Psychology and the future of HUSNGs (Part 1)

by mersenneary

When I tell people I majored in psychology in college, occasionally they make remarks about what a great fit that is with poker. Usually, what they're thinking about is how psychology can help you crack poker faces, and as you might expect, this pop analysis really doesn't actually hold true. You don't have to study psychology to figure out whether someone is strong or weak at the table, and scientific studies about personality don't typically provide the answer about whether to 3bet or flat from the big blind. That said, there is a lot that I've learned that I've put to use in my poker career, and a lot I can say about what HUSNGs will be like down the road. Here are probably the two biggest psychological concepts to understand. They're worth looking up on wikipedia to learn more.

1. Cognitive dissonance: It's uncomfortable to believe something and take an action that goes against that belief.

One of the most difficult things people encounter when plugging leaks in their game is dissonance from doing something they wouldn't usually do. I can tell you to 3-bet more or call wider out of position more often or whatever the case, but if you don't understand and believe the reasons why I'm arguing for this, you're going to have a really tough time implementing it at the table. I'm not saying you have to believe that a 3bet is good before the 3bet is going to work, but be extremely careful about falling back into old habits because you haven't really learned why something is better, just that I think it's better. Knowing why will always make you a more confident poker player and a player who is more able to adapt to novel situations.

2. Pluralistic ignorance/Groupthink: Group consensus about what is best can often remain long after people in the group start to think to themselves that something else might be better.

Figuring poker out on your own is an impossible task for most players, but problems come along when you start taking your cues about what is correct from other people. Poker study groups have been around since poker began, and they help in getting better, but we can all look back at old 2+2 discussions and laugh at some of the bad thinking that was parroted around as fact. It has to be true that we'll do the same in a few years, and then the same again a few years after that. Part of the reason for this is that knowledge of the game is constantly evolving, but that doesn't quite explain why people seemed so sure of certain things in the past when we now know it to be bad advice. Here is a quick list of three dramatic changes I think we'll see in husngs three years from now:

a. People will play more hands from the big blind (50% will be considered amusingly bad).

b. People will check/raise or otherwise contest far more dry flops.

c. Overbetting and underbetting will become far more common.

The reasons why most people believe you should be relatively tight from the big blind, not be too aggressive on boards where it's hard for anybody to have a hand, and keep your betsizes mostly between half and full pot are mostly vestiges from old, bad logic about how to play the game. They aren't grounded in math. They're grounded in notions people have about how to play, re-inforced by other people looking around and seeing the same notions and concluding that they must be true.

But in these cases and so many others, they're not true at all. I've flatted wide OOP for a really big sample now, with spectacularly better results than folding, so much that HEM tells me I can attribute anywhere from 10-20% of my entire lifetime winnings on going against the grain and playing hands like J4s, 96o, Q5o, and 84s as standard. The old way of thinking about these hands (“play solid hands OOP, it's OK to have a fairly tight hand selection, nothing wrong with folding marginal hands preflop”) is outdated.

Similarly, we're nowhere close to equilibrium play on a K82r flop. Against a 100% raising and c-bet frequency, the button has middle pair or better about 24% of the time. Against a 50% raising frequency and 100% c-bet, it's going to be around 36%. The risk/reward from check/raising T9s here (risk 200 to win 240, still have equity when called) is just way too enticing, and we'll move towards much bigger check/raise frequencies, both for bluff and with an expanded value range (in the future, after the small blind evolves past the current population tendencies in this situation, check/calling A8 will be seen as an odd, non-standard play).

Lastly, the old way of thinking about poker comes from learning the basics of the game, and the fact that half to full pot bets are normal and expected. However, overbetting and underbetting are optimal in far, far more situations than currently implemented. There's nothing mathematically magicial about a half pot continuation bet or keeping your bluff sizings under the size of the pot. You can already see the best players in the game start to implement more and more overbetting and underbetting, as well as playing more hands OOP and fighting for more pots where both player's ranges are very weak. Just as what is now considered standard was once only implemented by the best players of 2006 and 2007, so too will the insights of today's best trickle down to the rest of the player base.

It's these HUSNG greats that are able to think about poker well enough and have the balls to implement (currently) non-standard lines, breaking through the pluralistic ignorance of everybody else assuming there's nothing better to be done. Poker evolves from these players who are able to see past conventional wisdom that isn't grounded in math and the truth of the situation. That's how it's always been and how it always will be going forward into the future of HUSNGs.