How to slow down the game?

[_TKO_]

Hey man,

Glad to hear that everything worked out well! I sometimes forget to take my own advice, so thanks for keeping this post fresh for me.

Bang,
TKO.

[jfk]

You may be partially betrayed by the physiology of adreneline and heart rate.

If any of you have read Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink" he goes through an exhaustive explanation of the mistakes made in the Amadou Diallo shooting in New York. Gladwell illustrates, among other points, the effect of adreneline and rapid heart rate in retarding the judgement of an individual, especially in a high pressure situation.

While I don't have the book in front of me, what I remember is that as your heart rate hits certain levels, your cognitive functions start to diminish and then essentially shut down. I believe Gladwell used the terminology "blindness" in the chapter concerning this.

Alan Bostick above brings's up Schoonmaker's "visible thinking" principle. Whether or not one employs this at the table what is probably most important is to keep the inner calm to be able to do it. Schoonmaker compares poker players to jet fighter pilots in the sense that the majority of the time is spend in relative boredom, interspersed with intense and brief moments of engagement. The ability to maintain our best thought process in those moments of engagement is crucial.

I say all this in the context of a head up NL tourney I once saw on, I think, Fox. John D'Agostino was playing against (I think) Phil Ivey. Both had their heart rates measured, which were displayed on the screen. I was shocked to see the degree to which those rates became elevated when each of the players had a real hand. The rates were, according to Gladwell's book, elevated enough to cause impaired judgement. I figured if two of the best players in the world were suffering from this, there was no doubt I was affected worse.

I know that I frequently get locked into a fight or flight mindset when hitting big hands. Top sets have cost me a lot of money when I refuse to believe that someone would've stuck around in the hand long enough to gut shot some unlikely straight and I pay them off extravagently. While my rational mind knows on some level that the betting indicates I'm beaten, that thought process is sometimes overridden by a physiologically driven cloudy logic.

Once away from the table, or even just minutes later you can calmly see the error of your action. Seeing it in the moment is the real trick.

The way in which I've tried to combat this is to try to maintain a degree of detachment about any hand. Instead of playing the hand, I try to imagine that I'm watching myself play the hand and try to decide as a spectator who should be ahead and what the other party should do.

So, no, you're not alone. We all suffer from making judgements at the table which are clearly flawed after calm, rational thought is later applied. This is a problem of the heart rather than the head, though the head is the primary instigator.

[Benman]

May I suggest you read the excellent book "Blink." It's by the same guy that wrote "The Tipping Point," Malcolm Gladwell I think.

Anyway, what I got out of that book is that deliberative thought about on-the-spot problems is often overrated. Do your thinking away from the table, on poker forums for example, but then go with your intuition when you're at the table. Great hitters in baseball do the same thing--lots of practice and study, but then they turn off their conscious brains when they go to bat. Your brain is still at work, just subconsciously.

[killphilNI]

I frequently visualise my online interface when playing live tournies. I find it helps.

[jfk]

[ QUOTE ]
...Great hitters in baseball do the same thing--lots of practice and study, but then they turn off their conscious brains when they go to bat. Your brain is still at work, just subconsciously.

[/ QUOTE ]

Benman,

I'm assuming that you didn't get the chance to read my post above.

Oddly, I would've drawn a different conclusion in your baseball illustration. What I drew from "Blink" is that the baseball player is not going to want to shut off his conscious mind in the same way the jam experts relied on their conscious learning to describe what they liked about the strawberry jam.

(For those of you who haven't read the book, Gladwell cites a study where college students and food experts are told to rank strawberry jam on preference. The results of the two groups are basically the same. Then the two groups are told to rank the jams and describe why they like them using qualities like texture, sweetness, color and other specific qualities.

The results of the experts are the same, but suddenly the non-food expert college student has jam rankings all over the map. Being asked to say why they like the jam has confused their basic ability to judge jam.)

Going back to the baseball example, the lession I drew from the book is that the expert hitter would be able to consciously think about the situation he was in and not have this conscious thought inhibit the instinct needed to do the job.

In a late inning, close game, one out, first and third situation, a cerebral hitter is thinking about getting a ball in the air, ideally to the right side. If he's right handed he'll probably look for a ball up and away. He may or may not adjust his position in the box. He'll know that the pitcher is going to try to keep the ball down to induce the double play. The batter may also consider that he'll more likely to get the ball in to prevent the runner at first from going first to third on a ball to right. The list could go on, but you get the idea.

A good hitter should be able to process all this consciously and not have it affect his ability to get the job done. In fact, this knowlege should augment his skills.

I would think of a cerebral player like Henry Aaron going througn this thought process whereas a guy like Dave Kingman might take the more Solomon Grundy approach and figure, "I'm hacking and trying to put one over the wall". Occasionally that works out great, but frequently the pitcher gets the Kingman type hitter to ground into the 6-4-3. Sadly, a guy like Kingman might well have had diminished performance if he tried to go through the thought process of the better hitter, like the college students and the jam.

Anyway, that's the lesson that I drew from "Blink" which I would apply here. Feeney, Schoonmaker and Harrington all go through examples which I think support this line of thought.

As a side note, if you liked "Blink", you'll love "Freakanomics".