just all of these things, and I’m thinking, “Ah, you know, I can’t even find the poker room in the casino, how am I ever going to think about all of these things at once. And slowly, slowly, slowly, you start… That becomes second nature because you’re getting used to doing it, and then all of a sudden you can think. You start being able to think, “Okay, are these the right cards to bluff with in this situation? Is this the right time to raise? Is this the right time to make the move?” That still doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to do it. Because you still might be scared because you might do it once and it doesn’t work, you get caught and then you feel sheepish. And you don’t wanna try it again. Or you don’t get caught, it works, and then you become a little bit too optimistic and start making mistakes in the other direction.

0:33:52 MK: And so you have to keep doing it over and over, and you have to get to a point where it’s comfortable and where… To me, one of the things that actually really helped me, and this is very funny because I’m a psychologist. The last Math class I took was in high school, that’s not my background at all. I was very nervous starting poker that I would need advanced mathematics. Eric told me, “No, you don’t. You’ll be fine, as long as you can add, subtract, multiply, divide, you’ll be fine.” So I always thought my edge was going to be psychological, which it is, however, the thing that actually helped me learn to be more confident in executing bluffs and executing moves and figuring all of that out and actually putting into practice what I knew I should do in theory was working with solvers and working with this highly mathematical thing.

0:34:45 MK: I don’t need to understand how to run Monte Carlo simulations, the computer can do it for me. But if I do it and if I understand the inputs and understand what I’m working with, and then look at the output, and then try to reason through why. Why does the computer say that I should bluff with this particular hand with this particular card, and you suddenly start to see the logic behind it, see the thinking behind it, and then when you’re playing, it doesn’t feel like a bluff, it feels like, “Oh, I know that I should do this here with this card, this percent of the time.” I’m not bluffing, I’m actually just executing the strategy that I should based on what I’m holding, based on what I’m seeing, based on what I’m doing.

0:35:30 MK: Of course, it’s not… It’s nowhere in the space especially for me, especially for someone who isn’t mathematically inclined, but that was very surprising to me that a mathematical tool actually helped me psychologically be able to be more confident about some of these situations where in the past couldn’t execute, where I couldn’t quite pull a trigger.

0:35:52 SC: It does make me wonder because I’m wondering about, again, why we do have these failure modes or these mistakes. Kahneman talks, I think, a little bit about how some of our heuristics and our instincts have evolved for certain reasons, but it almost sounds like what we should be aiming for at the poker table is to remove emotions from our decision-making process entirely, to become Spock or data as much as possible, and maybe that is a difference between playing poker and living our lives.

0:36:25 MK: Absolutely, absolutely, but I actually think that what we should aspire to do is, first of all, I think we should realize that we can’t remove emotions entirely because we’re emotional creatures, we’re human, and it’s not always good, it’s not always the right thing to do to remove emotion from a situation. There was a lot of work that was done by Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist on something called the Iowa gambling task. I won’t get into that task because that task has a lot of problems with it, but it was since replicated in other gambling environments. And he looked at people who actually had cortical damage, whose brains did not process risk, so they had no risk aversion whatsoever. And they ended up, not doing well, they went broke.

0:37:18 MK: So people who just couldn’t experience the fear of risk at all went broke and did not make good decisions. And so sometimes, emotions are actually important. Sometimes, emotions keep us from going broke. They’re there for a reason because they’re central to the decision. So I think what we need to learn is to actually be more mindful and more self-reflective, and pay more attention to ourselves as we play so that we can, one, identify when we’re feeling an emotion. Two, figure out what the emotion is and where it’s coming from so that we can, 99% of the time, we want to discard it and say, “Okay, emotion, I see you’re here. I’m gonna put you aside. I know I’m feeling you, but you’re not important for my decision. Let me just put you here and make my decision without you.” And then that 1% say, “Okay, you’re actually telling me something important. Maybe I should listen to you. Maybe it is time for me to step away from the table because I’m just not capable of thinking clearly right now because I’m too angry. I can’t control it. I can’t actually put it aside,” or whatever it is. So I think it’s a lot of it is about learning to see those patterns, those thought patterns, those reaction patterns in yourself so that you can then just account for them and acknowledge them, and then put them aside and make a decision without them.

0:38:49 SC: Yeah, and the idea of bluffing is probably one of the regimes in poker where emotions come in pretty strongly. And I remember being very impressed by, when they first appreciated it, I think it was von Neumann who proved that whatever the best strategy is in a game like poker, it’s going to be a mixed strategy where you don’t do the same thing every time in exactly the same situation. And that is exactly the kind of things human beings are just not very good at judging. And so, you have to be in a situation where you know what the on-average best play is, and yet, not do it sometimes. And I don’t know whether… Yeah, there’s probably some mixture of bringing emotions into the game ’cause you wanna be a little bit of a daredevil, but also suppressing the wrong emotions in these kinds of times.

0:39:38 MK: Absolutely, absolutely. And we are very bad at mixed strategies and oftentimes, we think we’re randomizing. That’s a very popular term in poker these days, that you’re randomizing your strategy. You know, “25% of the time, I do this and 75%, I do that.” And we don’t normally. It’s very hard for humans to do that. And so what a lot of actually the best players do is they have some sort of randomizer so that they… For instance, I know a lot of players look at a watch and they look at where the second hand is, and they have… Because they can look to see if it’s between 12 and one, or one and two, et cetera, then they have their randomizer. And if it happens at 10 times in a row, they’re doing the play that they don’t really wanna be doing, well, so be it because they just look at that and that’s what they’ll do. And that’s true randomization, or as true as you can get at a poker table, but it’s still incredibly difficult. And yeah, emotion really does play into it. That’s why we don’t randomize correctly. That’s why we don’t mix well because we often just say, “Oh, I know that I’m supposed to do this whatever percent of the time. I feel like doing this right now, so I’m just gonna do it.”

0:40:53 SC: Yeah, but I actually have a theory about this ’cause I know about that trick of looking into your watch with the second hand to randomize, but we also know that human beings are bad at feeling what real random sequences are like. And part of me thinks that what we should be aiming to do is not to be random, but to appear random. [chuckle] We should try to give the opponents at the table the appearance that we do something 30% of the time, whether or not it’s actually that way. So I think that it would actually be better just to judge, “Well, I’ve done this the last three times, and I know that I should do it only three out of four times, so next time, with a 100% probability, I’m gonna do the other thing.”

0:41:35 MK: I think that’s really smart. When I was researching The Biggest Bluff, I met this man who’s a really fascinating thinker, his name is Frank Lantz, and he runs the gaming center at NYU. And he…

0:41:47 SC: I should… Sorry, Maria. I should say that both Antonio Damasio and Frank Lantz are previous Mindscape guests, so the audiences know about them, yes.

0:41:53 MK: Oh, fascinating! That’s great! Okay, excellent. So I had a chance to talk to Frank Lantz, and he has done a lot with game design. And what he told me is that actually, a lot of people, when they’re designing games, they design the probabilities incorrectly on purpose because they know that the human mind doesn’t experience real probabilities in a good way. So they know that players will get frustrated if it’s really random and they’re just on a losing streak. And so they actually skew it, they skew their randomizers so it’s not truly random. And one of the reasons he loves poker is because you can’t do that in poker, and poker is a naturally random game. And so he thinks that it forces us to acknowledge that, and that it forces the human mind to actually take that into account and to be… Just to hit over the head with it and deal with it. And he actually thinks that it’s a perfectly designed game, but one that modern game designers would never design because…

0:42:56 SC: Interesting, yeah.

0:42:57 MK: People would… Players would actually just rebel and say, “This is rigged.” And if you think about it, think of how many times people play poker online and say, “This is rigged. This is a rigged site.”

0:43:06 SC: Oh, yeah.

[chuckle]

0:43:08 MK: “How could I keep losing over and over?” Because they don’t understand that true probabilities can look like that, and that sometimes, yeah, you get quads four times in an hour on a table.

0:43:18 SC: Yeah, yeah. And the flip side of that is that we can say how poker is a merciless teacher and makes you try to be as rational as possible yet, we both know real poker players, and some of them are pretty darn emotional and convinced that all the luck in the world goes against them, right? We can name names.

[chuckle]

0:43:36 MK: Absolutely, absolutely. We will not name names. I got… Talk about luck, I got so damn lucky that Erik Seidel was the person I wanted to coach me and that he said yes. Because he is just one of the calmest, just most even-keeled people you’ll ever meet. He does not tilt. And the fact that he would just nip all of those bad thought habits in the bud for me, that was so powerful because I wanted to do the same thing. I would start telling him bad beat stories, and for non-poker players, bad beat stories are basically when you should have won, but you didn’t. Someone sucked out on you, or set over set, someone had higher cards than you, and just the world went against you and you wanna start ranting and raving.

0:44:24 MK: And the first time I tried to do that, he yelled at me. It’s very hard to imagine, if you’ve ever met Erik Seidel, raising his voice, but he came… It was as close to a yell as I’ve ever heard. And he explained to me that this was just a really, really horrible way of thinking, that I should not dwell on that because, “Yeah, that happens, that’s just variance. I can’t control the outcome.” And so, it’s a bad mental habit and it’s going to make me a worse player, and I think he’s absolutely right. Because if you keep dwelling on the bad beats, it’s gonna affect your decision, it’s gonna affect your emotions. It’s gonna make you a less pleasant person to be around, but it also just actually affects how you process hands and how you process information. And I’m so grateful to him, even though in the moment, I was pretty upset and I wanted to just let him… Have him listen to me. I’m so grateful to him because these days, I don’t remember how I bust tournaments most of the time unless it was a very interesting hand. I don’t even remember those hands because all I remember is, “When did I make an interesting decision? When were there interesting thought problems? What went wrong or what went right? How could my decision improve?” Not what the outcome was.

0:45:47 MK: And Eric would always say, “I can listen to the hand. I want you to tell me the hand if you have a question about it, if there’s something interesting.” And he even… So when we discuss hands together, he doesn’t care how it ended. After my river decision is done, he doesn’t care if I won or lost. In fact, he doesn’t even wanna know. That information is totally irrelevant. All he cares about are the decision modes leading up to it. And I think that’s so powerful and that really… It’s very also… It’s very freeing because if you just think that way about everything, not just poker, it really helps you, I think, let go of things and just be a much more even-keeled person. Now, I understand why Erik is such… Just a Zen master.

0:46:33 SC: Well, I think Zen master is exactly the term I was gonna bring up. It’s almost monkly or saintly, this idea that the process and what we do is what we should be focusing our judgment on, not the outcome. In the real world, the idea of being results-oriented sounds like a compliment, but poker players use it as an insult ’cause you care about what the result was, not whether or not you made the right decision.

0:46:57 MK: Absolutely, absolutely. And being results-oriented is one of the worst mistakes you can make as a poker player because it’s going to stop you from improving because you’re going to take the wrong information and you’re going to draw the wrong conclusions. If a really bad decision works out a few times, you’re like, “Oh, I should always do this because they always fold here.” And no, you just got very lucky, you got lucky twice, and that’s all that happened, you made really, really bad decisions.

0:47:27 SC: Right.

0:47:30 MK: And so it’s so important not to be results-oriented. And that actually… It also keeps… I think one of the reasons that Erik has had the longevity that he’s had is because he’s been very savvy about managing his money, even when he’s winning, because he knows what variance looks like. He knows that no matter how much he wins now, that doesn’t mean he’s going to keep winning at the same rate. So many players who could have been great players just went broke because they go on a hot streak, the variance is in their favor, they make a lot of money, and then whoops! They stop winning, but by that point, they’ve already spent it all. And there they go, there goes their career. So I think that it’s important not just not to be results-oriented not just when you’re playing poker, but to then take that thinking in a broader way.

0:48:21 SC: Well, and that’s a lesson where maybe slightly less confidently, but we can apply it to broader questions of outcomes and results in life. There are people who do take wild risks. Many of them fail, we never hear of them. Some of them do really, really well, and in their minds and the minds of the rest of the world, they’re geniuses and could do no wrong. But if a million people flip a bunch of coins, some of them are gonna get 10 heads in a row.

0:48:50 MK: Absolutely, absolutely. And then the ones who are successful write books and use hand play bias to explain exactly why they were successful, and then other people try to do it because you’re choosing on the dependent variable, which you know you cannot do.

0:49:04 SC: Yeah. Not supposed to do.

0:49:06 MK: You need to have… Exactly. You know you need to have all those other cases, “Okay, well, what about all the companies that did everything you’re doing and failed? Or all the people who did everything you’re doing and failed?” And it’s so hard for us to think that way. We look at the success stories and we want an explanation. We want certainty. We want a story. We want a narrative. We want to know what brought you from point A to point B. And it’s so easy, once the success is there, to supply the reasons.

0:49:34 SC: And this is very unlike academia or journalism where the best people, inevitably, rise to the top for reasons of value and virtue. [chuckle]

0:49:43 MK: Absolutely, always. [chuckle]

0:49:44 SC: Just so that everyone knows, yeah, just so everyone… And podcasting also, yes.

0:49:48 MK: Oh, absolutely, best podcaster.

0:49:49 SC: Speaking of which, yeah. [chuckle] You were a trained psychologist, and this was, I guess, your pitch to Erik Seidel, one of the world’s best poker players. You’re bringing a slightly different angle to this. Did it help? Did being a trained psychologist, when you sit down at the table, once you know the basic mathematical formulas and probabilities, were you able to psychologize your fellow players a little bit? And was that a useful skill?

0:50:18 MK: Absolutely, I actually do think that being an outsider, more broadly, but a psychologist and a journalist, really helped me. So the psychology part helped me identify a lot of the things and a lot of the dynamics that I was seeing. And so I had a framework within which to work so that I knew… I could not just see the bias; I could name the bias. I knew what was happening and it helped me address it better because I had this metacognitive awareness that I think a lot of people who are playing at the poker table don’t have simply because that’s not their background, that’s not their framework, that’s not the way they think through things. But I think that that really helped. And also knowing how people can tilt in a lot of different ways helped me identify positive tilt, helped me identify all of these dynamics.

0:51:11 MK: So Walter Mischel, my advisor, he had this theory that basically, we all only exist within situational contexts and we’re different people in different contexts. And what you need to know in order to figure out, “Well, what kind of a person is this?” is to have something that he called a behavioral signature for them. Given that this happens, what happens then? So he’d say something like, “There’s no such thing as a person who’s risk-seeking. There’s a person who’s risk-seeking in certain environments, but maybe in other environments, that person is very risk-averse. There’s no such thing as a person who’s just sociable 100% of the time. You might be very extroverted, you’re very outgoing, love people, but believe me, I will find that person with whom you are not only not sociable, but you become the least sociable person in the world. I will find that situation.” And so, having that sort of background and having that sort of approach to people really helped me, I think, identify dynamics at the table that other people might have missed.

0:52:18 MK: And I actually use it a lot in the sense that I talk to people. I talk a lot at the poker table, not when I’m playing; when I’m in a hand, I don’t talk at all. But when I’m sitting, I get to know people. I try to figure out, “Where are you coming from? Why are you playing? What’s motivating you?” I try to get at some of their inner psychology because that helps me understand them and that helps me understand why they might make certain decisions, why they might make certain plays. I’ve gotten much better at it over time. In the beginning, I was bad, just flat out bad because I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking for and I didn’t know poker. And so I lacked part of that context, but I think over time, I got much better. And then the journalist part of me, I think, was incredibly helpful because I’m used to listening. I’m used to being in the background and just letting people tell me their stories. And at the poker table, it’s so valuable not to have your own ego at the table and to just look at everyone else and let them tell you what their stories are. I think that’s one of the things that actually is my biggest edge, is that I try to keep my ego out of it.

0:53:28 SC: Well, one of the great things about your book, I think, is that you seem to delight, you take a special pleasure in talking about your failures, when something went terribly wrong. [chuckle] But that’s what’s educational to the rest of us. And one of them was that early on in your career, you would make what I… Maybe this is a term of art in psychology, but you called it thin-sliced judgements where basically, judging someone on their appearances and leaping to a conclusion too quickly and ignoring contrary signals. So that’s another thing that poker, I guess, teaches us to be better at.

0:54:09 MK: Oh, absolutely. And yes, this is a term of art in psychology where you use a thin slice of someone to then just make a judgement about everything. And there are so many stories I could tell you about poker, but usually, they involve guys in tank tops and with big biceps and tattoos. That’s usually… And usually, facial hair, too. That’s how a lot of these stories start because I just see…

0:54:26 SC: But also… Or little, old ladies, right? There are things that you…

0:54:29 MK: Or little, old ladies, yes that too, that too. Or little, old ladies. And those are the two strongest, but boy, was I wrong in so many instances where I just saw a guy like that, I’m like, “He’s a bully. He’s gonna be a total poker bro and he’s gonna be trying to… ” And a lot of times, they’re not. They’re just normal players or sometimes, they’re even very tight and they aren’t aggressive at all. And if they’re aggressive, you have to be really careful. And the little, old ladies, even though you think that they’re your best friend and that they’re harmless and that they’re so nice and sweet and wonderful, if they’re good poker players, and a lot of them are, they will then throw that right back at you and there’s no female solidarity there.

[chuckle]

0:55:14 SC: Nope, they’ll be telling you that you’re a sweet, young darling while they’re counting your chips in their stack, right?

0:55:19 MK: Exactly, exactly. There’s a saying in poker, “There are no friends at the poker table,” and it’s so easy to forget it. I’ve forgotten it so many times. I still sometimes forget it because I don’t wanna be mean or I think…

0:55:33 SC: Yeah, you wanna be friends, but nothing personal.

0:55:36 MK: Yeah, or, “You can’t possibly be bluffing me. We were having such a nice conversation.”

0:55:40 SC: I know, I know. Well, Jennifer and I both like playing poker, but we won’t play at the same table in the casino together. It’s just asking for trouble.

0:55:49 MK: Absolutely, absolutely. I think that that’s a very wise policy. I hope you’re never at the table in the tournament together. There have been some interesting situations with… I don’t know if you know the Greenwood brothers, Sam and Luc, they are identical twins and sometimes… And they’re both high stakes tournament players, both really nice guys, really ethical. There’s never been any hint of anything untoward between the two of them, but it’s awkward, right? You’re sitting right next to your identical twin. You’re like, “Okay, I’m gonna have to bluff you,” because that’s what’s going on and they do, they do not soft play each other, sometimes it’s just vicious when you watch them on a TV table and you’re like, “Oooh, Ooooh, that’s awful.”

0:56:35 SC: You could see it happening, yeah. Well, one of the themes in your book that’s relevant to this is you have a search for the right metaphor to bring to your adventure as a poker player, like you started off… I forget, but there was like you were an army general, and then you were a jazz musician and a detective, and then eventually a storyteller, right? I mean you realise that… And this was in your wheelhouse, like when you look at these people who you’re playing with, telling an inner story about who they are, and more specifically telling a story about that particular hand and the actions they took in it was very helpful in deciding how to respond.

0:57:13 MK: Absolutely, you’re so right. I tried on so many hats as I went on this journey, and it was so funny to realise that at the end of the day, storytelling, which is what I’ve always done, is the thing that can serve me the best. I mean, sometimes you have to… You realise that the tools you already have are the ones that really do work incredibly well, and this was actually an insight that I got from Phil Galfond, who is also just this wonderful poker player, great guy who spent a lot of time working with me as well.

0:57:51 MK: And at some point, he told me to try to use what I already know, to try to use my storytelling skills, and when he said that, that actually made something click because I realised everyone does tell stories at the poker table. Every single action is part of a narrative and that helps you, when you’re thinking about how other people play, it helps you analyse it because you’re not trying to think, “Okay, the probability of him, blah, blah, blah is X,” because as we’ve already talked about, most people aren’t rational, aren’t playing in such a very strict game theoretical way. They’re human and they’re trying to tell you a story, so you look for inconsistencies, you look for what they’ve said, you look for… Does everything add up or not? And it also helps you play better because you start thinking, “Okay, does my story make sense? And what’s the story I want to tell? And how do I tell it from the beginning?” It helps you lay out your plan of attack. It helps you lay out your strategy before you make the first move, because you have to think through the whole story, you have to think through the whole narrative.

0:59:03 MK: And like with any story you have to be willing to change. So sometimes you’re writing and you realize that your outline was wrong, that what you thought was going to happen in this piece or in this book isn’t what’s happening and then you have to re-evaluate. And I think that, that kind of flexibility is also very important in poker because you could have the story, the outline, the idea for a hand… What’s going to happen, and then the information just changes drastically. And you need to be willing to then scrap it and say, “Okay, well, what was the story I was telling? How does this new information fit into it?” And, “Can I adjust it or not?” And sometimes the answer is, no. And that’s when you know, “Okay, I need to give up.”

0:59:44 SC: Yeah…

0:59:45 MK: This is not a story that’s gonna end well.

0:59:47 SC: I remember when I started playing poker one of the dumbest things that I would do was I would… 20 minutes or half an hour had gone by and I had not bluffed at all so I would decide before the hand started that I was gonna bluff this hand. And that’s just not good, because if you learn a little bit you realize there are good places to do that kind of thing and bad places, and you have to be able to adapt to that story in real time. Another thing that human beings are just bad at, right? We tend to make a plan and bullheadedly go forward with the plan.

1:00:18 MK: Absolutely, absolutely. We tend to not always be the most flexible creatures.

1:00:23 SC: No.

1:00:24 MK: And we often don’t like reacting to new things and new developments and new circumstances. Once again, I think it’s that aversion to uncertainty. We have a game plan and we wanna follow the game plan. Don’t try to tell me the game plan has changed. I prepared for this game plan.

1:00:45 SC: Yep.

1:00:47 MK: And it’s a skill. I think it’s something that we can all learn. We can all be better at. It’s something that I am still working on everyday. I think all of these elements that you learn in poker are things that you just have to keep working on. And I think the moment that you say, “I’ve mastered this,” is actually the moment you should be really scared. Because none of these are things that I think ever can be mastered fully.

1:01:13 SC: Well, we should give our listeners who are either current or potential poker players some tangible advice that they can use to improve their games. I was thinking you can give whatever advice you think is most interesting, but I was gonna ask about tells. About the idea that something someone says or does or gestures or facial expressions at the poker table can give away whether they’re strong or weak, or bluffing, or telling the truth. Do you think… Is that a real thing? Is that something that the experts rely a lot on?

1:01:45 MK: I think tells are a real thing, and I think that they’re under used. That said, I think that at the highest levels there are far fewer tells than at the lower levels because the better a player is the fewer tells there are.

1:02:02 SC: Makes sense.

1:02:03 MK: And a lot of times tells don’t look like what you think they’re going to look like. So a lot of times people are looking at things like, “Oh, did he fidget? Did he do this, did he do that? Oh, he looked up” and I’ve heard that looking up is a sign of lying. And things like that. Just gestures and very specific things. Most of the times those are too noisy. Because in order for a tell to tell you anything it needs to be something that’s reliable. And for that you need a lot of observation and frankly just don’t have enough time at a poker table to get enough instances to know whether something is actually a tell or a noise. But the way that tells, I think, work much better is if you start looking at deviations from behaviour. So just pay attention. My number one piece of advice is, pay attention to all of the players.

1:03:02 MK: It’s really hard if you’re sitting at a full table so start with the two players to your left because those are the players that you’ll be playing with most often, because you are the button when they’re the blinds, and so you’ll just automatically be in pots with them more often than with other players at the table. And just watch them and look, how are they sitting, how are they acting normally when they’re not playing, how are they acting in a hand and try to get all of the data that you can. So whenever a hand goes to show down, whenever you actually see what they had, think back through how they acted and how they played that hand. Were they bluffing or not, because you have some concrete evidence. And then you can actually start drawing some sort of vague connection.

1:03:56 MK: And then what you wanna be looking for is any deviations from how they normally behave. So if they’re normally sitting in one way and then suddenly their posture has shifted. It might shift differently for every single person and so that a shift in posture in and of itself, if someone’s suddenly sitting more still or someone’s moving more, that doesn’t mean they’re bluffing or not bluffing. What about this specific person? Have they acted this way before, and if not, try to figure out what does it mean based on the information you have. And even then, be careful. And try to use that…

1:04:30 SC: Well… But that’s the hard thing. If someone does something very much out of character it could be ’cause they’re either really weak or really strong, it’s just that they’re not in the middle.

1:04:40 MK: Exactly. Exactly. That’s why I said, try to look at show downs, try to see if that happens when they show a hand down and you see were they strong or were they weak. But like I said, even then be careful because that should not be the thing on which you base your decision.

1:05:00 SC: Yeah.

1:05:00 MK: It should be kind of the drop in the bucket if you need more information. So I try not to have a tell be the thing that I rely on the most. Under rare circumstances, people have tells that are real. So I had… I once played with a guy who when he was weak you could just tell, his whole posture just shifted. And it was so funny. And I was so sad when we were moved to different tables…

1:05:29 SC: Of course.

1:05:30 MK: Because I loved playing with him. But that’s rare.

1:05:34 SC: It’s for like the tie-breaker. I mean, you still gotta figure out what your percentages are and how you’ll handle this.

1:05:39 MK: Exactly, exactly. A tie-breaker is a wonderful way of looking at it, but I do think it’s important to pay attention to how people are acting, because sometimes you’ll also pick up on cues that you don’t even realize you’re picking up on.

1:05:52 SC: Okay, and also the expectation to pay attention is very crucial because, over and above the tells, right, you’re building up a model of this person, how they act in different circumstances, and it might have… It might be completely based on their actions, not on their facial expressions, their actions in the sense of what their bets and raises are and stuff like that, but that’s… People are different. And that’s kind of crucial.

1:06:17 MK: Absolutely, absolutely. And then one of the other things that I write about in the book, that I won’t go into detail now, but that I think is fascinating is that paying attention to people’s hands can actually be one of the physical things that is the most telling. So people tend to move differently, tend to move their hands differently, when they’re different degrees of strong. I think that’s really interesting.

1:06:41 SC: So if you’re… One of your goals, anyway, at the beginning of the project was not just to win hundreds of thousands of dollars in poker tournaments, but to learn to be a better thinker and reasoner and so forth. Did it work? Is the rest of your life affected by your… The training you have in poker, and can other people, you think, improve their mental game by practicing at the poker tables?

1:07:02 MK: Absolutely, absolutely. My thinking has become so much stronger just around everything, and I feel a difference in how I approach situations, how I break them down. And my ability to really try to gauge the quality of a decision without looking at the outcome, without thinking about the outcome, that’s not something that I was good at before, and I mean, sometimes it’s still really difficult to think that way, but at least I try. I’ve become much better at identifying my emotions. I think I’ve become a much stronger person because I’ve had to confront a lot of the kind of internal issues I’ve had, that would make me much more passive at a poker table, that would make me fold, that would make me kind of play in a sub-optimal way, because I’ve had to confront it in poker, I think that has made me more able to confront it in my personal life. So I’ve had some negotiations where I was able to get more money than I otherwise would for instance, like a very practical thing came out of it.

1:08:09 SC: Yeah.

1:08:09 MK: That was only because I was thinking in these kind of poker terms. And I think especially right now with everything going on in the world, the fact that I think poker has really made me realize and try to internalize a lot of the tenets of stoicism that I’d studied as an undergrad, but never really understood what it meant. I think that that’s really served me well; The idea of controlling what you can and focusing on those things that you can control, and then letting go of the things that you can’t, realizing the world is going to happen, bad things are going to happen, good things are going to happen, just things are going to happen, I can’t control them, so let me focus on the things that are actually within my power, let me work on honing my skills in the areas where they’re actually going to be helpful. The quality of my decision process, the quality of my emotional reactions of the way that I think and respond. And the outside world, well, I can’t control that, so let me not expend my emotional energy, let me not expend my mental space, trying to worry about it too much.

1:09:25 SC: Yeah, no, I think that’s a super valuable lesson, but it brings me back to something that I said before, but I’ll raise it again, because there are some poker players that seem to live up to that ideal of sort of Zen-like detachment, and then you found in Erik Seidel, a mentor, maybe Dan Harrington, who you also talked to for the book is like that, but there’s a lot of very successful poker players who just seem like crazy thrill seekers in some way, right? And even if they win a million dollars, they lose it playing Baccarat the next day, so there’s clearly some weird balance, give and take, or maybe just some ability to turn on and turn off that irrational thrill seeking, that… ’cause you need to be able to say, “You know what, I have a really bad hand, but I think I can force this push, person to fold, so I’m just gonna make a crazy bluff.” And that’s that… I don’t know whether a Zen-like detachment is the right attitude to bring to that.

[laughter]

1:10:25 MK: No, I think that’s a very valid point. And I think that if you’re the kind of player who knows exactly why you’re running a crazy bluff and you’re doing it with a very logical approach, I mean, even an Erik Seidel or a Dan Harrington, is perfectly capable of executing an insane bluff, in the right moment, against the right person. They don’t just do it because they feel like this is the moment to bluff, they don’t do it for irrational reasons. And I do think that a lot of players who are really great poker players and then not so great at life, they’re capable of doing that at the poker table, but then they just… They turn it off somehow…

1:11:07 SC: Yeah, okay.

1:11:09 MK: They don’t apply it to any other context. I talked earlier about kind of this metacognitive awareness, well, they don’t have it. For them, they can do it at the poker table and then they just let it all go somewhere else. Someone else who I met during the process of writing this book, who unfortunately died as I was writing it, was one of Erik’s mentors, Paul Magriel, known as X22, and X is a perfect example of someone who was brilliant at games, horrible in life, knew it, and it was still the case, he couldn’t quite get over it.

1:11:46 SC: Because human beings are complicated messes of different little sub-processes, right? We’re not a unified singular curl cheetos, or whatever, we have different parts to ourselves that we bring to different situations.

1:12:00 MK: Exactly, and we’re complex, where it’s shades of gray, it’s not black and white, there’s a lot of uncertainty, there’s a lot of unknown, and there’s just, there’s a lot of complexity there, and I think that that’s a wonderful thing.

1:12:13 SC: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. We should celebrate it, but so to finish up, I’m not even sure if this is a question or just a statement that maybe you can expand upon. But aside from poker, and aside from rationality, and emotions, and bringing them into line and things like that, your book is also a story about just taking a wild leap into learning something, not as a young kid, that is a completely different world, right? It’s a testament to the excitement and the potential downfall sometimes of just throwing yourself whole-heartedly into something that’s pretty alien. What are your feelings about that, having done it? You tell these great stories about going on helicopters in Monte Carlo and casinos in Macau and so forth.

1:13:03 MK: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely true. It was a huge leap and it just scared the crap out of me, in every single way, both because I took an established career, and said, “I’m gonna put you on hold and I’m gonna just go into this crazy world.” And so many people I respected told me I was insane. They said, “You know, you can’t stop writing regularly for the New Yorker, everyone’s gonna forget your name, they’re gonna forget who you are, you need to be in front of people, you need to be… You need to build the momentum of your career, you need to build your reputation, you can’t do this.” Other people would say, “Well, if you’re gonna pull a George Plimpton and go all experiential journalism, why poker? It’s gambling. It’s horrible. It’s this awful thing. Why go into that world?” And so I had a lot of these thoughts in the back of my mind, that this might be a terrible mistake, and I was really scared. And then I was really scared also to write this book because I’m not a first person journalist. Normally, I only write about other people, I don’t use I. I don’t remember the last time I used I in a piece I wrote. And this book was going to be completely different.

1:14:17 MK: And so that was also a huge leap of faith for me. I didn’t know if I’d be able to pull it off, I don’t know, I didn’t know if people would like it, I didn’t know if people would like my voice, I didn’t know what my voice was in that context, so all of it was really scary. And in a weird way, that’s how I knew it was something I really wanted to do, because the way that I’ve actually approached a lot of my life is that new things should be scary, and if you’re not scared, that means that you’re not challenging yourself enough, that means that you’re just not going to grow because you’re staying too much in your comfort zone. And I’ve done a few crazy career things in my life. I moved to New York with just no money whatsoever. I became a bartender, I took a job for $23000 a year in New York so that I could write. And a lot of these things didn’t quite work out. I think I went through five jobs in my first year out of college, but I think…

1:15:16 MK: And it was always scary, but I always thought, “You know what? Let me do it.” And I’m very, very lucky in the sense that even though I don’t come from a wealthy family at all, I grew up just in a poor family and now they’re nicely middle class, but we came from the Soviet Union, we had nothing, we were just political refugees, and so I never… It wasn’t like my parents would say, “Oh, don’t worry, we’ll pay your rent.” They couldn’t, they would love to, but they couldn’t, but they are the most supportive, loving people, and they’ve always had my back. And so I knew that if shit hit the fan, I could always just go home, right? I could always just… I had parents who were there and they said, “We can’t pay your rent, but you can come move back in with us. We can’t give you this, but we love you and we support you. And the reason we moved to this country is so that you could do whatever you wanted, not so that you’d be a doctor or a lawyer.” My sister is already a doctor, so it made them… Made it easier to do that, “But so that you could do what you want to do.” And I think, I don’t wanna underestimate and understate how important that was, knowing that I had that emotional backing. I think it made me much more able to take risks that not everyone has the luxury of taking.

1:16:38 SC: Yeah, it’s a, once again, a mixed strategy, right? I mean, it’s a little bit of a balance between being responsible, understanding that there is a backup plan and so forth, but not just being complacent, not just doing the same thing over and over again. I think it’s too easy to be either a crazy gambler or a stodgy stick in the mud, and keeping things interesting without inviting disaster is a tricky balance and worth trying, worth aiming for.

1:17:09 MK: Absolutely, absolutely. I think that’s… If I can keep meeting that goal throughout my life, I think it will be a life well-lived in a lot of ways.

1:17:19 SC: Me too, and I think the book is a great success and people who read it will get that feeling and the excitement will come across. So Maria Konnikova, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape Podcast.

1:17:27 MK: Thank you so much for having me Sean.

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