Why You Should Think Like A Poker Player

Hidden gems of poker

How does thinking like a poker player makes you more rational? If anything isn’t betting your money on poker a more irrational thing to do?

To be honest, this is exactly what I was thinking before listening to Annie Duke, a professional poker player who has made over $4 million playing poker.

In reality, if you won that much money you must be doing something right. In this podcast, she talks about responding to failure, becoming more open-minded, and dealing with high-pressure, high-stakes situations with uncertainty, and so much more.

In poker, there are so many factors involved when making decisions. What does your hand look like? What hand do other people have? What is the pot size? How many people are at the table? just to name a few. Considering how many possibilities there are, it can very difficult and overwhelming to make good decisions with so many unknowns.

One of the most fundamental things in making decisions when in uncertain situations is your mental model. Mental models attempt to help us predict what is right in the world and can be very effective for helping us filter the noise and find what is important.

Annie Duke’s main mental model is probabilistic thinking and is one of the reasons for her success in such an uncertain game like poker.

What is Probabilistic Thinking?

Simply put, assign probabilities to each outcome you think could happen. For example, as I am writing this article, it is clear that I can not make everyone love my article, but in my head, I believe that there is a 60% chance of you liking this article, for the following reasons:

  1. I reason through the thinking behind the idea, creating very limited gaps of knowledge if any

  2. It is something you likely have not done before or to this degree that I am pushing

  3. I acknowledge some of the things you might be thinking as you read through the content, making it as if we were talking together as I explain these ideas

  4. This is article is a little long, maybe it is too much for you

  5. I could easily have a bias in here as I am presenting this idea without being aware and that goes against what you believe

In reality, my probability is way off as I have only recently started implementing this mental model. Taking the factors I mentioned above in mind, it makes my content a little better than it would’ve been if I didn’t consider them.

5 Stages Probabilistic Thinking

  1. Finding the relevant factors to your situation

  2. Thinking of different decisions based on the factors and what outcomes they create

  3. Giving a probability to each one (ex. 63% X happens when I do Y)

  4. Acting on your decision

  5. Analyze Decision (w/other people)

There are situations where you have an infinite number of factors and decisions. The point is to find the ones that have the largest impact or the ones with the most significance.

In the example above, you are considering many aspects to make sure you are not missing out on anything. In this process you start selecting factors based on what you feel is most significant.

When you first start, your probabilities are going to be off like mine, through feedback and results you will start to refine your decision-making process to make it more objective than it currently is. If you are interested in learning more about probabilistic thinking check this out.

Why Analyze With Others?

The reason your analysis needs to involve people is that we are all inherently bias towards ourselves. This is made evident through Dan Kahan’s findings. Our problems come from something called identity protective cognition.

To explain this concept, first think of your own identity, the thing that defines who you are. I am ___. It could be funny, a nice person, smart, absolutely anything that resonates with you.

Now imagine you got some feedback from people or results that goes against that. People did not laugh at your jokes when you thought you were funny. People said you were mean when you thought you were nice.

In this situation, you thought you were really smart, but you got a C. This feedback makes us feel bad because it doesn’t align with your perception of yourselves. You instantly become very defensive and deny the validity of the feedback.

Here you felt that our identity gets attacked. The feedback of failing makes you believe that you are incompetent in a particular skill or aspect of your life. Our natural inclination to make ourselves feel good makes us act to protect this identity.

This is what leaves us open to blaming things that are outside our control to let ourselves off the hook. This leads you to say things like “This teacher doesn’t like me” or “I didn’t get enough time to study” or “We never learned these things.” Sound familiar?

This is our rationalization as to why we did badly on this test even though we are “smart.” The problem here is that we let ourselves off the hook and don’t hold ourselves accountable because it makes us feel bad.

Reaction to Failure

Throughout our lives we all deal with failures. On most occasions it can be very difficult, especially with our identity protective cognition being in the way. Improving our process for dealing with it is essential if we want to be the successful people we aspire to be.

Some of us view failure as something good, while others see it as something bad. What is interesting about failure is it this double-edged sword that has the power to speed up or hinder our learning.

On one hand, pain can be really helpful in learning as it is a consequence of your poor decisions and we need to avoid it because we are naturally hedonistic. This forces us to improve our process so we do not experience as much pain the next time around.

On the other hand, this pain is very defeating for your identity. Your identity protective cognition makes you deflect it, to make you feel better about yourself to make sure you preserve your positive self-image.

When Annie was first starting out in poker, she lost a hand told her bad beat story (poker complaining story) to Eric Seidel, a fellow poker pro who has won more than $34.6 million. When most people would validate her story, Eric did the complete opposite, this was his response:

“Why are you telling me this story, do you really think I want to hear this? Okay, I have lost a lot of hands too. I heard so many bad beat stories I have no interest in yours whatsoever. If you really lost because of bad luck, what is the point of the story, there is nothing you can learn from it…if you just come and tell me about bad luck, you are like literally wasting my time and it is annoying”

As harsh as the comment may be, Eric clearly outlines exactly what is wrong with this type of thinking: you don’t learn anything from it. You can complain about your misfortune all you want, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t change what happened.

Dealing with Failure

Whenever you lose/fail at something you have 2 choices:

Option 1: Take the short term-pain for a greater future positive self-narrative

Option 2: Take the discount now and be the same every other time after that

Before we examine the options above, we need to recognize what is the result of the feedback you are getting: pain. It hurts when you are wrong because it tells you that you have a fault.

If you were to pick an option of the two, you would probably pick option 1. It makes sense, thinking long term. The problem here is you are answering in theory, but practically speaking most would buckle once they get hit with a really difficult challenge.

The reason it turns out this way in practice is that our brains are hardwired to crave instant results. Sometimes, the driving force of being better in the future is not strong enough to withstand our monkey mind. So basing your decisions on willpower only is very ineffective.

I’m not sure about you but I wouldn’t want to be the picture on the left. There is just that feeling of unease in that situation that doesn’t sit well with. I might feel really bad now, which might also affect me badly later.

How do we make our pain more manageable in the short term without badly affecting the long term?

The Solution

Annie proposes a really good way for dealing with this problem: finding a good group. In this solution, you have long term improvement as well as short term gratification.

How Does a Group Help?

The reason all of us need a group is that we are inherently biased towards ourselves and our identities. Anything that goes against it is seen as a threat as it can’t hurt our identity, hence how we view ourselves. This flaw makes us unable to objectively and accurately assess ourselves.

I want you to think of how easy it is to point out other people’s mistakes. You probably pinpointed a couple of my mistakes throughout this writing that my natural bias towards myself does not allow me to see.

That is exactly why having other people is so important. It is so much easier for you to spot other people’s mistakes rather than ones of your own.

This makes it so other people call you out when you are blind to your own reality and vice-versa, which helps you create a more objective lens of the world.

How Can you Create a “Good” Group?

When finding your squad, you need to create a “constitution” to ensure everyone who abides by these rules grows together. Feel free to add some of your own along the way.

  1. Agreeing to not tolerate the bad beat stories (whining stories)

  2. Agree that everyone’s ideas and thoughts are still under construction and the goal is to help others create a more accurate mental model of the world

  3. You are not allowed to withhold valuable that can help a person grow

The point of this dynamic is not to reach a consensus where all of you think the exact same thing. Everyone can have their own strategy for how to process information, but it is about phasing out each other’s biases and mistakes to make everyone have a more objective view of the world.

Validation from the Group

As you go through your transformation it is going to be a difficult and painful process. This isn’t about others praising you, this is about seeking validation from people that matter to you (the people in your group).

The approval only happens when you start changing the way you think and how you express your process of making a decision.

When you slowly start changing your wording from “I am so unlucky” to “I am at fault” Changing your perspective from one where you lack control over your situation to one where you do.

As you go through this transition, your group supports the good thinking, while opposing the bad thinking. This feedback validation from the group makes feel good without undermining our progress.

With the longing for approval, it forces us to change how we think. This includes considering multiple perspectives and attempting to recognize our biases. The group helps us out by pointing our mistakes and we point out theirs.

Annie discusses how in your groups, there will always be a time where you disagree. Normally, when our positive narrative gets disagreed with, we tend to feel that we getting personally attacked. This feeling of threat makes us act as if we are actually under threat so we try to escape it or aggressively fight back (with words). This causes us to be dismissive, discredit, or think the other person is not worth listening to.

For the disagreement to work in a constructive way you need to be able to disagree without being disagreeable and not be defensive about it. If you think back to the “constitution,”this is only possible when you agree that your ideas are still in progress.

This completely reframes disagreement, it turns into something helpful and something everyone can learn from. Now, this becomes about how good can you acknowledge the other side or acknowledge uncertainty rather than how hard can you push your own personal agenda.

Over time, as your thinking changes you get the same effect when you are away from the group. Think of 100 learning opportunities. Without your squad, you let’s say you only caught 5 mistakes. With the squad, you could have caught 10 mistakes.

Even though you are away from the group, you process your information as if you were with them. You think like this because you know that your group will hold accountable for your decision later.

You might ask yourself “What interesting thing am I going to bring to the group next time I talk to them?” or “What bias did I recognize in this situation?” or “How was my decision-making process here?

You also start catching your mistakes quickly. Instead of realizing your mistake a few hours later, you catch it a few minutes later when you could still do something about it.

A Group of Only You

Annie brings forward a really interesting idea of making a group consisting of only you, one with multiple versions of you to be specific.

If you think about it, there are so many different layers to you, there is you in the past, present ,and the future. There is a school you. Friendly you that meets people for the first time. You with your close friends. A family-friendly you and the list goes on and on.

Now think of all of the different perspectives and thought processes in all of those different situations stemming from just you. Taking a small fraction of that can make a really large group where every decision is challenged helping you recognize some gaps in knowledge or thinking that present you would have not been able to find.

Working As A Leader

Managing a team can be a very difficult and daunting task. You are in charge of everyone on the team and take full responsibility for the results of the team.

Most times, as the leader, your group will have you have multiple decisions under consideration and you need to predict the outcome to the best of your abilities and assign probabilities to it. The probabilities are meant to be how sure you are about your prediction.

You might be thinking “This is absolutely ridiculous, your predictions are always going to be wrong.” While that is true on most occasions.

Your desire to make this guess makes you very information hungry. You changed your mindset from “What is the right answer?” to “What am I not thinking of?”

This type of thinking makes you more open-minded, by making you predict the outcomes, you start to look for ways to make a more desirable outcome. This comes from creating more data points as well as talking to people of different perspectives. This causes you to constantly refine your view to make your decision as objective as you can get it to be.

Once you create what probabilities on what you think might happen if you went through with decision A or decision B, involve the group in your thought process. This part is where you can get the best learning outcomes as a team.

Let’s say you, as the leader, decide that option A has a 25% chance of success. Half the group agrees with you and the other half believes it has a 70% chance of success. You would discuss your points of view, but with a twist: you do red team, blue team.

To put it simply you make people argue for the side they do not believe it. If you were 25% sure then you would be switched to the side with 70% certainty and vice-versa.

Annie explains you need to have a 1-on-1 while everyone else judges who wins the debate, not who is correct but who argued for the opposite side the best.

The switching of sides forces you to put yourself in a completely different headspace. Your goal is to make the best argument for the opposite side. This gives a chance for everyone to think through a different perspective and forces everyone to consider more possibilities than those they would’ve come to on their own.

This is a great way to help outliers not have their idea dismissed because the majority thought differently. The thought of making people switch sides is incredible because it takes away the possibility of stubborn thinking.

When everyone hears the process of both sides it makes it so the group as a whole rethinks and refines their idea to limit bias as much as possible.

Key Takeaways:

  1. Probabilistic thinking is about predicting outcomes before they happen

  2. We have something called Identity Protective Cognition, which is our self-defense mechanism when something goes against our perception of ourselves. This causes you to be dismissive of feedback making you less likely to grow as you do not accept possible faults on your end

  3. You need a group for analysis as you can not objectively assess yourself objectively

  4. Your group must not tolerate complaining and focus on what everyone can learn

Actions Items:

  1. Try predicting outcomes before they happen to develop intuition and refine the decision-making process

  2. Always think “How can I make this outcome more likely?”

  3. Find your squad to enable your growth