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Christopher George is a long-time poker professional, but his focus on Stud and other non-hold ’em games sets him apart from your average twenty- or thirty-something online grinder. You wouldn’t think it from his demeanor, but the swings he’s experienced set him apart as well. As he puts it, “I live my life like I should play poker and play poker like I should live my life.”
You can follow @CeeGeePoker on Twitter and, if you’re really lucky, catch him streaming high stakes mixed game action. More reliably, you’ll find his training videos on Deuces Cracked.
Timestamps
0:30 – Hello & Welcome
6:53 – Strategy
31:40 – Christopher George
Strategy
$400 tournament at the Wynn, blinds 300/600/75, effective stacks 30K. Hero opens to 1500 with QJs (blinds were 300-600, and I believe antes were 50). CO, Button, and Villain in BB call.
Flop (6700) 984r rainbow. Checks around.
Turn (6700) T. BB bets big blind bet 2100 , Hero raises to 5100, two folds, BB calls.
River (16900) A. Villain checks, Hero bets 12k, Villain folds
Every time I see people talking about Daniel Kahneman’s book thinking, fast and slow I worry a lot they miss an important aspect of most of his studies. He often uses examples where people are non-experts and/or in novel situations. Both which don’t apply to professional poker players when they are making decisions playing poker.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wup_K2WN0I
As far as I am concerned Antonio Damasio provides a necessary counter balance to the great work Kahneman has done.
At the very least it should hint at the importance of having mental/emotional balance and/or equanimity when playing poker. The only way to do that is be to be mindful of your emotions and thoughts.
Thanks for the comment, Eric.
Don’t the examples from finance and from the Israeli military (just to pick two off the top of my head) involve experts in familiar situations?
Hey Nate,
So I haven’t read the book in over a year and gave my copy to the library but I will try to respond anyways.
In those two situations if i recall correctly I was less then convinced the people involved in the study could really be considered experts in the sense did they really have a mastery of their field. A mechanic might do a great job at fixing your car but if you wanted to predict which of 3 new engines is most fuel efficient I would ask an engineer. In the finance situation I believed they used stock brokers but what if they had used people with Phd’s in math. I could go on a rant about stock brokers but I will skip it. I feel like both studies showed more how traditional knowledge can often be very wrong which I am in total support of.
And even if you grant their expertise what happens to their ability to predict after they were shown their mistake. I am certainly not suggesting people shouldn’t study away from the table.
And like I said I don’t have the study in front of me but usually examples involving finance involve open systems where people’s intuition is much less effective. Poker like for example chess is much closer to being a closed system.
Listen Kahenman’s book did a great job of highlighting situations where your intuition will lead you wrong but in doing so he ignored all the research that shows examples of when a person’s intuition does a better job which is usually in cases of pattern recognition and/or frequency prediction in closed systems. Obviously it was his book and his right to hammer home his point of view but I think any poker player would be really disadvantaged if they took away from his book that they should ignore their intuition.
Anyways that is my two cents and I realize some of it is a matter of opinion.
Having read Gladwell’s “Blink”, I was curious about some of the same things, and was happy to see that Kahneman does reference Gladwell explicitly. His argument is basically what you said: that intuition is helpful in situations where people have a lot of experience and have gotten reliable feedback, but many experts overestimate their ability to apply intuition in situations that don’t meet that description. He gives the example of therapists who are very good at predicting how clients will respond to particular approaches during a given session or within a week or two, but are not good at predicting a client’s long-term prospects.
The problem with poker, as opposed to chess, is that outcomes don’t follow directly from inputs. It’s easy to “learn” the wrong thing in poker. You bet, get raised, and then decide you shouldn’t have bet, which is not necessarily the case. I won’t deny that there are people who have learned to play poker by “feel”, but I think they are rare cases and also very much on their way out. Far more often I encounter people whose instincts have made them weak tight and far too concerned about stuff like “protecting” against flush draws.
I actual agree with most of this. And I think it basically explains why having a coach or a friend that is a winning player is so important in becoming a good poker player. There are just so many things that are hard to learn from experience alone. At the very least it drastically accelerates the learning curve.
There is also something to be said that being a general, a stock broker, or a psychotherapist almost requires you, just to be able to function on a daily basis, to be over confident about your ability. This is probably true for poker players as well to some extent.
Where I would push back is that I believe most of the best poker players both extensively study the game away from the tables AND use “feel” at the tables. I am trying to argue what makes very good players great is their ability to harness their intuition about what they know about the game. Another way of saying this is that conscious deliberation in situations that require rapid complex decision making often leads to worse outcomes then following ones intuition-think traffic jam.
It is obviously incredible hard to quantify how much feel any particular player uses in any given situation. I think my last point would be to point out for the sake of taking pause is to note that even Bill Chen who wrote the mathematics of poker says his uses intuition to some extent.
Coles Notes = systematic learning informs intuition.
I went out and snap bought TF&S – I think I was in exactly the same spot as Andrew in terms of assuming I kinda sorta knew the content already. Then I realised I should have put the purchase through the Thinking Poker affiliate link – looks like some more Thinking Slow is in order.
As an addendum to the experts/non experts subject, I’ve also seen it mentioned that the vast preponderance of subjects in studies in experimental psychology(?) are in essence people volunteering for studies undertaken in Western European & American university towns, and that some of the findings might therefore be less universally valid to the whole of humanity than one might at first assume.
As a current graduate student working on a PhD in experimental psychology (although not in the field of judgment and decision-making), I feel like this is an ok spot for me to deposit my two cents.
So it is true that in large part, subjects in our studies are fit into a relatively small box. They are most often undergraduate students in introductory level psychology courses fulfilling a course requirement for research participation. It has been a common criticism angled at psychology from the field of anthropology, in particular, that many psychological findings may not translate cross-culturally. That said, I doubt that something like cognitive biases has much in the way of culturally based differences, considering that many of those biases are often proposed as originating from an evolutionary perspective.
I enjoyed this show even more than usual for some reason. Can’t quite put my finger on it but Christopher was interesting. Thanks y’all!
Also want to quickly comment that, for some people, they might be able to make a bigger charitable impact by having a high paying job and giving a lot of money to charity. Of course working directly in a charity may be more satisfying.