Emily and I were looking at used cars today, and though we weren’t even at the point of negotiating prices or anything, I found a few parellels to poker that I thought were interesting.
I should tell you about the guy we were dealing with first, because he was a character. By nature, he was about as far as you could get from the stereotype of a used car dealer. He’d been a high-end photographer and was only really passionate when talking about all the interesting people he’d shot, from famous poets to Uri Gellar to Chuck Norris. He hinted at some odd turn of fate that had left him selling used cars, but mostly he seemed quite zen about the whole thing.
Despite this, he did occasionally employ some classic salesperson techniques that generally came across as forced, like he was trying out something he’d read in a book or learned during training. However, he twice employed a “I’m not usually one to say this but…” line which sounds like a line but which he delivered in a far more genuine fashion than he had with his other lines. The one that really stood out was, “I can tell you, because I did the intake on this one personally, the woman who brought this car in was a classic. She was the picture of the little old lady who just drives to and from work, never goes over the speed limit, hands at 10 and 2. She’s easily the most perfect prior owner I’ve seen.”
This one is interesting because it’s one of those, “I’m acknowledging that we both know this is a BS line for me, as a used car salesman, to use. And since it’s such a stereotypical ploy, I must be telling the truth!” Much like when I check call a KT8 flop, a K comes on the turn, and my opponent bets again. We both know that he’s representing very little and that he isn’t ‘supposed’ to bluff here and so he couldn’t possibly be bluffing, right?
My curiosity was piqued. So while we were on a test drive, he asked what I did for a living, and got really interested in the whole poker thing. I answered a few of the standard questions: What’s the most you’ve ever won and lost? Is it all just psychology? Have you ever been on TV?
Then I asked him how long he’d been selling cars. “Only a month,” he told me. That would explain his ham-handed lines and his station at the used car desk. But it also takes a lot of the force out of a statement like “the most perfect prior owner I’ve seen.” How many intakes could he have done in a month?
If you’re going to bluff, you’ve got to tell a consistent story across multiple streets.
Uncommonly witty.