How We Decide (31 page)

Binger is gradually getting more aggressive at the poker table. It's as if his betting instincts have a dial, and he's slowly turning up the volume. He's still folding the vast majority of his hands, but when he does decide to make a bet, he doesn't equivocate. In these situations, his table manners follow a well-rehearsed script. Binger takes a second glance at his hole cards and flexes his jaw muscles. He then adjusts his reflective sunglasses, pressing them tight against his eyes, looks at his cards again, and pushes an intimidating pile of chips to the center of the table. His face radiates self-assurance. He's done the calculations and knows the odds. Most of the time, the other players respond by folding.

This fiercely disciplined strategy pays off. By the end of the fifth day of the tournament, Binger is in fourth place, with $4,920,000 in chips. Fourteen hours later, he's got $5,275,000. After seven exhausting days, he's amassed a pile of nearly $6,000,000 in chips. And then, on the eighth day, Binger makes the final table. When play begins, the Hollywood producer Jamie Gold has a commanding chip lead over the other players. Gold has been playing smart poker, but he's also been enjoying a staggering run of good luck. As one poker professional later told me, "[Gold] has an amazing ability to pull cards out of his ass. And somehow he always pulls the exact right card."

After a few hours, Gold begins to eliminate some of the remaining players. His big chip lead means that he can turn each hand into a potential trap. Gold can also bluff with abandon, since calling his bluff means the other player has to go all in. Binger is playing conservatively—"I just wasn't getting the right cards," he said later—and so he waits, and watches. The big antes are gradually bleeding away his chips, but he's getting a better sense of his competition. "After a while, you just get these feelings about people," he says. "You'll watch them make a certain bet and then scratch their nose or whatever and all of a sudden you'll realize that they've got nothing, that you can take the hand." There are no certainties in poker, which means that anything that can narrow the uncertainty is extremely valuable, even if it's just a subtle hunch. These psychological interpretations aren't quantifiable—you can't summarize a person in a probability—but they still inform Binger's betting decisions.

When there are only five players left, Binger begins to make his move. "It started when I got dealt a pair of kings," he says. "I decided right then and there to make a rather aggressive bet." A few hours before, Binger had bluffed one of the five, a player named Paul Wasicka, out of a big pot. Although Binger had been dealt a poor hand, his aggressive bet convinced everyone else to fold. Binger could tell that Wasicka was still seething. "I knew Paul thought I was just trying to bluff him again," Binger remembers. "He thought that I only had a small pair. But I had pocket kings."

Binger wanted to draw Wasicka deeper into the hand. In tactical moments like this, poker transcends its probabilities. The game morphs into a deeply human drama, a competition of decision-making. Binger needed to make a bet that would convince Wasicka he was trying to steal another pot, that he was once again making an aggressive bet with nothing but a low pair. "I decided to go all in," Binger says. "By overplaying my hand—by pretending to act strong—I was actually acting weak, at least in his eyes. I then tried to exude weakness, but without making it obvious, because then he would know that I was only
pretending
to bluff, which is a sure sign that I've actually got a good hand." Binger's best friend and brother were both watching the tournament on closed-circuit television. The best friend was convinced that Binger was bluffing and that he was about to get knocked out of the tournament. The signs of repressed anxiety were unmistakable: Binger's fingers were manically tapping on the table, and his teeth were digging into his lower lip. "Only my brother knew better," Binger says. "I guess he knew how to read my face. He said I looked too weak, so I must be strong."

Wasicka took the bait. He was so certain that Binger was bluffing that he ended up betting millions of chips on a weak hand. Binger won the pot and doubled his chips. "That bet had nothing to do with math," Binger says. "I'd gotten high pairs before, and not done much with them ... But at that moment, as soon as I saw my cards, I knew what I needed to do. To be honest, I don't know why I went all in on that hand. If I'd really thought about it, I might not have done it. The bet was damn risky. But it just felt like the right thing to do. You can do all the probabilistic analysis in the world, but in the end it all comes down to something you can't quite explain."

Professional poker players are a fatalistic bunch. They live in a deterministic world shaped by mysterious forces. Everything is possible, and yet only one thing ever happens. You might get the card you need on the river, but you might not. There's a possibility you'll make the straight, but you probably won't. Poker is a game of subtle skill and exquisite odds, but it's also a crapshoot.

This undercurrent of chance is the defining feature of the game. It's what makes the psychological aspects of poker—the subtle reads, the convincing bluffs, the inexplicable intuitions—so essential. Chess, by contrast, is a game of pure information. There are no secrets or shuffled decks or hidden cards; the moving parts of the game are all perfectly visible, right there on the chessboard. As a result, computers can consistently beat grand masters; they can use their virtually unlimited processing powers to find the perfect move. But poker isn't so amenable to microchips and mathematics. Great poker players aren't just gambling statisticians. They need to bring something else to the table, to possess that inexplicable talent for knowing when to risk everything on a pair of kings. "Poker is a science, but it's also an art," Binger says. "To be good, you have to master both sides of the game."

What Binger is alluding to is the fact that there are always two ways to look at a poker hand. The first approach is mathematical. It treats every hand like a math problem and assumes that winning the game is simply a matter of plugging the probabilities into a sophisticated equation. According to this strategy, poker players should act like rational agents, looking for bets that minimize risk and maximize gain. This is what Binger did during the opening rounds of the WSOP, when he was only betting on high-percentage hands. Making money was just a matter of getting the odds right.

But Binger knows that poker isn't merely a set of math problems. When he talks about the art of the game, he's alluding to everything that can't be translated into numbers. The laws of statistics couldn't have told Binger how to lead Wasicka into his trap, or whether he should bluff with a middling pair. Even the most carefully calculated odds can't eliminate the unpredictability in a shuffled deck of cards. This is why the best poker players don't pretend that poker can be solved. They know the game is ultimately a
mystery.

The difference between math problems and mysteries is important. In order to solve a math problem, all you need is more rational thought. Some poker hands, of course, can be played by relying on the math: if you're dealt a pair of aces, or get a straight on the flop, then you're going to make an aggressive bet. The odds are in your favor, and a little statistics will lead you to make the correct decision. But this rational approach can't be applied to the vast majority of poker hands, which are utter mysteries. In these situations, more statistical analysis won't help the player make a decision. In fact, thinking too much is part of the problem, since all that extra thought just gets in the way. "Sometimes, I have to tell myself to not focus on the math," Binger says. "The danger with the math is that it can make you think you know more than you do. Instead of thinking about what the other player is doing, you end up obsessing over the percentages." The first part of solving a mystery is realizing that there is no easy solution. Nobody knows what card is coming next.

This is where feelings come into play. When there is no obvious answer, a poker player is forced to make a decision using the emotional brain. And so that vague intuition about his hand, that inexplicable hunch about his opponent, ends up becoming a decisive factor. This decision won't be perfect—there's too much uncertainty for that—but it's the best option. Mysteries require more than mere rationality. "I know that my mind assimilates many more variables than I'm actually aware of," Binger says. "Especially when it comes to reading other players, I'll often make strong and accurate reads without knowing what signals I'm picking up on. And as I've gained experience, I've felt my poker instincts just get better and better, to the point where I almost never doubt them. If I get a strong feeling, then that's what I go with."

Remember Damasio's card-playing experiment? In that gambling game, players had to turn over about eighty cards before they could consciously explain which card deck was the best option. Their conclusions were rational, but they were also rather slow. It takes a while to do the math. But when Damasio measured people's emotions, he discovered that their feelings were able to identify the good decks after only ten cards. Whenever people reached for the risky decks, they experienced a surge of nervousness, even though they couldn't say why they felt so nervous. The subjects who trusted their emotional brains—who listened to their sweaty palms—made the most money.

The different strategies used by poker players illuminate the benefits of having a mind capable of rational analysis
and
irrational emotion. Sometimes it helps to look at cards from the cold perspective of statistics, to bet on hands only when the odds are on your side. But the best poker players also know when
not
to rely on the math. People aren't particles. To play the game is to accept the limits of statistics, to know that numbers don't know everything. Binger realizes that in certain situations, it's important to listen to his feelings, even if he doesn't always know what they're responding to. "As a physicist, it can be hard admitting that you just can't reason your way to the winning hand," Binger says. "But that's the reality of poker. You can't construct a perfect model of it. It's based on a seemingly infinite amount of information. In that sense, poker is a lot like real life."

Ap Dijksterhuis, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, had a scientific breakthrough while shopping for a car. Like most consumers, Dijksterhuis was slightly overwhelmed by the variety of makes and models. There were just so many alternatives to consider. Before he could find the right car, Dijksterhuis needed to take a dizzying number of variables into account, from fuel economy to trunk space. And then, once he made up his mind, Dijksterhuis had to figure out which options he wanted. A moon roof? A diesel engine? Six speakers? Side air bags? The list of possibilities seemed endless.

That's when Dijksterhuis realized that buying a car exceeded the limits of his conscious brain. He could no longer remember whether the Toyota or the Opel had a bigger engine, or if it was the Nissan or the Renault that offered the attractive lease. All the different variables were blurred together; his prefrontal cortex was confused.

But if Dijksterhuis couldn't keep track of the different cars, then how could he ever make a decision? Was he destined to pick the wrong car? What was the best way to make a difficult choice? To answer these questions, Dijksterhuis decided to conduct a practical experiment; it was later published in
Science.
He got several Dutch car shoppers and gave them each descriptions of four different used cars. Each of the cars was rated in four different categories, for a total of sixteen pieces of information. Car number 1, for example, was described as getting good mileage but having a shoddy transmission and a poor sound system. Car number 2 handled poorly but had lots of legroom. Dijksterhuis designed the experiment so that one car was objectively ideal, with "predominantly positive aspects." After showing a subject these car ratings, Dijksterhuis would give him a few minutes to contemplate the decision. In this "easy" situation, more than 50 percent of the subjects ended up choosing the best car.

Dijksterhuis then showed a different selection of people the same car ratings. This time, however, he didn't let each of them consciously think about the decision. After he gave the automotive facts, he distracted the subject with some simple word games for a few minutes, then interrupted the fun and suddenly asked the person to choose a car. Dijksterhuis had designed the experiment so that the person would be forced to make a decision using the unconscious brain, by relying on his or her emotions. (Conscious attention had been focused on solving the word puzzle.) The result was that these subjects made significantly worse choices than those who were allowed to consciously think about the cars.

So far, so obvious. A little rational analysis could have prevented the "unconscious choosers" from buying a bad car. Such data confirms the conventional wisdom: reason is always better. We should think before we decide.

But Dijksterhuis was just getting warmed up. He repeated the experiment, only this time he rated each car in
twelve
different categories. (These "hard" conditions more closely approximate the confusing reality of car shopping, in which consumers are overwhelmed with facts and figures.) In addition to getting information about the quality of the transmission and the engine's gas mileage, people were told about the number of cup holders, the size of the trunk, and so on. Their brains had to deal with forty-eight separate pieces of information.

Did conscious deliberation still lead to the best decision? Dijksterhuis found that people who were given time to think in a rational manner—those who could carefully contemplate each alternative—now chose the ideal car less than 25 percent of the time. In other words, they performed
worse
than random chance. However, subjects who were distracted for a few minutes—those who were forced to choose with their emotions—found the best car nearly 60 percent of the time. They were able to sift through the clutter of automotive facts and find the ideal alternative. The best car was associated with the most positive feelings. These irrational choosers were the best decision-makers by far.