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“You have to poke holes in the story he’s trying to tell, and from that, deduce what he’s trying to hide.”
But you have to be aware that you, too, are subject to the exact same process. Everything you can think about someone else can also be applied to your own actions—something we forget all too often, at the table and off. “You’re constructing your own story at the same time, doing everything you can to make sure it will add up.”
You need to be aware enough of your own narrative that it coheres, comes together, makes sense.
As a writer, you always need to know what motivates your characters. Why are they doing what they’re doing? If you haven’t thought through the motivation, the behavior will be off. They’ll suddenly do things that make no sense. Their stories will veer into the unbelievable. In poker, it’s much the same thing. You need to find the motivation to find the narrative cohesiveness.
Always ask why: Why is someone acting this way? Why am I acting this way? Find the why and you find the key to winning.
“That’s my challenge to you,” Phil says. Never do anything, no matter how small it may seem, without asking why, precisely, you’re doing it. And never judge anything others do without asking the same question.
They’re used to pushing others out of the way with the force of their swagger.
Hendon Mob?”
but the feeling of more than $900 in my hands and the knowledge that I have my first ever victory is enough to get me to forget the slight. I’ve now paid for my whole trip with one win. I have a bankroll!
We’ll check in every week to see how I’m doing, and if everything is feeling good—that is, if I’m thinking through things the right way, making the right decisions, playing hands well, not if I’m winning—April will see me crossing the ocean to play at a major poker stop.
“You know, you take much less shit from people than you used to,” he says thoughtfully, with something I take for admiration. “That’s really good.”
“I must pay tribute to that powerful but capricious lady, Chance, who chose to bestow her beneficence on my personal life even though I spent much of my mathematical life trying to prove that she does not really exist.”
After some stairs and turns, I find myself under rich lights, surrounded by jewels, gowns, white tails, dark tans, money. I inhale. The smell of effortless wealth. Of the heart of a country where the lowest allowable balance to open a bank account hovers at €1 million.
It’s a funny thing, luck. A man goes broke one minute. He meets his wife the next.
And the heart of modernity is conceived not in a laboratory but in a casino.
The mathematician wants to control chance. The gambler knows he cannot actually do so, not at the poker table, so he creates a new game where he can push the limits on his own terms. It’s the computation and the human, one against the other. The combat is constant. And the ultimate victor remains unknown.
To degen is to gamble a little harder than one should, to push an edge a little beyond where that edge actually happens to lie. If you hit the craps table on your way from the tournament, you’re degenning. If you’re playing a turbo tournament that’s a little above your pay grade—in turbos, the value of skill is diminished given the fast structure—you’re degenning.
If you’re placing your winnings on a sports bet, you’re degenning.
Lodden Thinks was created one day in the mid-2000s, when two poker pros found themselves bored at a televised poker table. The Magician and the Unabomber—Antonio Esfandiari and Phil Laak, the former nicknamed for his past profession, the latter for his affinity for hoodies pulled low over his face and sunglasses
The game is all about perception and psychology: What does Lodden (or whoever is the target in this particular iteration) think the answer is—and can you be the one to see the world from his perspective more closely than your opponents? In a sense, it’s the heart of not only poker but many a social situation. How good are you at figuring out how others see the world—and at gearing your own actions accordingly?
Remember: objective reality doesn’t actually matter. Subjective perception, and your ability to tune into it accurately, is key to the win.
Phil Ivey and Doyle Brunson, played a round of Lodden Thinks for $10,000. “I want to bet on Clint Eastwood’s age,” Doyle says to open this particular game. Daniel Negreanu volunteers to guess. He’ll be the Lodden. Once he’s “locked it down”—that is, has thought of his response and locked it in—the guessing can begin.
“In some way we are,” Ivey responds. Because of course, part of the game is watching the Lodden’s reactions and seeing what you can extract from his responses. Like so many things in life, this is a game of people, not hard truths.
You need to know the base strategy. You need to adjust based on the specific individuals. And then you need to adjust further based on how those specific individuals are feeling in that exact moment, in that exact situation.
I’d rather you cash less, but go deeper.” Be willing to bust more often, take the higher variance lines that might mean I lose all my chips—but if I win,
position to go deeper, last longer, get closer to that final table. Be willing to be more aggressive even if that means losing more. There’s a saying in poker that if you’re never caught in a bluff, you’re not bluffing enough.
“Good players are going to realize if the min cash is important to you,” Erik says. “And they’re going to take advantage of that. They’ll really abuse you.”
The better you get, the worse you are—because the flaws that you wouldn’t even think of looking at before are now visible and need to be addressed. If you want to grow, if you want to progress, you need to always dig deeper. It’s fine to be proud at some milestones, like cashing in an international event—but it’s also important to stay focused on the bigger picture, and remain aware of how much you have yet to accomplish.
But now I’ve shown I can. We move the goal higher. We move the target further. We become more ambitious. Fuck participation trophies. We go for the win.
I’m still playing scared. Maybe not as often, but I still fold rather than take the gamble, try to sneak into the min cash money instead of trying to aggressively accumulate chips
Do I go for the min cash in my life decisions, holding on for the safer sure thing rather than taking more risk for the more uncertain but ultimately more attractive option?
But if you’re really looking to make a go of this, you have to assess where you are and if you have a real skill edge. Don’t hold yourself to an arbitrary deadline. There’s always next year.”
There are no friends at the poker table, the saying goes, but I still somehow take it personally.
Our brains, it turns out, are veritable prediction machines. We are constantly making sense of the environment—and making guesses about what will happen. It’s called predictive processing:
actively think one step ahead and look at the environment accordingly. Our brains are more proactive than reactive. Whether our predictions are accurate or not, of course, depends on the inputs and the prediction-making process. Whether they improve in accuracy or not over time depends on our capacity and willingness to learn.
It’s on me to notice it and to change it if it’s wrong. Otherwise, it will govern my actions without my quite realizing it.
When we make thin-slice judgments of people—the term for the fleeting perceptions our brain creates, first coined by psychologist Nalini Ambady—our inputs are often mistaken. We’re governed by things like facial structures and expressions—the things we rely on in those thirty-four-millisecond judgments—as well as our own past experiences, which, as it usually happens, are closer to incidental peripheral noise that has no bearing on the current situation.
But the fact that our judgments are not based in objective reality but rather some subconscious, quite biased processing that takes place in our heads doesn’t stop us from
using these instantaneous impressions to make decisions that should rightly require deep, systematic thinking.
that faces may actually give more false than useful information.
The players they picked as more confident and those they picked as executing movement in a more fluid manner were also the players who had the winning hands.
His group has also found that a huge amount of information comes from gestures. The smoothness and fluidity Slepian noticed is certainly part of it. “Confident people move from point A to point B quickly. There’s not a lot of hesitation,” Blake says. “When you’re at the top of your range in poker”—that is, at the top of the range of possible card combinations you’d hold in a given situation—“you’re often going to do that, too.”
The first has to do with thought process: How does a person approach and think about the game? “The way people handle their chips when they are more indecisive, or their bet style at the top of their range—these are the sorts of things we pay attention to,” Blake says. He gives the example of pocket aces versus seven-nine. With aces, I know exactly what I want to do: raise. My thought process is clear, clean, and concise, and my gestures will likely follow. But seven-nine is more of a borderline hand. It could really go in any direction. If someone has raised before me, I could fold, I could
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The most telling moment is often at the very beginning of a hand, when players first check their hole cards: how they check and what they do immediately after tend to be the most honest actions a player will execute in the entire hand. It’s still early; the stakes are still low, since there’s not yet much money at play; and so their guard is down.
Everyone knows to conceal when running a big bluff. But at this stage, there really aren’t yet big bluffs. And so concealment is not top of mind.
Concealment, or how a player chooses to actively hide what they perceive to be telling behaviors, is actually the second type of pattern that the Beyond Tells team has found.
“Same strategy, different magnitude,” Blake says. Or maybe their hand placement differs. Or their breathing.
Find out how they conceal and you begin the process of reverse engineering exactly what they might be concealing.
The more specific the behavior, the more likely it is to stop revealing much once a player is aware of it.
There’s one thing in particular that I do that Blake really doesn’t like: I recheck my cards several times. “The moment you recheck your cards, you risk falling into a pattern,” he warns. Some players recheck only their marginal hands—it’s easy to remember when you have pocket kings, but you may need to double-check if you have five-six suited or six-seven.
