The 'Better Player' Theory Takes Some Hits

One of the few universal truths about games that involve both skill and chance is that most players overrate their own abilities and underrate their opponents' skills.

This doesn't occur because people with huge egos tend to drift into the games arena, although certainly most of us have run into our share of opponents who at least act like they think Einstein, Feynman, Bobby Fisher, Stu Ungar, and MacGyver were real or fictional idiots in comparison to their own brilliance, especially when it comes to games.

Leaving these misguided folks – who also tend to overrate the importance of skill at games in the overall scheme of things on Earth – aside, we still almost all have a difficult time evaluating our relative strength in games like poker, for a number of reasons.

First, when you play a game that involves both chance and skill, it's easy to blame luck when you lose and to credit skill when you win. Even if we're capable of spotting our own mistakes, most of us have selective memories about how many good cards we caught, or about how lucky we were that an opponent had a king-high flush at the exact same time we had an ace-high flush.

Even more significant, though, is the fact that most of the time we are not capable of spotting our own mistakes. Indeed, that's practically true by definition, because if we knew we were making a mistake, we wouldn't make the play in the first place.

Occasionally, the sequence of cards or bets that follows a mistake teaches us that we overlooked something, and so even though we make the mistake, we learn about it shortly thereafter. More commonly, though, we're unaware that we're making errors and we stay unaware thereafter.

Our poker ego develops further when we see our opponents make errors that we know we wouldn't have made. It doesn't take too many of these to convince us that we are more skilled than the blundering opponent. We know we wouldn't make the mistake, we see the opponent make it, and presto, it's obvious that we play better than the opponent does.

The gaping hole in this apparently logical deduction hides behind the blind spot we have for our own mistakes. Poker is a very complex game: Let's say, for sake of argument, that there are 100 key concepts that someone needs to understand to play poker at the expert level (the actual number might be 20 or 1,000, depending on how narrowly you want to define "key concept").

Let's further assume that two reasonably capable, but nonexpert, players are facing each other in a ring game, and that these two players, via the sort of remarkable coincidence that writers and teachers rely on so heavily, are equally skilled; that is, each of them rates to win at exactly the same rate over the long run in a particular game. Let's say each is good enough to win half a big bet per hour in the local $10-$20 hold'em game.

Even given this hypothetical status as equally skilled players, it would take a far greater coincidence – one that would strain credulity – for each of these two players to have mastered precisely the same "key concepts." Although each player might have mastered 70 of the 100 key concepts, it's highly unlikely that they would be the same 70.

Player A understands concepts 1-70, and Player B understands concepts 21-90. This means Player A will observe Player B screwing up whenever concepts 1-20 are involved, and Player B will observe Player A screwing up whenever concepts 71-90 are involved. Neither will notice an error when concepts 91-100 come into play, and each will grudgingly admire the other's play when concepts 21-70 are required.

As a result, each of these two equally skilled players will emerge from their competition fully convinced that he is vastly more skilled than his opponent. Put another way, we all have blind spots around concepts we have yet to master, but we don't have blind spots for concepts we understand that our opponents do not.

"So what?" you might say. How does knowing that we likely overrate our own abilities and underrate our opponents' abilities affect our results? We're still going to play as well as we possibly can, after all.

Actually, this simple aspect of human nature can and does have a dramatic impact on our results, in any number of hugely important ways. Let's take a look at some of the cold equations, some of the things that can happen when you think you're a lot better than you really are. This could cause you to do the following (among other things):

1. Join, or stay too long in, a game in which you are overmatched. After all, if you see four or five players you "know" yourself to be more skilled than sitting in the game, there's money to be won, right? There certainly isn't much money available to be won if your skill level is last and least amongst those at the table. You can (and probably will) blame poor results on bad luck for a while, perhaps a very long while – unless you're willing to re-examine some of your fundamental assumptions about how well both you and your opponents play.

2. Change your playing style to something that's suboptimal. Suppose, for example, that you believe yourself to be so much more talented than your opponents that you "know" you can play more starting hands than they do (or than is generally considered to be wise), because you "know" you can outplay your opponents after the flop and/or get away from these marginal hands when they're in trouble. If you truly understood the reality – if you knew that in fact you play worse than average after the flop, rather than better – you would change your starting-hand selection considerably, and would probably enjoy much better (or at least "less worse") results.

You don't need to have a hugely overinflated opinion of your own game to get into trouble. You can suffer similar consequences if you have a realistic view of your own abilities but disrespect your opponent. One of the primary examples of a poor playing-style decision caused by overrating your own abilities happens primarily in tournaments.

I'm going to write much more extensively on this topic in the near future, but for now, just think about all the times either you or someone you know decided to throw a hand away in a tournament situation, even though you realized you were getting reasonable pot odds or situational odds.

Why do those with overinflated poker egos throw these hands away? Because they don't want to gamble for all or most of their stack, even when they are a slight favorite. "Knowing" that their opponent will almost certainly make some huge error later, they want to wait for a situation in which they are an even bigger favorite, or a situation in which they can use their superior skill to outplay their opponents.

The problem with this kind of thinking is that it causes many players to throw so many hands away that they are no longer outplaying their opponents. Instead, they are handing chips over to their "less talented" opposition, content in the knowledge that they will be able to outplay them later.

Naturally, if you find yourself up against anyone, big-name star or otherwise, who seems reluctant to play without a big edge, you can and should do everything you can to take advantage of it. Such players are more susceptible to big-bet bluffs and will be less likely to call all-in bets, although when one of them finally does call, you can be sure it's with something very strong.

You don't have to do this very often to hand over whatever skill edge you might actually own, and, of course, if you actually don't own a skill edge, you're really taking the worst of it. I firmly believe this is one (but certainly not the only) reason why our last two world champions have been unknowns. If the great players hand over too many "gambling" pots to the unknowns without a fight, they're throwing away much, if not all, of their advantage. Does it really matter if you're skilled enough to extract an extra bet if the knowledge of that skill leads you to hand over extra pots uncontested?

This problem is rarely apparent, because the failure to engage in these gambling-type hands doesn't immediately impact one's stack size. A little later in the tournament, though, the "great" player finds himself short-stacked, and forced to gamble because the blinds are too large in relation to his stack. When the player loses in this situation, he goes home thinking, "I wasn't very lucky once I got short-stacked," instead of realizing that if he'd played his cards right, he wouldn't have gotten into that short-stacked position to begin with.

The next time you think that owning a big poker ego is a harmless way to have some fun and/or feel good about yourself, take a step back and start recognizing all the situations in which a more accurate understanding of what's true could pay off.