Poker, Life and Other Confusing Things

That’s the title of a new book by my friend and fellow psychologist, Professor Arthur Reber. Whenever I have a psychological question, he’s my “go-to-guy.” He almost always has the right answer. You’ll love his novel way of looking at poker and life. They both often confuse me.

He looks at poker through the eyes of a psychologist, and psychology through the eyes of a poker player. That combination produced a book that will improve your play and help you to understand many poker and non-poker subjects, while providing a few hours of enjoyable reading.

Enjoyment is rare for most instructional books, especially ones by psychologists. The words are too obscure, the sentences are too long, and too many psychologists’ books are just plain boring. Despite being a distinguished professor, with a long list of research publications, he is never boring. His writing often reminds me of another one of my favorites, Tommy Angelo. Both use words to amuse as well as instruct.

His first few pages make three critically important points:

“The cards are the least important part of the game.”

“It is ridiculously complicated… it is the most complex game people play regularly… more complex than chess or bridge or backgammon.”

“Poker is also a microcosm of life.” That is, working hard at our game can help you to succeed in more important competitions such as your business and career. But I must add a warning that he omitted: Don’t apply most poker principles to your personal and family relationships.

This book won’t directly improve your understanding of poker strategy. Because we’re just psychologists, we leave the strategic lessons to the pros. As he put it, “There is some poker strategy buried in these essays, but not directly. They weren’t written to teach anyone how to play poker. Some of them may help you play better, but the real goal is understanding the game from the psychologist’s perspective.”
Later, he made the same point in more colorful language: “This stuff won’t tell you how to play pocket jacks in mid-position against an UTG raise, but it might help you understand why you screw this situation up so often.”

His first chapter is heretical, but it’s also absolutely correct. He states that virtually everything written about poker assumes that the readers’ goal is to win the most money, but it just isn’t true. I made that point in The Psychology of Poker, and some readers didn’t like my heresy any more than they will like his. Despite all the contradictory evidence, they insist that they and most other players want to maximize their profits.

Economists have been making a similar mistake for centuries, and some of them still regard any contrary position as heresy, even though Nobel Prizes have been awarded for research that proves that investors and businesspeople don’t try to maximize profits.

But, as psychologists, our job is to help people to act more intelligently, and they can’t do it if they don’t understand their own and their opponents’ motives. As he put it, “The vast majority do not play poker to win the most money. In fact, the vast majority do not play poker to win money at all, let alone ‘the most.’”

He then describes five types of players: The pure fun player, the fun-plus-a-bit-of-ego player, the fun-plus-a-little-spending-money player, the semi-pro player, and the pure pro player.

Less than five percent are the last two types. The assumption about trying to win the most money applies only to them, and it does not apply all the time. No matter what they claim, even the greediest full-time pros have other motives, and they often let those motives reduce their profits or even cause losses.

To gain the most, both financially and otherwise, you must understand your opponents’ motives. More importantly, you must understand your own. If you don’t understand everyone’s motives, you’ll make many bad decisions. This book will help you to understand and adjust to your opponents’ motives and, more importantly, help you to make decisions that get the results that are important to you.

Despite being a psychologist and poker player for several decades, I learned a lot of poker psychology from this book. For example, I didn’t know how dopamine causes mistakes, or winning increases testosterone, or how habit hierarchies cause brain farts. That’s the colorful, but apt, term of my professorial friend (and he used even nastier words).

He emphasizes emotional control more than virtually all authors: “I maintain that more money is lost at poker because of poor management of emotional highs and lows than any other factor, more than stupidity, more than bad game selection, more than bad luck… Tilt is the poker player’s greatest enemy, the evil sorcerer stirring the toxic potion to cloud men’s minds. Tilt is the primary source of the losses of most good players.”

Some people will emphatically disagree with that and other positions, but his directness is one of his best features. He doesn’t pull his punches; you know exactly where he stands. I’m looking forward to the debates on the online forums. Poker players love to argue, and he creates lots of opportunities.

He made an excellent analysis of self-deception: “Most of us think we know who we are. Some of us do, but the data are revealing. Most don’t.” They lose, but ignore their results or blame them on bad luck. They keep losing and playing “because they are experts in self-deception!”

His analysis of certain mathematical errors is related to his position on other types of self-deception. Poker players often ignore the indisputable fact that cards are random and make stupid mistakes because they think they are on a rush or overdue for a win. The mathematicians have made these points many times, but he explains why so many poker players can’t or won’t accept randomness.

Much of his academic research was done on implicit learning, which is often called “intuition.” He uses a different term because the process is much more complicated than most people believe. In fact, the distinction between the two was the first lesson he taught me.

Many years ago I wrote some articles on intuition versus logic. He emailed me saying essentially, “You’re a nice guy, Al, but you don’t really understand the subtleties.” I didn’t like being corrected by a stranger, and I resisted for a long time, but finally agreed.

I still believe that logic is more important than implicit learning or intuition, but our email and face to face exchanges helped me to recognize and adjust to logic’s limitations. Unfortunately, space limitations prevent me from explaining how implicit learning works. You’ll have to read the book, but it’s worth the effort.

He has been teaching me poker psychology for many years. If you read this book, you’ll learn a lot of about other people. More importantly, you’ll learn even more about yourself. ♠

Dr. Al ([email protected]) coaches only on psychological issues, such as controlling impulses, coping with losing streaks, going on tilt, breaking out of your comfort zone, and planning your poker career.