When did you learn how to play poker?
For many it’s for nickels and dimes with roommates in college, a family affair in the kitchen or an illicit school lunchbreak game that’s more ‘picnic table’ than ‘final table’. But whenever the bug bites you, the effects can last a lifetime.
For Maria Konnikova, poker player, author, podcast host and PokerStars ambassador, it was an interest that only took hold well into her academic career. She’s not a big games player, other than the odd Scrabble session, and wasn’t drawn to poker by Rounders, Moneymaker or any other such cultural touchstones.
Konnikova didn’t discover poker at college, but wishes that she did. A PhD in decision-making could have made great use of this game of psychology, deception and, well, constant decision-making.
“It's just the perfect conditions for an experiment,” says Konnikova when we meet to talk about her favorite subject. “You have all these people at a table under hot, emotional conditions for hours and hours and hours. They have to play through downs, through ups, different emotional swings, through hunger, being tired. And you see how people react.”
If it’s an attitude to poker that can sometimes appear a little clinical, that’s because — in a very real sense — it is. “If I'd known about poker prior to my grad school days, I would have found a way to use it. It’s perfect, but instead for my dissertation I had people play stock market games, because the stock market was the best kind of analogy I could find. In retrospect, I wish I could fly back to 22-year-old me and say ‘There's this game called poker, and it's going to be perfect for this!’”
Dicing with chess
Thanks to her discovery of poker — and the subsequent tutelage of Hall of Famer Erik Seidel — these days Konnikova is a regular at the tables. As mentioned above, she doesn’t have a wider interest in games in general — the route from Magic: The Gathering to high stakes poker tournaments is not one she’d ever find herself traveling.
She did, however, briefly dabble in chess. “I’ve never been a game player. I learned chess, but had a very bad experience in my first ever chess tournament. I was in fifth grade, around 12 years old, and had just started playing, so I had no ranking, no anything, and they match you on your skill level.
“So for me, they tried to see who would be a good match, and they matched me with a five-year-old. That was a blow to my ego.
“And then that five-year-old proceeded to kick my ass.”
With that bruising introduction to competitive gaming, it’s understandable why Konnikova’s passion for poker would eventually come about more due to her academic interests than time spent with friends and a pack of cards.
But once she discovered poker, and married that discovery with her advanced academic research into decision-making and risk-analysis, a new voice in poker culture was formed.
It’s not hard these days to find a content creator that brings to life the thrills and spills of the poker lifestyle, nor a blogger who can break down the intricacies of a high level poker hand. What’s rarer is someone with an academic background who can help us place poker in a wider social context, and it’s a role Konnikova has taken up with evident passion.
‘A game of our time’
“Poker has roots, it’s centuries old,” says Konnikova, “And while there are different variations of the game, you can trace it way back. It's a game that has had universal appeal for a very, very long time, but it’s also a game of our time.
“If you look at what's going on in the world right now, I think poker is a good mirror for that and a good way of understanding all of the upheaval, all of the transitions, everything that's going on.”
It’s not just that poker offers a mirror to current times; one of the key things Konnikova learnt during her studies, appropriately enough, was that poker also makes a great teacher.
“Poker is an exploration of human curiosity, and our willingness to take a gamble. You have to be willing to gamble if it's a correctly calculated risk, we just reframe it as good, smart risk-taking. I think that's something that everyone needs to learn how to do.
“Everyone does it every day and most people are s**t at it; most people don't know how to calculate that risk correctly, they go based on emotion and random stuff that is not statistically relevant. They suck at actually going through the probabilities and figuring out what’s really going on.
“I think it's an essential skill to have if you want to lead a good life, and poker is the single best way to teach that. It's the only way that we learn to calculate risks accurately, because we're experiencing the probabilities at a high enough frequency.”
Another key element of poker that helps us evaluate risk, says Konnikova, is by watching our opponents navigate the paths of risk and uncertainty in front of our eyes. We’re constantly facing decisions in our daily lives, and learning from others’ mistakes, and triumphs, is an important tool.
“It's often easier to spot mistakes in others than it is to spot them in ourselves, because ego gets in the way. We like to think, ‘Oh, I would never do that — can you believe this guy?’ But maybe, if you're smart, you will recognize that in your own actions, internalize it and say ‘Okay, maybe I do that too’.
“I'm still finding that the more you know, the less you know.”
Some know more than others, however they gain their poker education. Shortly after our conversation, Konnikova picked up a tournament win in a €1,050 EPT side event for her fourth career victory.
Whoever she’s watching, it’s working. Everyone else could do a lot worse than watching her.
Images courtesy of Jules Pochy/Manuel Kovsca.Rational Intellectual Holdings Ltd.
