Blink: The power of thinking without thinking.

[shutyomouf]

Blink" does a fine job of shedding light on the decision making process. The primary concept of the book is "thin slicing"--making decisions quickly on a minimum of information. The author shows when it works and why. He also shows when it doesn't work and why. Finally, he shows the reader how to improve on his/her "thin slicing" ability.


Has anyone read this book? I have read most of the good poker books and have been looking for some other books to read. My bro-in-law recently purchased this and just began reading it, when hes done then I'm going to read it. Any insight would be helpful. Thanks

[TheBob]

It's really pretty cool. I don't remember it relating much to poker but certainly an interesting read. Not to be one of those search feature nits but I do believe there was a thread on here about it in the past should you be looking for more info.

[fraac]

I found it aimless. I think he wanted to write the book before he had any content for it.

[arkwon]

I just bought this book, having read Malcolm Gladwell's prequel to this The Tipping Point (I recommend that)
I believe it was ZeeJustin who posted a thread here about how the underlying theories discussed in this book are applied to Poker - worth checking out.

[jfhst18]

I did a search for Blink and this was the only thread I found. If someone runs across another I'd love to have the link.

[BigAlK]

[ QUOTE ]
I did a search for Blink and this was the only thread I found. If someone runs across another I'd love to have the link.

[/ QUOTE ]
Here you go. You just have to search back farther. The default is something like a week or a month. I searched back 1 year limiting the search to books and publications. This is the thread I remembered. Not sure if there might not be another since one poster thought ZeeJustin had participated in the discussion and he didn't in this one. You might try searching back more than a year and/or in other forums.

[jfhst18]

Thank you Big...You're right I hadn't used this site's Search before so didn't tihnk to fool around with paramaters.

[otter]

Yes, I thought it was really good and I think it applied to poker as well. There was a thread about 8 months ago about this.

[jeffnc]

[ QUOTE ]
I found it aimless. I think he wanted to write the book before he had any content for it.

[/ QUOTE ]

Agreed. It's an interesting concept, but he doesn't flesh out exactly how or when to apply it.

For example, in the very first chapter he seems to make the books most important point. Art experts could "intuitively" spot a fake sculpture when more analytic techniques by scientists who were non-experts could not.

Well, this is intuitively obvious - they are experts and have a ton of experience. Some things come very quickly to them. But it doesn't mean we should all make quick decisions.

A later example in the book - police make a snap decision and shoot and kill a man who is "acting suspiciously" but is in fact completely innocent.

Conclusion? Sometimes you should decide quickly. And sometimes you shouldn't.

Thanks.

[dubiousdrift]

I read this thread and the other, older thread and thought I'd add a few thoughts of my own, for whatever it's worth.

Gladwell's book "blink" is an excellent book to get you thinking about how we make decisions. Clearly that has a lot of bearing on poker. As someone else mentioned, this is a *what* book, not a *how* book, but if you don't know what is possible, you can't begin to learn how to do it.

One of the big take-away thoughts that I got from Gladwell's book is that all of these "blink" decisions were accurate only after the expert has spent years, often decades of studying and practicing in the particular field. The good news is however, is that it is an achievable skill - for whatever field you might be in. These people aren't savants that have extraordinary raw talent, they have just spent a lot of time and energy becoming very good at what they do. The applications to poker were pretty obvious to me while I read the book, but the applications to any other field of interest are also obvious. Either way, it's a great book and well worth the read.

Another, poker related book that someone has called attention to is Joe Navarro's book on tells. Also a great book and well worth the read. Navarro actually discourages looking to the face for tells and points instead to all the other parts of the body, citing the face as the most deceptive and unreliable source of information. Everything that Navarro discusses, all the strenght, weakness, high and low confidence tells are - after enough study, "blinkable". Ever watch a player make a bet and know, absolutely that he was weak, but not know why? Blink! The fact that his legs were wrapped around his chair and he rubbed his eyes just before pushing all in weren't things that you consciously noticed, but your subconscience was aware of - especially after studying Navarro's work.

On a tangent note, I really liked the Navarro book much better than the Mike Carro books on the subject (Heressy, I know), because he didn't just say "look at this movement - that means he's bluffing, unless he's acting". There was real science behind the behavior and more important (or at least, more helpful to me) was that the behaviors were explained by their motivations, not their interpretations. An example is the legs wrapped around the chair legs as a weakness tell because its a 'freezing' response. 'Freezing' responses happen in prey to keep them from getting eaten by predators. It doens't mean that they won't call you down, it just means that they don't have a lot of confidence in their hand.

Dig into the "more reading" sections behind both Gladwell and Navarro and you'll eventually find Paul Eckman, who has spent his career decoding emotion in the face - often studying signs of deceit for organizations like the FBI (where Joe Navarro retired from... coincidence?). Without spending a bunch of money for the FACS software, you can buy a copy of Eckman's "Unmasking the Face" that, while it reads like a book written by a professor (because it is), it is very helpful and very clear on how to assign emotion to a person based on their facial expressions, however brief.

Put all this together and you can begin to study your opponents in terms of their limbic, body language responses to events at the table (Navarro), their emotional state based on the micro-expression they had when the turn card came (Eckman), their betting patterns, pot odds, implied odds (the full stable of 2+2 books) to help you make the right decision. Do this long enough, with effortful study and you don't have to think your way to the correct response, you blink it.

All pretty cool stuff when taken all together. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

- dubiousdrift