“In the game of poker, you’re a detective and a storyteller,” he tells me. “You must figure out what your opponent’s actions mean, and sometimes more importantly, what they don’t mean.” What exactly does he mean by that, I wonder? Is it like the dog that didn’t bark in “Silver Blaze”—the absence of information that conveys crucial evidence? In that particular story, the fact that a dog didn’t bark meant that the intruder was someone the dog knew; had it been a stranger, there would have been noise. In a phenomenon known as omission neglect, we often pay attention to the barks but not to the
...more
