Poker Players And The Stories We Tell Ourselves
The Noumenal Realm
In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Immanuel Kant introduced the idea of the noumenal realm as reality as it exists independently of human perception. He argued that while people can experience and understand the phenomenal world through their senses and reason, the noumenal world, or the “thing-in-itself”, remains beyond direct knowledge. Human understanding is limited by the structures of the mind, such as space, time, and categories of thought, which shape all experience.
There is an ideal version of tournament poker that exists entirely in the noumenal realm, in a theoretical place devoid of human feelings and perspicacity. There, every decision lives in complete isolation from every other decision. There is your position at the table and the cards in your hand. There is the stack in front of you and those of your table-mates. There is the stage of the tournament and the payout structure. Nothing else matters. The previous hand is irrelevant, yesterday’s result is irrelevant and whether you are on an upswing or a downswing does not enter the calculation.
Anyone who has played tournaments knows that it’s impossible to separate yourself from all that context but the best of us do our utmost to repress that knowledge and be in a singular moment. Tournament poker is just a collection of individual hands but it feels like a journey, complete with setbacks, moments of hope, dramatic swings and occasionally a satisfying ending. The game is one of incomplete information so it also comes with more than a dollop of doubt which can linger after a hand is played.
Cash game poker players have an advantage here. Many of them describe their careers as one impossibly long session, where every individual hand disappears into one enormous sample. Many tournament players struggle to think like that because the game they play has a beginning, a middle and an end. The structure itself encourages us to think in narratives rather than probabilities.
Creating A Narrative
I think that I am a lot better than most at divorcing myself from recent outcomes when it comes to previous hands or previous tournaments that I have played. Years of mass multi-tabling online forced me out of a precious mindset. Having said that, anybody who has ever grinded alongside me will attest that I love a good sweary stream of consciousness. That might look like a tilty reaction that suggests a broken mindset that will carry over into the next hand but it’s really just a cathartic thing for me – a conscious decision to quickly let the frustration out and move on. However, if I’m being completely honest, I do sometimes make the mistake of creating a narrative around entire days of play online and entire festivals live.
Every so often, I succumb to the allure of treating these batches of tournaments like one self-contained poker adventure. Whether it’s a big Sunday of 50+ tournaments or an EPT stop of 20+ bullets, I catch myself quietly keeping score in a way that is unhelpful to a rational mindset. Instead of seeing independent tournaments completely distinct from one another, I begin to weave a narrative, viewing them as a larger entity, a day or trip that is either going well or badly.
Such a framing is emotionally satisfying and quite natural because it is how human brains organise experience. We tend not to remember isolated moments unless they are part of stories with emotional arcs. The trouble is that poker doesn’t care about emotional arcs. Every tournament starts with a clean slate regardless of what happened the day before. The cards don’t know you cashed your last three tournaments and they certainly don’t know you’ve bricked your last 17 bullets in a row. Every decision still demands to be made on its own merits, even if your brain insists on dragging the entire week into the room with it.
So, how come I’m good at unfettering myself from the last hand or tournament but not as good at decoupling from a batch of games? How is it that I can successfully zoom-in to the continuous present and be a pretty darn good rational entity in a single hand but also be vulnerable to thoughts that are not purely probabilistic when deciding whether to play and what to play when I am between tournaments toward the end of a day or festival?
The Seduction Of Momentum
A few weeks ago, on The Chip Race podcast, my co-host Dara O’Kearney and I interviewed British pro, bracelet winner and proverbial ‘man on a heater’ Jamie Dwan who admitted that part of the reason he played the $50,000 High Roller at the World Series was because he had already won significantly during the series. The numbers involved are obviously on a different planet to mine, but I recognised the psychology immediately. His instinct to take a shot with the wind at his back is surprisingly common.
When I’m having a good festival – let’s say I’m up €20,000 – I notice that I’m a little more willing to abandon Kelly Criterion by either taking a bigger piece of myself in a game for which I am selling action or to take all of myself in something twice the size of my normal maximum outlay. Somewhere in the background here sits that dangerous phrase that every gambler has heard at some point: “I’m playing with the bookies’ money.”
Of course, that phrase and the decision to wager more makes absolutely no sense when you examine it for more than a millisecond. My bankroll doesn’t distinguish between winnings from this week and money accumulated over years of grinding. However, my mind makes that distinction because psychologically, won money simply feels different. It somehow feels more disposable or more re-investable.
The Other Side Of The Coin
The opposite tendency is perhaps even more revealing. When I’m having a poor festival – let’s say I’m down €20,000, I become noticeably more cautious. Events that I would happily have entered at the beginning of the week suddenly seem like unnecessary risks. Decisions that were straightforward become more emotionally complicated, and the nitty option I justify to myself as self-care. Playing the €500 game rather than the €2500 is me protecting myself as I get closer to my pain threshold.
It’s actually pretty easy to stage a myriad of justifications for this behaviour. I am protecting my confidence. I am managing variance responsibly and avoiding the temptation to chase losses. Those explanations sound perfectly sensible, however, I have become increasingly suspicious of how readily my brain reaches for those justifications.
I suspect that what masquerades as discipline is often disappointment. What I think is me protecting my confidence is actually my ego insulating itself. Rather than protecting my bankroll, I may simply be trying to protect the story that I’ve been telling myself about the trip. Losing another bigger buy-in threatens to make a bad festival feel even worse than it already does.
Irrational Decisions Must Be Challenged
For almost two decades, I have spent weeks at a time away from home, away from my family, travelling and competing. My life can sometimes be challenging and even, on occasion, emotionally volatile. Acknowledging that I am not a robot and accepting that I may have some psychological weaknesses is obviously fine but I cannot let myself off the hook too much. I can forgive myself for the odd punt and the occasional moment of cowardice but that doesn’t mean I should allow these irrational decisions to go unchallenged.
This particular leak hides in plain sight (because it doesn’t feel like a leak) and it is irresponsible and damaging in both of its forms. Buoyed by some short-term good fortune that has no meaningful impact on my net worth, I should not be inclined towards financial friskiness. Demoralised by some short term bad luck that has no meaningful impact on my net worth, I should not lean towards pecuniary parsimony. Both deviations are bad bankroll management so both, theoretically, hurt my bottom line.
Imagine two identical tournaments held a week apart. The buy-in is the same, the field is the same, my edge is the same and my bankroll is the same. In one scenario, I have just won €20,000 over the previous few days. In the other, I have lost €20,000. Plain and simple, if my willingness to register changes, then something other than poker is driving those decisions. If I decide to take a shot, it should be for a compelling reason about the quality of the field. If I decide to favour a smaller game over a bigger one, it should be because I judge there to be more EV playing with the low-rollers.
Recognising when and why I stray from my bankroll fundamentals is a good first step. It’s better than acting either blindly or in a state of denial. Awareness might not shore up this leak but it does create a small gap between the feeling and the decision. In that gap, I have the opportunity to repair my flawed logic, unweave the narrative thread, grasp the true probabilistic nature of it all and strive for some sort of hypothetical apotheosis. The philosophical problem with Kant’s noumenal realm is that, as something inaccessible to human experience and cognition, claims about it cannot be meaningfully verified or falsified. However, I am disinclined to resign that ideal version of a poker tournament to the metaphysical scrap heap. Perfect might be impossible but the pursuit of perfection is a fine objective.
Comments