Hello all,

I'm studying Behavioral Neuroscience at The Ohio State University. Anyway I am writing a paper on the genetics of behind being a risk taker and risky type behavior(i.e. Drugs, Casual Sex, Sky-diving, Gambling). I'm looking to start this thread to get a discussion going about this area in relation to poker. If you guys know of any good papers for me to read and add to my paper please let me know.

Now I will begin. First off neuroeconomics is am emerging field of research that studies how the brain deals with making decisions with presumed risk. Risk in this case is also different than uncertainty. When playing poker we are all subject to neuroeconomical theory. An example (a little exaggerated) of neuroeconomics is when holding AA pre flop. All possible game theories state that it is +EV to get your money in pre-flop with this hand. If a computer program were to play poker they would always, based purely on math, call an all in bet pre flop with AA. However the human element may change things. Now anyone serious about the game will still call an all in bet with AA, but think about that guy who actually folded them on live TV because he had already made so much money. Or that guy who hates pocket aces because he seems to "always lose with them". This is neuroeconomics at work. Our brains will take the mathematics behind the situation, but also combine it with a lot of other factors. A better example is 1 spot before the bubble burst at the main event. If again a player holds AA and is forced to put his entire stack in pre flop it is an automatic call purely math based. However lets say he spent his life-savings (bad idea) to play. He actually may find a fold in this spot because the risk associated with the play are not just the 20% of the time he loses, but the fact that 20% would make him homeless.

Next I read a paper on the genes behind risk taking and economic decision making. Dopamine seems to be the main chemical behind the willingness to gamble (take risk in general) and variations in genes do affect this willingness. Now gamblers brains function off two types of learning process that make them feel the game is beatable (right or wrong). The first is Reinforcement learning- this is learning based purely off your own actions. Ex- "Man calling an all in with a Queen high never seems to work". The second is called belief learning- This is creating a mental model of the other players at the game to try to anticipate their actions and reactions. Ex- "He is a tight player who only goes all in on the river with the nuts, I fold my set." Belief learning may be the most fundamental aspect to being wired for good poker playing. Your belief learning rate is affected by your reinforcement learning. If you never learn that every time you call a tight player all-in he has your top pair beat, then it doesn't matter that your mental model of him is that he is tight.

Anyway I just want to begin a thread on this and am glad to elaborate with more detail just what our brain has to do with playing poker (quite a lot). I also interested to what you guys have read or what you feel about this, and/or how we can begin to implement this information into the game to gain a greater edge. I doubt we can change our genes to become better belief learners, but we may be able to gain exercises that will help.

I'd say a good book on this subject is Your Money and Your Brain. Which delves into the logic our limbic system tries to use when doling out rewards. For example, we win 3 straight games on 70% hands and are up $500. The 4th game, we are 55% to win, and we lose. Our brain focuses on the $500 we were 'up' even though part of that money wasn't truly ours in a math sense. So, even though mathematically we're still lucky to be up more than we will over time, our reward system has already rewarded us for 'earning' the $500 at our peak.

Ill have to look at that, thanks for the suggestion.
Yeah our brains are not wired perfectly for things involving luck and variance. We often attribute to much to our own skill, and not enough to variance. Gamblers fallacy is a great example, if we've lost the last 10 times it doesn't make any sense to think that the odds are in our favor the 11th time. In an abstract sense all odds will approach their theoretical value in the long run, but we fail to understand per trial that has no effect, nor do we understand just how large of a sample we would need to get empirical values. At the same time there is evidence that we actually have an evolutionary reason that favored calculated risk taking. Big risk=Big reward; Although not everyone who took a risks, came out on top, hence why a lot of people still never take risk.

The prefrontal cortex is involved with belief learning and if we can master that skill, our edge will be much greater, and we will be much more accurate with reading and manipulating our opponents the way we would like.

Good post, this kind of stuff fascinates me. Interested in the paper when you get it finished.

This certainly is a fun area to learn about. When I started breaking down the triggers that caused me to tilt, the big one for me was unmet expectations. I'd get 2 pair in vs the flush draw, my brain would see a 67% fave and start producing my reward. When the river binked the flush, the contrast between my expected win and reality caused quite a bit of aggravation (to say the least!).

So now, when I get a favourite hand all in, I try to tell myself that this play has won me money, whether or not it happens to hold up in this hand.

The neurochemical hypothesis is, I think, not deep enough to explain poker.

Reinforcement learning is kind of a non-starter when it comes to poker. DGIHarris has a thread on this somewhere, but basically there is so much variance that it would take you a hundred years to learn how to play poker based on experience alone.

Beyond that, the dopamine angle is complicated. Some people get a dopamine charge out of having a lot of money in play all by itself. So it's not that they get their jollies out of winning a lot of money, they get their jollies by betting a lot of money. Which I think probably is a part of the dopamine insensitivity thing. I think most poker players have that, and I think the successful ones use that to their advantage. Part of my strategy, for instance, is to get weak players into large pots, where they tend to make big mistakes. Doesn't bother me a bit because...well, you know why.

The other thing is, there's a punishment angle that has to be considered, and one of the things we learned from Damasio's Iowa Gambling Task is that some people are relatively insensitive to punishment. Good poker players have to develop that if they aren't born with it, for the reasons stated above.

Check out Bernstein's "a basic theory of neuropychoanalysis," ambitious but where this whole thing needs to go I think. Love the case report on "Mr. K," which describes a certain personality type that we don't talk about much, but once you learn to recognize it, you see them at the poker room all the time. If you look at Bernstein's approach to this patient, and his synthesis of everything from brain chemicals to impulse control, affect regulation to dissociation, I think you will have a good idea of what I'm talking about.

You are very right, the brain is not capable at understanding variance well at all. I think a lot of people even fail to realize that when we get a pocket pair all in pre-flop against any lower pocket pair it loses 1/5. Thats not much, but I know when we get it all in pre flop and flip the cards, and he shows 77 to our TT a major feeling of relief comes over us, and we begin to think the pots ours. Your example as a 67% is even worse, i doubt our brain would even notice the difference in wins vrs losses in that spot. I've made major improvements on my tilt by understanding that we do not control the cards (we chose this game) and by improving my pot control skills, allowing me to lose little pots when my hand is vulnerable and variance will be high.

AbqDave- you are correct, a monoamine theory like dopamine can not soley explain poker. In fact dopamine as much as we currently know doesn't explain anything. We have no current model that explains just how a little chemical like dopamine can manifest such complex human behavior such as motivation, willingness to take risk, and the rush of gambling. What we do know is dopamine levels are found to be in much higher concentration when performing a task that has risk and reward. The limbic system functions by using dopamine to give us motivation to achieve a previously experienced pleasureful stimuli. The goal though is to understand our learning systems, so we may be able to pick up quicker in any game we are thrown into. There is also interesting genes behind it, a study found that men who had a certain gene made more optimal financial decisions under stress.

In general playing poker is one of the most complex behaviors of all man kind when you get down to it. Reinforcement learning isn't that important to the game, as you said its unlikely we get enough trials to fully grasp the reality of the correct move, however belief learning is everything that makes a good hand reader what they are. Its one of the most fundamental aspects to folding when your beat, and even more understanding just how much money you can get off your opponent when ahead.

Exactly.

Once I bought a motorcycle just so I could take it apart to see how it works. I had that thing in a million pieces, eventually I found myself holding the crankshaft in my hand, saying, "this is pretty much the nugget of the thing." Understand on a deep level how a crankshaft works, and you can understand on a deep level what a motorcycle really is.

Now you can melt the crankshaft, saw it into little pieces to look at under a microscope. Shoot you could stick it in a cyclotron to study its subatomic structure. That's all well and good, long as you understand you are no longer studying motorcycles at that point.

Reductionism has its limits, especially in biological systems, especially in the human brain. I think once you get below the level of the neural network, you start to rapidly lose the essence of what you are studying. Poker resides in the network, at a pretty darn high level. Way up there where you need to ditch the behaviorist and should start talking with the social psych people, if not the analysts. With the thing about Bernstein being, he's qualified as a social psychologist as well as as an analyst, and he took the trouble to read up on brain chemicals and neural networks, so he's not talking out of his butthole quite as much as some psychologists.

Which isn't to say that reinforcement doesn't play a role. Bernstein suggests that, teleologically speaking, it must be rewarding to form concepts. Otherwise there wouldn't be any "energy" to drive an organism to ditch old, invalid concepts and to form new, more valid concepts.

In poker, you gotta learn to focus on that kind of learning. That sense of delight that comes when that little cartoon light bulb pops up above your head. You post a hand on the forum, get a bit of abuse, and instead of getting all defensive, you get your "aha" moment. "I got it!" (That is pleasurable, isn't it? Based on my work with people at the end of life, I would submit that, for the really big concepts, the ones that go really deep and tie a lot of significant things together, when you feel that kind of thing "click," that's one of the most exquisite pleasures there is.)

Now, here's an interesting question. I think there's a brain chemical associated with the "Aha." What is it? I have an idea in mind, but I don't think it's gonna be dopamine.

One of the chemicals I have in mind in known in some circles as "the spirit molecule."

I think this is an interesting topic and if you find any research related to the psych associated with success and learning you can substitute poker and it will translate fairly well..

It is my belief that positive/negative reinforcement has a great deal to do with poker.. I think one of the most important aspects of poker/general gambling has to do with one's initial results. I know this may be viewed as a simplistic view but humor me for a moment.. If the first 10-20 times you played poker you lost every time, would you continue to pursue it??

I think we need to consider a combination of early success with the game as well as self-worth, desire, and interest in solving complex problems... Just a thought..

As I studied Psych/Soc in College, I think it's also important to approach these topics with an interdisciplinary approach.. How does the behavioral impact the psychological and so forth..

Good thinking. Generalizable theory. Always thought this played a role in developing sexual preference.

Just remember people get different kinds of utility from games. For me early on it was, "I got to spend six hours gambling in vegas, got free drinks and it only cost me $200." But with that caveat yeah you're on it.