Why I Loved and Left Poker

This is the 42nd and last installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

This is the 42nd and final installment of Range Rover, and I end this column at an appropriate time: after around five years of being a professional poker player, I have stopped playing fulltime, and am getting back to writing books. I am the first winning player i know to walk away from this game – but more than the money, I cherish the life lessons that poker has given me. As I sign off, let me share two of them: the first accounts, to some extent, for my love of the game; the second is the reason I am leaving it.

Poker is a game centred around the long term. The public image of poker is based around hands we see in movies or YouTube videos, and the beginner fantasizes about specific events, spectacular hands in which he pulls off a big bluff or deceives someone into stacking off to him. But once you go deeper into the game, you learn that short-term outcomes are largely determined by luck, and your skill only manifests itself in the long run. You learn to not be results-oriented but process-oriented, to just make the optimal move at every opportunity and ignore immediate outcomes. You learn, viscerally, for much money and pride is involved, the same lesson that the Bhagavad Gita teaches: Don’t worry about the fruits of your action, just do the right thing.

Needless to say, this applies to life as well. Luck plays a far bigger part in our lives than we realise: the very fact that you are literate enough to read this, presumably on a device you own, means you have already won the lottery of life. Much of what happens to us and around us is outside our control, and we would be foolish to ascribe meaning to these, or to let them affect us. Too many players I know let short-term wins and losses affect them, and become either arrogant or angry. This is folly. Equanimity is the key to being profitable in poker – and happy in life.

Why am I leaving a game that has given me so much? There are many reasons: Poker is all-consuming, and impacts one’s health and lifestyle; my real calling is to write, and I am pregnant with books that demand labour; but one key reason is that poker is a zero-sum game.

In life, you benefit when others do too. When two people transact a business deal, they do so because both gain value from it. When lovers kiss, the net happiness of both goes up. Life is a positive-sum game. But poker is not. You can only win if someone else loses, and the main skill in poker is exploiting the mistakes of others.

Now, all sport is zero-sum and consenting adults play this game, so this should not be a problem—except for the fact that poker lies on the intersection of sport and gambling. Gambling addiction destroys lives and families just as drug or alcohol addiction do, and i have seen this happen to people around me. I can sit at a poker table and calculate equities and figure out game-theoretically optimal ways of playing—but where is the nobility in this when my opponent is not doing likewise, but is a mindless slave to the dopamine rushes in his head? In the live games I played, I sometimes felt that there was no difference between me and a drug dealer: we were both exploiting someone else’s addiction.

When I write books, i have a shot at enriching myself by enriching others. This can never happen in poker. And so, my friends, goodbye.

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Addendum: You can read all the archives of my column on the Range Rover homepage. Here, briefly, are some I enjoyed writing.

My first column, The Bookshop Romeo, talks about the importance of thinking in terms of ranges, and its applicability to life. The Numbers Game and The Answer is 42 are about the importance of mathematics in poker. Make no Mistake, Finding Your Edge, The Colors of Money, The Cigarette Case and The Importance of Profiling deal with some basics of exploitive poker, while The Balancing Act, Miller’s Pyramid and Imagine You’re a Computer  talk about game-theory optimal (GTO) poker. Om Namah Volume is about the importance of putting volume.

I had great fun writing this series of pieces of probability, randomness and the nature of luck in poker and in life: Unlikely is Inevitable; Black Cats at the Poker Table; Running Good. I fed into my interest in cognitive psychology and behavioural economics for those pieces, as I did for these: The Interpreter; Poker at Lake Wobegon; Keep Calm and Carry On; The Endowment Effect; Steve Jobs and his Black Turtleneck.

Beast vs Human and The Zen Master Speaks deal with temperamental aspects of poker. The Game Outside the Game is about the politics of access, and Raking Bad about the ill effects of excessive rake. Sweet Dopamine talks about poker as an addiction, and The Dark Game and The Second Game of Dice expand upon this subject using personal experience.

Steve Jobs and his Black Turtleneck

This is the 41st installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

The next time you are sitting at a poker table, faced with a big decision for a lot of money, take a few seconds off and think of Steve Jobs, naked after his morning shower, walking to his closet to pick out the clothes he will wear for the day. Does he tank over what to wear? No, he doesn’t. He just takes out a black turtleneck, a pair of jeans, and that’s his outfit for the day. Through the last years of his life, in fact, that was his outfit for every day.

Jobs wasn’t lazy or devoid of imagination. He had just cottoned on to a phenomenon called Decision Fatigue. Basically, neurologists have found that every decision you take tires you out a little bit, and robs you of energy. Through the day, Decision Fatigue accumulates, as you get more and more pooped. So if you want to use your energy optimally, the smart thing to do is to automate all trivial decisions, or get them over with quickly, so you can bring all your powers to bear on the big decisions that really matter. Basically, don’t sweat the small stuff.

Jobs did this by wearing the same outfit every day, as does Mark Zuckerberg, thus eliminating one early decision at the start of the day. You could do this by having the same breakfast every day (or letting someone else decide for you), parking in the first available spot instead of searching for the perfect one, and so on. One way to deal with Decision Fatigue is by Satisficing. When I shop, for example, I don’t look for the perfect item to buy, but pick the first adequate one. This is Satisficing: making quick and easy decisions instead of perfect ones. If I’m buying a TV or a T-shirt or a portable hard drive, I won’t agonise for hours over all the different models available, but just pick the first one that seems satisfactory. I’ll devote more scrutiny to big ticket items that really matter—like buying a house, for example.

Consider the implications of this for poker. Poker players typically play sessions that last for many hours, sometimes upwards of 15, which is tiring in itself. They have to stay focussed, observe the action even when they’re not in the hand, and in live games, where such things matter, interact with others for the sake of conviviality. Add to this Decision Fatigue. In any session, you will face dozens of decisions, some of them big ones, increasing the likelihood of your getting exhausted as the session goes on, and thus more prone to errors. So what is one to do?

The obvious answer is to automate. At a beginner level, if you have a starting hand chart for every position, at least those preflop decisions won’t consume energy. As you grow into the game, you can have default decisions for more and more situations. But there is one huge problem with playing like this: you run the risk of becoming predictable, and therefore, exploitable. As you rise up the stakes in poker, you need to start balancing your ranges. This involves a huge amount of work off the table, so that decisions are easy while actually playing. I think of it as akin to a batsman spending thousands of hours in the nets till it becomes reflexive for him, in a match, to lean into an elegant cover-drive against a half volley outside off. Test cricketers don’t actually make a decision on every ball when they are batting; they just follow their reflexes. They have to hone their second nature.

This is why online grinders, whether they are playing cash games or tourneys, multi-table with such ease. Most decisions are automated. Of course, since most of us are playing exploitive poker instead of GTO, we also have to be observant for mistakes to exploit—but even this becomes second nature with practice and hard work off the tables. So here’s my takeaway from this: to reduce decision fatigue at the tables, and to become a better player overall, you need to put in lots of work off the tables. If you do that, there’ll be many black turtlenecks and jeans ahead of you, and Steve Jobs won’t be naked no more.

The Zen Master Speaks

This is the 40th installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

Once upon a time, a poker player went to a Zen master in the hills, Quiet River, and prostrated himself at his feet. ‘Sensei Quiet River,’ he said, ‘I have something I need to ask you. I am a poker player. But I am not as good as I can be, despite studying both the mathematical intricacies of the game and the psychological tendencies of others. Something is missing. I need you tell me what it is?’

Sensei Quiet River just looked into his eyes.

‘Here,’ said the poker player, whipping out his smartphone. ‘I have all my hand histories here. Let me play them for you. Please tell me my leaks.’ He switched on the hand replayer on his phone and held it up in front of the Sensei. But the Sensei ignored it and kept staring into the player’s eyes. Many seconds passed. Finally, the player understood.

‘I get it now,’ he says. ‘The problem is not in the math or the psychology. The problem is me.’

Sensei Quiet River smiled.

In the last installment of Range Rover I wrote, ‘We lose money in poker not because we think too little but because we feel too much.’ I promised to elaborate on it this week, so here goes.

Poker is a challenging game not because of mathematical complexity but because of human frailty. You can master it in a technical sense: you can understand equities, put people on ranges accurately, balance your own ranges, and so on. You will never be perfect at this, but you can easily be adequate for the games you play. But technique is half the story; temperament is the other half.

Even if you know all the right moves to make, you still need to have the discipline to detach yourself from the short-term outcomes of hands or sessions and play correctly. It’s hard to do this: we are all emotional creatures, casting a veneer of rationality on our reptile brains. We get tired, upset, elated, impatient; we give in to greed, sloth, arrogance, and, most of all, anger. Every poker player is familiar with a phenomenon called ‘Tilt’? What is tilt? The sports psychologist Jared Tendler, writer of a brilliant book called The Mental Game of Poker, describes it as “anger+bad play.” We get angry, so we play bad. And why do we get angry?

In his book, Tendler identifies different kinds of tilt. There’s Injustice Tilt, where you feel you are getting unluckier than others, and it’s just not fair. There’s Revenge Tilt, where you take things personally against certain other players at the table (maybe they gave you a bad beat, or they 3b you frequently). There’s Entitlement Tilt, where you feel you deserve to win more than you are, because you’re better dammit. And so on.

Our emotional condition at any point in time can cause us to play sub-optimally, even when we know what the optimal play is. This is most likely to happen at times of stress, and poker is an incredibly stressful activity, because there is always lots of money involved – not to mention ego. We often equate our sense of self and our well-being with the money we have – though we shouldn’t – and having it taken from us can destroy our emotional equalibrium. It isn’t easy, as that saying goes, to keep calm and carry on.

Let me now end this column with a tip. The next time you are at a poker table, facing a difficult decision, buffeted by emotions, here’s what I want you to do: Imagine that Sensei Quiet River is standing by your side. What would he do in your place? Do exactly that, and see him smile.

Imagine You Are A Computer

This is the 39th installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

Being human sucks in many ways, but one of its great advantages is that little thing called the imagination. We can imagine away our frailties and pretend to rise above our cognitive limitations. We are all Walter Mitty and Mungerilal, so this following thought experiment should appeal to you. Imagine that you are not a human being, but a computer designed to play poker perfectly and take the money of puny humans. Now tell me: what would change in the way you play the game? (Pause and think about this before you go to the next para, please.)

If you were God, you would know what cards your opponents held and the rundowns of all future boards. But as a computer, you wouldn’t need that information. You would play game-theory optimal (GTO) poker, with a strategy guaranteed not to lose in the long run regardless of the hands others might have or what they might do with them. Most of us humans, on the other hand, play exploitive poker, for which the hands and tendencies of others do matter. Let me illustrate the difference.

You are heads up in a hand, and on the river make a pot-size bet. Your opponent is getting 2 to 1 to call, and needs to be right one in three times to break even. Now, the aim of GTO poker is to make your opponent indifferent to calling or folding. You will do this by having what is known as a ‘balanced’ range jn this spot. Because you are offering him 2 to 1, a balanced range here would have 1/3 bluffs and 2/3 value hands. (Note that the composition of a balanced range depends on bet sizing, or the odds you give the opponent. If you bet half-pot, giving him 3 to 1, a balanced range would have 75% value hands.) Being balanced in any spot means that your opponent has to play perfectly to break even—and if he calls too much or folds too much, you make money. Basically, you cannot lose, and are thus likely to win.

Unless you’re playing high stakes online cash games, you’re unlikely to ever actually need to play GTO. The cash-game poker I play is exploitive poker. I try to identify mistakes my opponents tend to make and exploit them. In the above example, if my opponent tends to give up too often on the river, I will increase the number of bluffs in my range. If he is a calling machine and never folds, I will have 100% value bets in my range. While this is exploitive, this is also exploitable. By deviating from GTO to exploit his mistakes, I offer him (or someone else) a chance to exploit me. If i start bluffing more because he folds too much, he, or another player, could increase their calling frequency against me.

A computer would aim to play GTO poker, and it would do this by building balanced ranges for every spot, starting from preflop, across streets and board textures. This is incredibly complicated, and humans can just come to an approximation of this. This is useful, for understanding balanced ranges help us understand our own mistakes, and those of others, even if we don’t actually intend to play GTO poker. But my question at the start of this piece was not supposed to turn into a lecture on game theory. Indeed, my own answer to that question has nothing to do with game theory or exploiting others.

In any game I play, I tend to assume, correctly so far, that I can acquire the technical knowledge to beat the game. My big leaks are temperamental ones. If i was a computer, I would not feel any emotion, and would thus avoid all the pitfalls of being human at a poker table. We lose money in poker not because we think too little but because we feel too much. I shall elaborate on this in my next column.

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Also read:

The Balancing Act
Miller’s Pyramid

The Answer is 42

This is the 38th installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

The answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything, according to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is 42. The computer that came up with this took 7.5 million years to calculate it, though the question for this answer wasn’t known. Well, I have a guess as to what it was.

My guess is that Douglas Adams was a keen connoisseur of Pot Limit Omaha, and he got into the following hand with his friend Richard Dawkins. Adams had T985ds, spades and diamonds, and the flop came K67, one spade and two diamonds, giving him a humongous wrap, a flush draw and a backdoor flush draw. Dawkins potted, Adams repotted, Dawkins jammed, Adams called. Dawkins had AAKKds, clubs and hearts, for top set. ‘Ha,’ he exclaimed, ‘I have the nuts. Take a hitchhike, my friend!’

‘Now, now, calm down,’ said Adams. ‘It is in your genes to be excitable, I know, but I must inform you that your top set is not the best hand here. Indeed, I am actually the favourite to win here.’

‘You’re kidding me,’ said Dawkins, as he looked at Adams’s cards in growing horror. ‘So what percent of the time do I win this hand?’

And that’s the question, dear reader, to which the answer is 42.

As it happens, the turn gave Adams a straight flush, at which point Dawkins became a militant atheist, as indeed am I, but that is not a matter on which I shall dwell today. Instead, I wish to bring up the role of numbers in poker. I have written before on how poker is a numbers game, and to master the game, you must master the math. In my last column, I wrote about the hard work involved in teaching yourself the game, much of which involved number-crunching. In response, my friend Rajat, a keen player with a recent live tournament win under his belt, tweeted: ‘I’m an old-school player, terrified of numbers. What advice for me?’ This is a reaction many people would have, so here’s what I have to say.

The mathematical laws that govern poker, and indeed, the universe, are not ‘new-school’ inventions. Just as an old-school physicist before the time of Newton was subject to the laws of gravity, so is poker subject to mathematical laws, rewarding those who master them. Indeed, ‘old-school’ players knew their math, as you will note from the vintage of David Sklansky’s The Theory of Poker (1983), and the musings of Doyle Brunson, a man who knew his fold equity, in Super System (1979). Since the internet boom in poker, the math behind the game has been far better understood, to the extent that a talented player who ignores the numbers is like a prodigious swimmer trying to cross an ocean but just refusing to get on a bloody boat.

All decisions in poker come down to the math of estimating pot equity and fold equity and making the best decision possible. You may use your ‘reads’ and psychological insights to get a better sense of your opponent’s range, and how likely he might be to act in a particular way, but all these merely help you come up with the right inputs. The answer, in the end, lies in the math. And here’s the thing: if you ignore the math, that doesn’t mean the math goes away. No, it’s working away in the background, like the laws of nature, ensuring the survival of the fittest – or those who adapt the best, as Dawkins would say.

If you have been winning at poker without caring too much about the math, it is either because you’re playing really soft games, or you’ve been lucky. The way the game is growing in India, both of these are bound to change. So here’s a thought for you: It is a truism in poker we must not be results-oriented, and should just focus on making the right decisions so that we show a profit in the long run. But how do we know what the right decisions are? The answer lies in asking the right questions – as Dawkins did to Adams.

Don’t Maro Ratta

This is the 37th installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

Imagine you’re seven years old and you’re sitting in a classroom where an old professor who scratches his ass constantly is teaching you poker. ‘Now children,’ he intones , as if a robotic app is speaking from inside his body and not an actual human, ‘Imagine you have 13 big blinds in the cutoff and the action folds to you. What is the bottom of your shoving range?’

Someone titters from the back benches. The teacher ignores him and continues: ‘I will tell you what your shoving range is. Now everybody write down what I am putting on the blackboard, and learn by heart for exams. Okay? Learn. By. Heart.’ He turns to the board and starts writing with his right hand and scratching his ass with his left. Someone throws a paper plane at him.

Wouldn’t you hate to learn poker like that? I bet it would kill your interest in the game forever. Maybe you could have been a recreational shark, emptying people’s bank balances in your spare time. But no, classroom happens to you, and you take up stamp collecting as a hobby instead, for the sheer adrenalin rush that gives you. What a shame.

Poker has never been taught in a classroom, of course. It is a recent science, and if anyone wants to learn poker, they have to put in the hard yards and learn it on their own. There’s no university course, no poker diploma you can get, no MOOCs on Coursera, and most instructional books are outdated. Friends may help you, you could even get some online coaching, but if you want to be really good, you’ll have to do most of the hard work yourself. And before you learn how to play poker, you’ll first have to learn how to learn.

One of the problems with Indian education is the emphasis it places on ratta maroing – or learning by heart. When I was a student, I would spend all night before an exam mugging up facts from a guidebook, only to forget them the day after the tests. I believe that every time I did this, a small part of my brain died. And I didn’t learn anything about the subject in question.

Why do I bring this up in the context of poker? It is because too many beginning players indulge in their old habits of ratta maaroing when it comes to learning this game. I know tournament players who will know their push-fold ranges quite precisely, but have never, ever, even once calculated the equity of a particular move. Indeed, some tournament coaches begin and end by teaching ranges for different spots, and while this is useful, it would make more sense to teach a beginner to figure out those ranges for himself. Get the calculator out, figure out fold equity against players left to act, pot equity against calling ranges, and so on.  It’s a lot of work, but at the end of it, such knowledge will be deeper than just mugged-up push-fold charts – and as the game evolves, you will have the tools to do so as well.

In cash games as well, where stacks are deeper, you need to work hard at understanding how to play in different spots. Poker is, ultimately, about nothing more than maximising EV. If you don’t spend lots of time fiddling around with tools like Odds Oracle by ProPokerTools, which helps you figure out equities against weighted ranges, and Flopzilla, which helps you understand how different ranges connect with different board textures, then you can’t improve beyond a certain point.

Let me sum it up: inside your brain there is an old teacher who scratches his ass and encourages you to take shortcuts and ratta maro. Expel him.

We Are All Sharks

This is the 36th installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

A few days ago, I was shooting the breeze with a friend of mine when he told me about a couple of business ventures he was planning, and the investors he’d lined up for them. ‘You won’t believe how gullible they are,’ he said. ‘If there’s one thing I’ve learned from poker, it’s how to find fish and exploit them. And there are so many fish in the business world.’

It’s a good thing I was sipping lemonade at the time and not my usual hot Americano, or I’d have singed myself. Having recovered from the shock of his statement, I shook my head sadly. Poker is a beautiful game, and it can teach you a lot about life. But the lesson my friend had learned was entirely the wrong one.

Poker is a zero-sum game. (A negative-sum game, in fact, if you’re playing a raked game.) The only way you can win money is if someone else loses it. So it’s natural that the key skill in poker lies in exploiting the mistakes of others, sometimes after inducing those mistakes in the first place. It is a mathematical exercise that plays on the frailties of human nature. The game is played by consenting adults, and as your opponents are also trying to exploit you and take your money, they’re fair game. But the real world works differently.

Life is a positive-sum game. This is most eloquently illustrated by what the libertarian writer John Stossel once described, in an old column, as the Double Thank You Moment. When you buy a cup of coffee at a café, you say ‘thank you’ when you are handed the coffee, and the person behind the counter says ‘thank you’ on receiving your money. Both of you are better off. Indeed, the vast majority of human transaction, including all business transactions, are like this. Both people benefit – or they wouldn’t be transacting in the first place.

This amazing phenomenon, which we take for granted, is responsible for the remarkable economic and technological progress of the last three centuries. The economies of nations across the world have grown in consonance with the rise of free markets within them. Think about it: if every transaction leads to both parties benefiting, and a consequent increase of value in the world, then the more people are free to transact, in whatever form, the more we progress as an economy and a society. This is why libertarians such as myself consider it a crime to clamp down on any kind of freedom, be it economic or social.

The positive-sumness of things is unintuitive, and many people reflexively speak of the world in zero-sum terms. For example, socialists, with all their talk of ‘exploitation’, the rich getting richer at the expense of the poor and the need for redistribution. But that is not how the world works; it is not a game of poker. Just as in poker there is no possibility of a Double Thank You Moment, in life, we can all be sharks.

So much for learning the wrong lesson from poker. What does poker teach us about life that is useful to us? Well, the most important lesson I have learnt from poker is not to be results-oriented. Luck plays a huge role in the short term, you only get what you deserve in the long run, so just focus on doing the right thing and don’t worry about the fruits of your actions. The Bhagawad Gita teaches the exact same lesson. Lord Krishna would have crushed the games.

It’s All a Gamble

This is the 35th installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

Some people, when I tell them I play poker, look at me kind of strange. They may not say it, but inside their heads they’re saying, ‘OMG, he’s a gambler!’ And because I am skilled at getting inside people’s heads and listening to them think, inside my head I’m sayin’, ‘Yeah, and guess what, OMG OMG, you’re a gambler too!’

What is it that gamblers do? They weigh up the odds of a particular situation or event, the risk-to-reward ratio, and make a bet. This is not something that just happens inside casinos; this is the stuff of life.

You walk up to someone you fancy and ask them out for a date: you are gambling. You buy a stock: you’re betting on it to go up. You sell a stock: you’re betting on it to go down. You buy real estate: gamble. You buy a book because you like the blurb and the cover is amazing: ditto.

Little in life is certain, and everything is scarce, because time itself is scarce. You have one life, and the smallest decision you take today could change the course of your life. Maybe you have to choose between the PHD abroad or the comfortable job at home. Maybe you have to decide whether to say ‘yes’ to your boyfriend’s proposal when you know he’s not the dream guy, and you’re settling, and he hit you once when he was angry, but who knows if you’ll ever do better because you’re chubby, and you do love him sometimes. Maybe you get a puppy, betting that the love you get for a decade or so will be worth the pain you feel when it dies, as is inevitable. Everything you do, big or trivial, may be worth it, or it may be a mistake. And the thing with real life is, you’ll never know where the road not taken would have led. But you have to gamble; you have to choose.

Poker is slightly different. Poker is also gambling but it involves repeated small decisions with relatively little on the line on any particular occasion. And importantly, you get to put in volume. Even though luck plays a greater role in poker than in other sports or mindgames, it is not gambling gambling: if you’re skillful, you will eventually make a profit. Good poker players keep making, on average, profitable decisions, and though luck (or variance, as we grizzled vets call it) may hit them hard in the short run, in the long run they will end up winners. In life, on the other hand, as Keynes said, in the long run we’re dead.

A poker player can play a million hands or 20,000 tournaments, and those sample sizes are pretty good. You don’t get those in real life. How many times will you enter a romantic relationship? How often can you switch jobs? You get the drift.

There are different types of gambling. There are casino games like roulette, baccarat and craps in which, in the long run, you’re guaranteed to lose. I disapprove of playing those; it’s just giving money away. Then there’s life itself. You’re forced to gamble by circumstance, but it’s okay, life’s a positive-sum game; though one could argue that since we all die in the end, the final sum is zero. At least until then the odds aren’t weighed against you. And then there’s poker, in which, unlike in life, we can put in volume and bring the long run close. So, you, who do not play poker, don’t make fun of us and call us gamblers. All of us are born in a casino, and will die in one.

Deep Thought

This is the 34th installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

I discovered poker as a grown adult approaching middle age, but I was a hustler in college as well. I was a decent chess player, and used to offer a prop bet to people with the following terms: ‘I will play 10 games with you, and will win all ten. If you even draw one, you win the bet.’ I never made this bet with anyone I’d seen on the circuit, thus guaranteeing that all my customers were patzers, and unlike in poker, the quantum of luck in chess is low enough that I won this bet every time I made it. One of my early victims, dazzled by my magisterial play, asked me what the difference between me and him was. ‘How many moves ahead do you think?’ he asked. ‘The same as you,’ I replied.

A famous study by Adriaan de Groot published in 1946 showed that, contrary to what you might expect, novices and expert players think more or less the same number of moves ahead. The difference in quality arises because the experts think the right moves ahead. Their candidate moves for analysis, in other words, are better moves to begin with. Their skill lies not in depth of analysis, but in understanding the nature of a position, which, in turn, comes from better pattern recognition. A grandmaster will look at a position not as a conglomeration of individual pieces, but in chunks of pieces that form recognisable patterns. He will understand the positional vulnerabilities of different kinds of patterns, and the tactical motifs that recur in these spots. In a spot where a novice thinks ‘If I threaten this piece, he’ll move it here to counter me,’ the grandmaster may think, ‘His pawn structure has weakened his dark squares, let me exploit that weakness and exchange off my weak white-squared bishop for his strong knight on c6.’ Guess who is more likely to win.

Why do I write about chess in a poker column? Well, there is exactly the same difference between beginning poker players and experienced ones. Beginners think in terms of what hand they have and how it connects with the board, and graduate to this from thinking about their opponent’s hand, and from there to considering what hand the opponent puts them on. But good players think not in terms of hands but ranges. They never ask, in any spot, ‘Am I ahead here?’ but ‘What is my equity here?’ and ‘How can I maximise my EV?’ They have a better sense of how specific ranges interact with different board textures, and can plan for future streets.

For example, let’s say you call with KJ on the button after a nit raises UTG, and the flop comes 876 two-tone. A beginner may give up when the nit c-bets, but a pro will usually continue in the hand and take down the pot with either immediate or future aggression, because the flop texture is terrible for the UTG’s range of big pairs and high cards, and most turns and rivers are bad for him. Indeed, this will be practically a reflexive decision for the pro, requiring no thinking at all. He would play this hand better than the novice not because his reads are better or he has a better poker face or suchlike, but because he understands the underlying math better.

Here’s one thing common to both chess and poker: the bad player does not know what he does not know. So here’s a tip on how to get better at both games: play a hell of a lot, and stay humble. The day you stop learning, you will be the fish at the table.

Poker at Lake Wobegon

This is the 33rd installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

One of the ironies of poker is that at a nine-handed poker table, all nine players believe that they are profitable, if not the best player at the table. This obviously cannot be the case. Poker is a negative-sum game: the rake takes a percentage of each pot or tournament, and winners win less than what losers lose. Also, easily more than 90% of players are long-term losers, and most of the winners are just marginal winners. So what’s going on here?

I have two answers for you: 1. The nature of poker as a game. 2. Human nature itself. Let’s get the easy one out of the way.

Every game contains differing elements of luck, and although poker is unquestionably a game of skill, the quantum of luck in it is far higher than in other games. A winning player’s edge translates into a profit only in the long-term. Over a short span of time, it is difficult to tell from results who is the fish and who the shark. Losers win their fair share of pots and tournaments, which fosters the belief that they are better than they really are. But their flawed self-assessment is a consequence not just of the nature of poker, but of human nature itself.

A few decades ago, the writer Garrison Keillor created a fictional town named Lake Wobegon, where, he wrote, “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.” This gave its name to the Lake Wobegon Effect, also known as Illusory Superiority, a tendency humans have of overestimating their abilities. This tendency crops ups across contexts: in studies, people have been known to overestimate their driving skills (everyone can’t be above average) and terminally ill cancer patients have also, poignantly, overestimated their chances of survival.

You will see the Lake Wobegon Effect in poker, as also its sister, the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Wikipedia defines the Dunning-Kruger Effect as ‘a cognitive bias wherein unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude.’

In the context of poker, a player may think he is better than he is because he lacks understanding of the game, or the intellectual tools to perceive his own weaknesses. I see this around me in many players. They don’t understand the long-term nature of the game, focus only on their own hand and don’t think in terms of ranges or equities, are results-oriented rather than process-oriented, and consider pots they win to be a validation of their skill while attributing their losses to bad luck. Some of these guys avoid putting in the hard work to get better, and rationalise this sloth; some of them are simply not capable of improving. This is not a defect in character any more than being human is.

How can you guard against the Lake Wobegon Effect and the Dunning-Kruger Effect in yourself? Here are two things you can do. One, always ask yourself what your edge is in any game you go to. If you can’t define this precisely in terms of how you are exploiting the specific weaknesses of others, you don’t have an edge. Two, keep track of all your scores, and see how much money you make over a decent sample size of sessions. Your brain might deceive you—but the numbers won’t lie.