Popular Wisdom
02 Popular Wisdom
Before we get into strategic ideas about no-limit hold’em, let’s spend some time on popular wisdom about the game and why following popular or conventional wisdom isn’t always wise. Just because an idea sounds good does not make it a good idea. There are a lot of really bad ideas that sound good on the surface.
People tend to be attracted by simple ideas that tend to dichotomize complexity. You can see this effect strongly in political discourse. The popular ideas are the ones that can be expressed as a simple either/or television sound byte, even if the idea is based on absurd logic. It’s comforting to be able to divide things into either/or categories. It gives us a semblance of control, a sense of understanding. Simple assertions of faux truth are a form of comfort food for the brain. But while facing the complexity of reality won’t always bring you comfort, it’s usually the best way to win at poker.
The game of poker, and particularly no-limit poker, is not a simple game of either/or, black or white, win or lose. Almost everything that happens tends to occur on a graduated scale of some sort. And it’s seldom on a linear scale. It’s a dance. You have to constantly be weaving and dodging, setting traps for your opponents to fall into while evading the traps they’re setting for you. When you put an early position raiser on a hand it’s not enough to think either he has a big pair or he has AK. He might also have a pair of eights, or he might have a 67 suited. Those hands might not be as likely as a big pair or a big ace, but you ignore the possibility at your own peril.
It’s possible to rationally, even mathematically, analyze such a dance. It can get complex, but it’s certainly doable. But when forced with the need for a complex analysis, most people just let their eyes glaze over and they fall back on intuition. The problem is that when faced with complex, probabilistic situations our intuition almost always fails us.
This might seem to contradict some of the claims in the recent bestseller, Blink. But it really doesn’t. Blink is a book about first impressions. But it doesn’t claim that first impressions are always reliable. Sometimes they are, and sometimes they go very, very wrong. Your first impressions are important. But when the impressions are about a complex, probabilistic situation they probably aren’t reliable. Humans have some strong natural biases and blind spots when analyzing probabilistic events.
Before we get into strategic ideas about no-limit hold’em, let’s spend some time on popular wisdom about the game and why following popular or conventional wisdom isn’t always wise. Just because an idea sounds good does not make it a good idea. There are a lot of really bad ideas that sound good on the surface.
People tend to be attracted by simple ideas that tend to dichotomize complexity. You can see this effect strongly in political discourse. The popular ideas are the ones that can be expressed as a simple either/or television sound byte, even if the idea is based on absurd logic. It’s comforting to be able to divide things into either/or categories. It gives us a semblance of control, a sense of understanding. Simple assertions of faux truth are a form of comfort food for the brain. But while facing the complexity of reality won’t always bring you comfort, it’s usually the best way to win at poker.
The game of poker, and particularly no-limit poker, is not a simple game of either/or, black or white, win or lose. Almost everything that happens tends to occur on a graduated scale of some sort. And it’s seldom on a linear scale. It’s a dance. You have to constantly be weaving and dodging, setting traps for your opponents to fall into while evading the traps they’re setting for you. When you put an early position raiser on a hand it’s not enough to think either he has a big pair or he has AK. He might also have a pair of eights, or he might have a 67 suited. Those hands might not be as likely as a big pair or a big ace, but you ignore the possibility at your own peril.
It’s possible to rationally, even mathematically, analyze such a dance. It can get complex, but it’s certainly doable. But when forced with the need for a complex analysis, most people just let their eyes glaze over and they fall back on intuition. The problem is that when faced with complex, probabilistic situations our intuition almost always fails us.
This might seem to contradict some of the claims in the recent bestseller, Blink. But it really doesn’t. Blink is a book about first impressions. But it doesn’t claim that first impressions are always reliable. Sometimes they are, and sometimes they go very, very wrong. Your first impressions are important. But when the impressions are about a complex, probabilistic situation they probably aren’t reliable. Humans have some strong natural biases and blind spots when analyzing probabilistic events.
posted by Gary Carson at 2:52 PM
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