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#1
05-05-2006, 03:27 PM
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Blink (a book)
I just finished Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell. He covers several topics that are relevant to anyone playing poker. Since many of you don't read, I figured I'd write a long, rambling post with my spin on his book.
From the Amazon write up: "Gladwell's conclusion, after studying how people make instant decisions in a wide range of fields from psychology to police work, is that we can make better instant judgments by training our mind and senses to focus on the most relevant facts and that less input (as long as it's the right input) is better than more." Essentially, there is a part of the brain that can instantly make complex decisions, and then communicate that via a feeling (for lack of a better term). This unconscious part of the brain is not capable of language, so there is no way of knowing how the decision was made. However, it is important to understand how this mechanism works because this is how you are able to multi-table. Whether we realize it or not, we are not thinking about ICM when you decide to push or fold. A table blinks on our screen, we look at the table, and you "know" what to do almost instantly. We aren't born with this ability, so how do we "know"? Well, the good news is that you can train your unconscious mind to make correct decision through hard work and repetition. This is done in the military and many other fields. As you play and work with SnGPT, your brain is learning. In fact, your brain is picking up information that you aren't even aware of. Your opponent may take an extra 25 milliseconds to bet. Your conscious mind probably won't even notice, but your unconscious mind may have picked this up and is somehow incorporating it in its decision making process. As you can imagine, this kind of unconscious observation would be more valuable in a live game (facial expressions, hand movements, etc). You aren't even aware of the information that your brain is gathering, or how it is being used. In a live game, you don't need to make split second decisions, but maybe you should. Gladwell gives examples where people who talk through decisions make worse decisions than people who make a snap judgment. If trained properly, your unconscious brain is better at making decisions for certain tasks than your conscious brain. As Mike Sexton likes to say: "if you think long, you think wrong". Unfortunately, since this part of the brain has no language ability, so there's really no way for a great player to truly describe how they play. When you hear Phil Helmuth talking about how he "just knows" if his opponent is weak or strong, he's not lying. He does "know", but he can't explain it in words. Try reading one of his books. They are awful. The Gigabet "Block Theory" post was another example of how hard it is for experts to explain themselves. Some people are better at explaining things than others. Rather than explaining how they think, they often explain how they trained themselves to think without thinking. Many of the great players here trained their brains by studying ICM and playing a lot. Whether they are really using ICM math at the table is unclear, but irrelevant. If you want to play like them, you should train like them. Now don't get carried away with all this and start 50 tabling. These snap decisions are best made after the brain is gathered the proper inputs. If you don't even have time to read the stack sizes, you brain will still make a decision, but it won't be a good one. You need to try to gather as much information as possible, and let your brain sort out what is important. I also don't mean to say your first instinct is always correct. Gladwell has plenty of examples where it is not. In some cases, the brain isn't trained properly. In other cases, you are facing a situation that you haven't seen before. In this case, your conscious mind needs to impose some "common sense". Let's say you are 2nd in chips on the bubble and 1 player has 5 chips and another is sitting out. You are dealt TT. Your brain may say "PUSH", but your conscious mind may need to override this decision and fold. The best players are probably the ones who know when to stop and think, but do so without overthinking. I think another example of flawed snap decisions came when party changed their structure. They basically doubled the stacks and doubled the blinds. To SngPT and your conscious mind, this was a nonevent. Big deal. Well, your unconscious brain had been trained on thousands of 1,000 chip games. I'm guessing that your brain doesn't really work like SnGPT. Since you don't know how it is coming up with decisions, you'll have no idea if doubling the stacks has screwed you up. Luckily, this was temporary and your brain eventually adjusted to the new structure (assuming you didn't go broke first). I'm not really sure what my point was. I would recommend ignoring everything I just said and reading the book yourself. 
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#3
05-05-2006, 03:34 PM
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Re: Blink (a book)
[ QUOTE ]
I'm not really sure what my point was. I would recommend ignoring everything I just said and reading the book yourself. [/ QUOTE ] Dude, why are you trying to explain what your brain just knows? [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img] Seriously, excellent summary and good practical recommendations for anyone who wants to make beaucoup coin multi-tabling. Brings to mind Stu Ungar, of course, regarded as the best ever at reading opponents. Every now and then I get in a Stu zone where the cards might as well be face up, but it's pretty rare. Must have been nice to have that ability ALL the time.
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#6
05-05-2006, 08:38 PM
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Re: Blink (a book)
[ QUOTE ]
didnt read the post nor the book, but "The Tipping Point" was a great book too if anyone cares.... [/ QUOTE ] The Tipping Point was good too. I always thought that the recent poker phenomenon would've made a good case study in Tipping Point.
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#8
05-06-2006, 11:21 AM
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Re: Blink (a book)
There is a great (pulitzer) book called GEB: Godel Escher Bach which delves into all kinds of strange things and the way the mind works.
One section that struck me as particularly relevant was the "chunk" theory. Someone proved that expert chess players see the board in chunks. They put chess pieces on a board in a random pattern and asked an expert player and a novice to try and memorize the position of the pieces. Then they dumped them off and asked them to put them back. The expert was no better than the novice at this exercise. Then they took a board from a game in progress and did the same thing. In this case, the expert was much better at putting them back correctly and (this is the important part) when they were wrong, they often had chunks of pieces correct in relation to each other, but they were all one square off. I think this is exactly the way multi-tablers' brains work.
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#10
05-06-2006, 01:30 PM
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Re: Blink (a book)
PVS,
Whoa, I just read this book on the last leg of my flight back from India yesterday. I hadn't even thought about it's implications with poker. In fact, I haven't thought about poker at all for like 2.5 weeks. Maybe that means I'm done and my addiction has been cured, lol. Oh, as for the book and poker.....obviously a ton of the great poker thinking going on in many people's brains is happening in this 'blink' and no one is really able to describe it well. I'd be very interested in hearing if anyone has attempted to incorporate 'blink' stuff into their poker study/game/thinking....the book has been out a while I think, right? Did anyone else who read the book think that blue card/red card gambling study thing seem weird? How do people continue to gamble if their 'blinking' subconcious is able to adapt so quickly and well to that card game. Is it that actual gambling games are too complicated for our minds/subconcious to realize tons of money is being lost? Yugoslav
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