Nature Podcast: 扑克与决策

Interviewer: Nick Howe

First up, how do you make a decision – go with your gut, toss a coin or simply roll the dice? Well, chances are that you do not think about your options probabilistically, weighing up the likelihoods of each outcome. Nothing personal, just, generally, humans are quite bad at thinking in this way. But there’s perhaps a game that could help you with that – poker. When it comes to playing the hand your dealt – making a decision in life – mathematician Jon Von Neumann thought that poker was perfect practice.

Interviewee: Maria Konnikova

He thought that poker was the perfect game to mirror strategic human decision-making because, like life, it’s a game of incomplete information.

Interviewer: Nick Howe

This is Maria Konnikova, a writer and former academic psychologist who’s written a book about poker and decision-making called The Biggest Bluff. After reading Von Neumann’s musings on poker and how it had helped him develop a mathematical model for human decision-making – also known as game theory – Maria wondered whether playing poker could help her understand uncertainty and make better decisions. For her, this was something particularly pressing as she’d been through a period of personal strife, with bereavement, job losses and health issues all affecting her and her family.

Interviewee: Maria Konnikova

And just all of these things happening within just weeks of each other made me realise that we just really overestimate often how much control we have over things, and I thought, ‘I want to figure this out. I want to try to dive into this further.’

Interviewer: Nick Howe

This wasn’t necessarily the first time Maria had been thinking about decision-making. In a previous life, she had researched decision-making at grad school. But with the extra push from her personal life, she decided to dive into this further again to better understand how to make decisions in an uncertain world. But this time, she took an unusual step. She took a year out to play professional poker, even though she didn’t know how many cards were in a deck.

Interviewee: Maria Konnikova

I knew nothing about poker. I mean zero.

Interviewer: Nick Howe

Despite this, after a lot of practice with professional players, Maria got into the pro poker scene. But at her first big tournaments, she did not do so well.

Interviewee: Maria Konnikova

I think you understated it somewhat. I mean I lost a lot of money at the beginning. I mean it was a very steep learning curve and the bottom of it was not pleasant.

Interviewer: Nick Howe

But after these setbacks, and with some psychology know-how and a dose of luck, within months, she was very successful. In fact, she won over US$84,000, beating out hundreds of competitors, at a prestigious poker tournament. But importantly, she found that poker really helped her think probabilistically. At every hand in poker, you have to estimate the odds of each person holding certain cards and weigh that up against your own hand. All the while, everyone is trying to deceive you. For Maria, hundreds of rounds of this intense probabilistic thinking helped her make better decisions. Whether it’s as simple as the decision to have breakfast or not or your future career choices, Maria thinks that if you want to learn to decide effectively, poker could be a useful tool.

Interviewee: Maria Konnikova

In fact, it’s not just a useful tool, it’s just genuinely the only tool I’ve found in my years of psychology training that teaches you to think probabilistically correctly. We learn much better from experience, so from actually doing something from physically experiencing it ourselves than we do from description, so when someone tells us something or says, ‘Oh, the probability of this is x or y.’ We’re bad at kind of reading that and internalising what it means, but if you force us to kind of go through something, we learn that way. Poker actually forces you to learn correctly. You’re learning through experience. You’re sampling, but you’re doing so over hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of trials.

Interviewer: Nick Howe

This experience is mirrored by other poker plays too.

Interviewer: Liv Boeree

Poker is all about, ‘I think you’re bluffing in this situation, given everything I’ve seen, 80% of the time or 30% of the time, or whatever it is.’

Interviewer: Nick Howe

This is Liv Boeree. An astrophysics graduate turned professional poker player.

Interviewer: Liv Boeree

Because you’re making these kinds of decisions so frequently, where you’re having to kind of stick a probability on your predictions, you start to really build up a good database of when you’re correct and when you weren’t.

Interviewer: Nick Howe

According to Liv, this kind of repeated reinforcement of probabilities and their consequence can help people make better decisions in real life.

Interviewer: Liv Boeree

An example I often give is like I needed to park somewhere. I was running late for a meeting and I couldn’t find any parking spaces anywhere, and I knew I was only going to be in the meeting for half an hour. So, I thought, ‘Do I risk it and park on the double yellow line? Let’s do the expected value calculation. I think a traffic warden will come along maybe 10-20% of the time. The parking ticket it is £100. So, on the expectation, I’m going to lose about £15 here, would I pay £15 to not be late for this meeting? Yes, I would. Okay, fine, I’ll take the gamble.’

Interviewer: Nick Howe

So, whilst a fine may be £100, there’s only a small chance you’ll be hit with it, so realistically, if you take the risk, you’re only betting a proportion of that fine. A hard thing to get your head around, but for both Maria and Liv, poker can help, as it’s essentially like playing a sped-up simulation of life.

Interviewer: Liv Boeree

Poker is definitely a great analogue for life because it emulates the messiness of life. Whereas a game like chess, the best player always wins almost every single time. Whereas in poker, if I sat down against a complete beginner and we only pay 100 hands, I’ll probably only win like 51-52% of the time. It’s only if I played someone for like 10,000 hands or more that that edge actually starts to even get above like 90% likelihood that I’ll win. So, because of this sort of decoupling between results and actual quality of strategy, that is very much the case in life because life is very messy. There’s a lot of randomness. There’s a lot of unpredictable variables. Poker gives you an opportunity in a kind of more like – sounds silly – but low stakes, controlled environment to mess around with these confusing things that can make decision-making hard.

Interviewer: Nick Howe

Now, poker isn’t the only game to have randomness and messiness in it, but for Maria, it’s got enough elements of skill and luck to hit a sweet spot to emulate life. With enough practice, Maria thinks this life-emulator will allow people to make better decisions in an uncertain world and, like life, if you go all in, poker shows you the consequences.

Interviewee: Maria Konnikova

It’s funny, I talked to a man named Frank Lantz who designed games for a very long time, and he told me that poker is actually a really horrible game design from a modern standpoint because people think it’s rigged all the time because the probabilities don’t function normally, just it’s random and not controlled. And he said that in all modern games that you play on the computer, the designers actually screw with the random number generator because too many people complain when it’s truly random. What he loves about poker is that it doesn’t pander to you. It actually says, ‘Yeah, you think it’s rigged? Well, here you go. That’s how the deck played out.’ It doesn’t care that you’re supposed to win. There’s no such thing as ‘supposed to’. Probability does not have a memory. So, when you’re playing most games on the computer, they are actually rigged, so just know that because otherwise people complain and think, ‘Oh, well, this doesn’t make sense. I can’t believe I’m losing. This is a terrible game.’ Poker doesn’t do that. Poker just says, ‘Screw you. This is how the cards work.’

Interviewer: Nick Howe

That was Maria Konnikova. Her new book about her poker journey and understanding decision-making is called The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win. You also heard from Liv Boeree who’s written a review of the book in this week’s Nature. We’ll pop a link to that in the show notes.