The Power of Tilt

5min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

The poker table is called going on tilt, right? When something happens to you and you are not at your best. People do tend to think of tilt in a negative way. But there's also the player who thinks this is amazing. Like I can do no wrong. They just suddenly, they know everything. And we just, we love all sorts of things with personality imbuing them with intention. It's just like probability doesn't have a stack of chips; it doesn't even have a memory. You know that you've just won a hundred blinds or whatever. Exactly. That's why it's so fascinating and beautiful."

The best chess and Go players in the world aren’t human beings any more; they’re artificially-intelligent computer programs. But the best poker players are still humans. Poker is a laboratory for understanding how rationality works in real-world situations: it features stochastic events, incomplete information, Bayesian updating, game theory, reading other people, a battle between emotions and reason, and real-world stakes. Maria Konnikova started in psychology, turned to writing, and then took up professional-level poker, and has learned a lot along the way about the challenges of being rational. We talk about what games like poker can teach us about thinking and human psychology.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

Maria Konnikova received her Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University. She is currently a contributing writer for The New Yorker. She is the author of two bestselling books, The Confidence Game and Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes. Among her awards are the 2019 Excellence in Science Journalism Award from the Society of Personality and Social Psychology. She is a successful tournament poker player and Ambassador for PokerStars. She is the host of The Grift podcast. Her new book is The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win.