Episode 30: Jussi Palomäki

14 thoughts on “Episode 30: Jussi Palomäki”

1. I thought crazy monkey tilt was just something people said, I never knew it was an actual thing.

2. One of my favorite episodes. Jussi offers great insights with a kind and humorous presentation. I understand tilt a lot better, and I loved hearing about the monkey experiment!

3. Suggestions.
   1.The Tendler book is an effort to apply sports psychology to poker.
   In most sports you want to kill conscious stream and implement 100% ultimate autopilot during execution.You are in the zone.
   Killing conscious stream and deploying unconscious competence is holy grail of perfection. The conscious stream is seen as a disturbance and a clutter for performance reason.
   It does not have to be true for poker.
   It looks that you want to keep you conscious thread alive and alert even when you are in a zone.
   There are more fundamental questions and gotchas regarding mental game of poker vs generic mental game of sport.
   Jared Tendler had excellent credentials to answer these questions,gotchas because of his practical experience with golfers and poker-players.

   2.Angelo music is much better fit for your podcasts. It supposed to be deployed more frequently as breakers during the show.

   • Thanks, Andy. I’m curious to hear Jared’s take on this, I’m glad you brought it up.

4. Woah, move over nitcast, the academycast is born.

   I thought it was pretty interesting how hard it was to say almost anything about tilt without getting into theories of the mind.

   Something (not entirely unrelated to tilt) that interests me, chiefly because I simply don’t have it at all in my makeup, is the ‘degen’ element to risk taking – the risk loving personality type. Adam Schwartz on the 2+2 pokercast has talked a couple of times about how some gamblers actually somehow crave the big loss more than the win, and I recall Phil Ivey saying on a poker after dark once something like ‘I like to lose so much I can’t breathe’. I just can’t fathom this.

   • I’m inclined to think it’s not super complicated – winning gets boring,especially when you get used to it. Losing adds danger and adrenaline and thrill to the process. At the end of the day, though, even degen gamblers just want to experience the loss before they bounce back – they don’t want to stay stuck. It’s a yin-yang thing – the pleasure of winning is just never as sweet as it is when you can contrast it against it’s antithesis.

   • Ian,
     I recall two different explanations for this risk loving trait in gamblers. One, was that they loved the uncertainty. They enjoyed the chemical response of the unknown when they pull the slot machine arm. They don’t enjoy losing more than winning, but they enjoy that moment when the wheels spin enough to repeat the event despite knowing the logical outcome. Second, is the discovery that certain brain injuries or medications which interfere with dopamine response lead to the inability to learn from our losses. Normally, we use the pain of loss to change our behavior, but some are not able to do that, for a variety of reasons.

5. The monkey tilt was very interesting. It is presented as this example of fairness, but I see it in the related context of relative status. We want to keep up with the Joneses. For example, if you survey investors, they will often prefer to make $100k/year in a world where everyone else makes $80k over the opportunity to make $150k/year in a world where everyone else makes $200k. If we were greedy, we would seek absolute value (the cucumber). Because we are mostly envious, we seek relative value (the grape). It fits very nicely into Dr. Falkenstein’s explanation for why higher risk investments do not outperform lower risk investments.

   The tennis story was also interesting. Tennis is almost all skill. Andy Roddick never had variance enable him to beat Roger Federer. In my own assessment, I rarely tilt at Poker. But I have smashed many a racquet on the tennis court. My explanation is that I can accept the certain amount of variance in poker, but with tennis, the only explanation for my play has to be my lack of skill or the greater skill of my opponent. See Mauboussin on luck vs. skill.

   Great job.

   • Actually, I think Roddick did win once, so “never” was a shortcut.

   • Piefarmer – if it was phrased as “in a world” then the response by the investors seems rationale to me since average salaries are reflected in cost of living.

     • Dana,
       I was paraphrasing and going from memory. Upon reflection, I do think it was usually put in a way to mean “your world”. So not literally “everyone else”, but the people you know and encounter. In other words, average cost of living is not changing. I’ll try to find a link.
       Sorry for the confusion.

       • http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic212792.files/Indices_of_Wellbeing/HSPH.pdf has these examples:

         A: Your current yearly income is $50,000; others earn $25,000. B: Your current yearly income is $100,000; others earn $200,000. (Prices are what they are currently and prices (therefore the purchasing power of money) are the same in states A and B.)

         B. You have 2 weeks of vacation; others have 1 week. B: You have 4 weeks of vacation; others have 8 weeks.

   • Very interesting. I have the exact opposite reaction. If I lose at tennis, I don’t get upset – not much I can do if the other guy is just better than me. If I lose at poker, though, assuming I’m clearly better than the other guy, because luck favours my opponent time and again – that tilts me!

     As for the salary example: everything in life is relative. There is no such thing as absolute anything. That goes for money as much as for pleasure and pain.

6. Great podcast – love the guest & discussion. I think this is becoming the self-help poker podcast.

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