Episode 31: Nicole “SGTRJ” Rejiester

11 thoughts on “Episode 31: Nicole “SGTRJ” Rejiester”

1. Thanks for mentioning my name in the podcast.My ego soared.
   I believe very strongly in keeping conscious thread alert for the quality of poker.
   However I see very strong con-argument – tiny size of working memory.
   There is one strong argument to delegate all task to your unconscious competence even in poker.
   The working memory is memory that can be accessed and considered at any given moment.
   Scientists argue that working memory has a set limit of about maximum four items on average,
   The tiny size of the working memory have strong impact on decision making.
   So physiologically we are badly equipped to consider different angles of a complex problem simultaneously because we can hold few items in out mind
   The working memory could be the number one limit for the quality of poker decision or general intelligence and reasoning.
   There are no evidence that working memory can be expanded.
   There is strong evidence that working memory can be better utilize by freeing space via packing and delegation.
   Example: “WSOP” would only occupy one slot in my memory, rather than five “SGTRJ” or maybe two “SG” “TRJ”.
   If you watch Derren Brown videos you will see that many of his tricks are based on attacking person working memory or some related believes-illusion (free will).
   Because of physiological limits we have constricted choice even we imagine otherwise.
   Before I read your article “Gray Monday” and made my post(Boston bombing vs Us drones) I watched this video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y9711pvZkc
   This is link to the trailer made by Polish company who specialize in games made for US market.Most of this games do not sell well in Europe,Asia or Middle East.They sell in US.
   I watched by this trailers several times before I read your articles.I was hypnotized by talent of animator,violence, synchronization (music,animation).
   I estimate there are 70% chance that my association (US drones vs Boston bombing) was directly caused by (pre)-watching this video.

2. Hi. Great podcast. For future Podcasts could you get someone like Phil ivey on the shoq? Just to listen to half an hour of his insights into poker would be amazing. Maybe Ivey is a bit ambitious maybe you could get some of the Iveypros on the show.

   • Thanks, Jake, glad you’re enjoying it. I don’t know about Ivey specifically – he’s notoriously averse to interviews – but as for “someone like Phil Ivey”, you can find great strategy discussions Vanessa Selbst, Ike Haxton, Olivier Busquet, and Ben Wilinofsky in the podcast archive. IMO the best episode we’ve done strategy-wise was with Ed Miller: https://www.thinkingpoker.net/2013/03/episode-25-ed-miller/

3. Any way we can get a link to that spreadsheet you were talking about??

   • I did link it in the post, but here it is: https://t.co/GKKUaDjpwT

4. Is anyone else having problems with this? I’m subscribed through my phone’s podcasting app, and it has this episode listed, but when i try to download it, it comes up as lasting 0 seconds.

5. I am using Chrome, and I try to save the MP3 to my PC, but it is not finding the file.

   • I found the repost of episode 31 and that works fine.

6. Another good episode, thanks for your ongoing efforts. And good to see that it really is becoming about 50% theory of the mind, 50% poker 😉

   I thought your discussion of flow and spidey-sense – especially the times when the spidey sense doesn’t work out – made a really good case for it being strongly a result of deep-set results orientedness: when we make the spidey-move and it works, we’re in the zone and let’s roll, when it doesn’t, oh well move on. Poker players are probably less results oriented than almost anyone, yet I think it’s really hard to shake it off completely.

   I was a maths undergrad, too, and whilst I’ll give Nate that I don’t think I did much work in a flow state of mind, I don’t think that _that_ much was done through really concentrated analytic thinking. For me, a lot of the work of compiling a proof (and similarly now in the act of constructing a written argument in the humanities) was very spatial and unconscious. It’s quite hard to articulate explicitly, but very often I’d have a mental image of the logic structures I was working with, and it was almost a process of feeling how they could be solved. Going for a walk around the block was/is probably as effective a tool for me as thinking hard.

   • I’m back to working on tough math questions very often. I do take a lot of walks. You’re right that internal symbolic manipulation isn’t so much of my thinking when things are going right.

     As I complained many times, I think that we need to be very careful when talking about flow to try to define what it is we’re talking about. It’s not clear to me that time spent on a walk exploring my own intuitive sense of the structure of a math problem is entirely analogous to Larry Bird being in the zone.

     • incidentally, I understood that being ‘in the zone’ in basketball had been shown to be statistically meaningless wrt streaky shooting (although experientially I definitely know a feeling on court I could describe as flow)

       one area in which sports surely represents something of a good parallel is the time pressured decision making. If not basketball, then perhaps something like shot selection in snooker, or play choice in American football? I recall someone on 2+2 (coletranedog? Brandon Adams?) linking to a study of some group like fighter pilots and their brain physiology or something that highlighted they responded positively to pressure, suggesting that great poker players might be similar, and I think ike haxton (or Phil Galfond?) suggested he feels like playing high stakes stimulates his thinking. I know that I’m the opposite – sometimes it’s a triumph to think anything beyond omg omg omg omg.

       but I agree that there’s a difference between talking about some intangible zone which we cannot consistently access or everyday good play.

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