Call Her Bluff – Victoria Coren in conversation with Jonah Lehrer
We make hundreds of decisions every day, but for some – doctors, firefighters, hedge fund managers – the stakes are much higher. How do those people go about making decisions when there’s a lot to gain – or to lose?
Canongate introduced Jonah Lehrer, who studies the science of decision making in The Decisive Moment, to Victoria Coren, writer and world-class poker player, to discuss it.
Before we get into how you make decisions at the poker table, I’m curious if decision-making is something you spend a lot of time thinking about. In other words, when you are playing a hand, are you thinking about how you should be thinking? Scientists call this metacognition, but it seems like a skill that many poker players have mastered.
Decision-making is something that I think about a lot. It saves me having to make any decisions. That’s not a joke. In ‘real life’ I am crippled by indecision; I approach all choices in an overly intellectual, utterly impractical way. Fear of making the wrong choice prevents (or delays) me from doing all sorts of things, whether it’s buying a T-shirt or having children. But in poker I’m able to trust my instincts – of course sometimes you have to calculate pot odds, and make careful deductions based on betting history – but if you just get a sense that someone is not being straight with you, that you’re being bluffed, that your hand is good, you can put your chips behind that suspicion and test it right away. You get an immediate answer, you know at once whether you’re right or wrong. And if you’re wrong, what’s the worst that can happen? You’re knocked out of a tournament. That freedom from truly serious consequences allows me to make poker decisions quickly, certainly and confidently.
When I started talking to poker players, my only experience of poker came from watching tournaments on television. I think one of the slightly misleading things about poker on television is that viewers often get the impression that the only way to make a decision is to calculate the percentages, to try to figure out what chance you have of winning the hand. But after I talked to professional players, I came away with the impression that calculating the percentages is usually only the beginning of their decision making process. What was often much more important than the complicated statistics were all the subtle hunches the players couldn’t really explain. How much time do you spend calculating the odds when playing poker? Do you think poker is an art, a science, or some awkward amalgamation of the two?
Poker is both an art and a science, like doctoring or playing the violin. Sometimes it is a clear percentage call: you’re 2/1 to win the pot, and you’re being offered 4/1 your money so you must say yes. Or you’ve put two thirds of your entire stack into the pot, so you can’t pass. But in a slow tournament, or a cash game, there’s a hell of a lot more going on than maths. What do you know about the person in front of you? How does he usually play? What sort of mood is he in? Is he keen to get home early tonight, or would he rather not go home at all? And what does he think about you? Does he think you’re a coward? An idiot? A cashpoint? Is he trying to impress you? Scare you? Is this amount of money a lot to him, or a little? How much does he care? All of these factors are hugely important, as you decide whether you are being bluffed or not – and that’s before you even get on to body language. But I don’t sit there for half an hour every time I’ve got a poker decision. It’s like . . . well, it’s a little bit like fancying somebody. You have an instinctive response, you know how you feel. You don’t necessarily have a conscious thought process about all the reasons behind your response – but those reasons are there.
Do you have any poker rituals? One of my favorite sayings, which I picked up at the WSOP, was that ‘it’s unlucky to be superstitious’, which eloquently captured the quirky fatalism that seems to suffuse so many players on the pro circuit.
I have yet to meet a poker player who doesn’t believe strongly in the power of sod’s law. They might have beautifully logical, scientific minds at the table – but when they play a tournament and don’t win, they all walk away saying ‘Why am I so unlucky? Why does it always happen to me?’. You make your own luck, nobody’s luckier or unluckier than anyone else, blah blah blah . . . but all poker players have moments of utter certainty that they are the unluckiest people in the world.
What do you think makes you such a good poker player? Are there common mistakes that really mediocre players (like me) consistently make that experts (like you) manage to avoid?
All poker players make mistakes. The skill of the game is minimising your own errors (some of which will be inevitable) and exploiting or inducing mistakes from others. There isn’t enough space here to list all the errors that can be made at the table – mathematical errors, emotional errors, pieces of bad judgment. The more experience you have, the more likely you are to recognise situations that have come up in the past, and avoid making the same mistake twice. The worst mistake that any player can make is to stay at the table when (for financial or emotional reasons) it has become impossible for them to play properly that night, and they can only lose more money. You’ve got to know when to cut your losses. As with so many pieces of poker lore, this is also true of romance, of friendship, of the workplace, of trying to put up an Ikea shelf . . .
Has writing about poker changed the way you play poker?
Not at all. Writing this book is helping me to understand why I was so drawn to the game in the first place, why I wanted to hide in a parallel world, why I can’t stop, what kind of escapes and comforts it has offered me. But there are only three things which change the way I play poker: my opponents, my bankroll, and practice.
In September 2006 Victoria Coren won the European Poker Championship, and with it a cool one million dollars. Overnight, she became one of the world’s most famous players. But how did she win it? In For Richer, For Poorer, Victoria Coren’s long-awaited poker memoir, she answers this question. It is an intensely honest story of twenty years of obsession, of highs and lows, wins and losses, friendships, power plays, loneliness and addiction. It is a book that takes us from the grimy underworld of illegal cash games to the high glamour of Monte Carlo and Las Vegas, and gets to heart of why poker has become the world’s most popular card game.
September 17th, 2009 at 9:30 am
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