I always figured the good poker players were all nerds, and the folk view of poker as this manly dominance contest of nerves etc just provided an endless stream of prey for them. I used to play Magic: The Gathering and read MTG blogs etc, and the pros drifted into poker because there was more money in it.
Poker, like other games of hidden information such as MTG, very strongly rewards rationality because it presses upon an important bias. Few people understand that the right play is the one that maximises your chances of winning given your information, not the one that will win given all the information.
Most people just can’t accept this. When they make the right bet and lose it messes them up—they start thinking of what they should’ve done differently, and their play diverges from the correct line. They can’t accept that they played correctly. The same thing happens when they make an incorrect play that happens to win.
I always figured the good poker players were all nerds, and the folk view of poker as this manly dominance contest of nerves etc just provided an endless stream of prey for them. I used to play Magic: The Gathering and read MTG blogs etc, and the pros drifted into poker because there was more money in it.
Poker, like other games of hidden information such as MTG, very strongly rewards rationality because it presses upon an important bias. Few people understand that the right play is the one that maximises your chances of winning given your information, not the one that will win given all the information.
Most people just can’t accept this. When they make the right bet and lose it messes them up—they start thinking of what they should’ve done differently, and their play diverges from the correct line. They can’t accept that they played correctly. The same thing happens when they make an incorrect play that happens to win.