Audience Question: You had a very interesting point that
a successful strategy is not really about
optimization, but it’s about computation
and deviating from optimization.
And to me as a chess player the reason I’ve
always liked chess is precisely because there
are no elements of chance.
You on the other hand are always in some ways
a potential victim out of chance ,so how do
you kind of weld those two things together,
how do you deal with the vagaries of chance
to make sure that you can always manipulate
it favorably?
Maria Konnikova: Well, you can’t ALWAYS
manipulate chance favorably, that’s I think
the bottom line.
But what you can do is actually try to just
maximize what you can control.
So what I always do, what Erik has always
taught me to do, is make sure you’re making
the right decisions for the right reasons.
And so I might play a hand in a very strange
way because I am exploiting someone who I
think is being— because I’m female one
of the things that often happens is people
become much more aggressive against me, because
they think they can get me to fold a lot of
hands and so they’ll 3-bet me, which means
raising my opens much more often with a lot
of weaker hands, or when I’m in one of the
blinds so I have to be in the hand they’ll
raise me much more widely, so they’ll do
things like that.
And then sometimes I’ll have a horrible
hand and one that I would never in a million
years 4-bet, but I’m going to 4-bet, I’m
going to actually re-raise them with garbage
because I know what’s going on, and sometimes
I’ll run into a really strong hand, but
more often than not I won’t.
So that’s what I meant by exploitation,
I’m still not going to be able to get away
from the chance elements that happen in any
hand, so what Erik is always very careful
to tell me is never—he doesn’t care actually
what happens at the end of the hand, he doesn’t
want to know if I won or lost.
Like once the decision is done, it doesn’t
matter, and so the outcome—you have to divorce
yourself from the outcome.
You have to say, “Am I making the right
decision?
Am I thinking about it the right way at every
single step of the hand?
Can I defend why I’m doing something, even
if I’m doing something really weird that
I wouldn’t normally do in a spot like this?
Do I have a reason for it?”
And if the answer is yes, and if the reason
is a good one, then I play the hand to the
best of my abilities.
And it actually sometimes helps when I’m
in a tough spot to know that I’m going to
be explaining this to someone, that I’ll
be explaining it to Erik or that I’ll be
explaining it to Phil or to someone, then
I know that I actually have to think through
my reasons rather than just act reflexively,
which can be very easy to do.
Sometimes you’re like, “Oh I always do
this here, I’m just going to do it quickly.”
But to actually stop and question it and then
happen what may—It can still be really tough
when you make the “right” decision and
then you end up losing; it’s not pleasant,
but you have to try not to think about that
and to remember that you just made the best
choice you possibly could given the information
that you had available.
And it’s easy to criticize other players
when you see them do something really weird,
you’re like “How could you have done that
there?!”
But you have to remember that you see all
of the information, you know what hands other
people have because you’re watching this
on TV.
They don’t see any of that and they’re
actually just acting based on the information
that they do have.
But all of that said, it still really sucks
to lose.
