Success is not just how you play your cards

Poker experts must extract information from others without revealing too much themselves, he said. “Sharks (expert players) accomplish this feat by carefully managing how their wagering behavior is informed by public and private information sources. Their peculiar information management behavior allows them to maximize their coherence with the information they use without ‘tipping their hands.'” And we know that experts aren’t just better at reading body language. Online poker eliminates in-person knowledge of other players, including cues such as eye contact and other fidgeting.

The study, “Information encryption in the expert management of strategic uncertainty” is published in the journal Cognitive Science. Frey’s co-authors are Dominic Albino, a former professional poker player in training as an economist at the University of Connecticut, and Paul Williams, an information theorist in the Cognitive Science Program at Indiana University.

Frey notes that interest in strategic experts, particularly chess experts, goes back to roots of both cognitive science and artificial intelligence, and studies as far back as the 1950s have looked at the way people play games.

Source: Success is not just how you play your cards, but how you play your opponents