What Can We Learn From Expert Gamblers?: Dylan Evans at TEDxWestlake

I've spent the last few years interviewing some of the most successful

gamblers

in the world, and it's not just because I like spending time in casinos, I have a feeling there's a special kind of intelligence to thinking about risk and uncertainty. I call it risk intelligence, so if psychologists study

gamblers

, they tend to focus exclusively on problem gamblers, but that's like studying obesity and neglecting oatmeal cooking or studying alcoholism and neglecting fine wines. Not all players are stupid, some of them are

expert

s and I think we can. We all

learn

a lot about how to make better decisions by studying the way these

expert

players think.

The very idea of ​​an expert player seems strange to some people. Surely the game is just a matter of luck, they say, but that is not true. Slot machines and roulette sure are. games of pure luck, so there is no room for experience there, but poker, blackjack and all types of sports betting offer the opportunity to exercise skills and experience. Expert players outperform novices in these games and their experience can make them very rich and it is this ability to make money. Obtain a benefit from the game that differentiates expert players from problem players and recreational players.

Both problem gamblers and recreational gamblers lose money in the long run. The main difference is that problem gamblers gamble more than they can afford. losing while Leisure players bet and lose relatively small amounts, but in the end it is not really the money that these people are playing for, but rather the thrill of winning, the adrenaline of the game with expert players, things are very different for them, they really aren't very excited about winning, think about it if every time you pulled the arm of a slot machine it paid out quickly, it wouldn't be fun, it would be work and for these players, these EX expert players, it's more of a cold rational pursuit of profit that motivates them and a certain degree of intellectual satisfaction, so as I

learn

ed more about the world of the expert player I discovered that it was made up of three distinct tribes: first you have the poker players, the rock stars of the game. world who gain fame and fortune on the tournament circuit, then you have the more private, austere and some

what

disdainful poker players of the dazzling celebrity of poker players and finally you have the sports bettors who bet on everything from golf and horse racing to soccer and universities.

Basketball and each of these tribes exhibits and requires a different skill set. Poker players are amateur psychologists who are experts at reading people, knowing when people are bluffing, and bluffing themselves. Blackjack players are dedicated, determined and systems focused players without much need for psychological awareness and Sports bettors can be subdivided into two distinct subgroups, on one hand there are computerized sports bettors and obviously

what

they need the most is the ability to program and, on the other hand, there are what I call the old-fashioned sports bettors. Intuitive sports improve people who do everything mentally and those are the people I'm most interested in and what interested me in this group was a fascinating article I read some time ago by two American psychologists called Steven Cesie and Jeffrey Leica and Cesie . and Leica in the 1980s, fresh out of graduate school, visited Brandy Wine Raceway, a horse racing venue in Delaware, and interviewed 30 Avid racetrack patrons, men, they were all men, they went to the racetrack every days of their working life, they didn't make their money from gambling it was just fun, but they were absolutely obsessed with it, they went to the race track and cesi and Leica discovered that they were divided into two distinct groups. 14 of them were incredibly good at predicting the odds, the final odds that would be. offered on horses just before the race, which is a pretty good guide to the probability of the horse actually winning and the other 16 were really no better than the average bettor, so over the course of four years I spoke to these guys studying them and interviewing them. cesi and Leica discovered that the best way to model what expert players did when they thought about predicting the horse's chances of winning the race was to model it as a complex linear equation consisting of seven variables, each of which was related to the horses. performance in previous races, such as their average speed, their average finishing position, etc., but of course these expert players knew nothing about linear aggression, they had never heard of statistical modeling, they did it all subconsciously in their heads.

Well, they knew what information to pay attention to, they consciously gathered the information, but then when it came time to reflect on it in their heads, they literally thought about it, somehow they didn't know what they were doing, but then they were speechless. . Nowhere did a number come to mind and that number was always remarkably close to the horse's actual probability of winning the race and that's what I call risk intelligence, it's that ability to gather information from a wide variety of sources. sources, think about it in your head. and get an estimate, a probability estimate.

Now I hope you are all wondering what your risk intelligence is like and I have created an online test where you can find out that it is free and anyone can take it, just go to www. . project point.com or just Google Risk Intelligence will get it and the test is what it asks you to do. It consists of 50 statements, some true and some false, and your task is to say: How likely is it that you think each statement is true? and to express that as a percentage, what we're doing here is using percentages to express our own degree of certainty or uncertainty, so if you think the sentence is definitely false, you're going to give it a 0% chance of being true. means that you are completely sure that it is false, on the other hand, if you are completely sure that the statement is true, you will express it by giving it a 100% probability, if you have absolutely no idea whether it is true or false, you will express it. by giving it a 50% chance of being 50/50, you have no idea that you could also flip a coin, but if you have a feeling that it's true, it's probably true, but you're not absolutely sure to express it by giving it a 60 % chance a 70% chance 80 or 90 depending on how sure you are and if you think it's probably fake but you're not completely sure, you express it by saying it's 40 30 20 10% again depending on how sure it is, when After you have taken the test, the website calculates a number between zero and 100, which is your risk intelligence, rates your RQ, your risk intelligence quotient, and, just as IQ is a measure of your general intelligence, the RQ It is a measure of your risk. intelligence and the interesting thing about this test, the unusual thing is that you can do quite well even if you don't know much and that is because this test does not measure your knowledge, it measures your self-knowledge, if you want, it measures your ability to know how much you know and to accurately judge your own degree of certainty or uncertainty in each situation and that is why I think some of my brightest students often find it more challenging than some of my more average students because the brightest have been rewarded all their life for knowing things and praise for knowing a lot of facts and as a result they have often become overconfident and this test punishes overconfidence it also punishes lack of confidence the point is not to be ridiculously humble or the point is to have the La appropriate amount of confidence in each situation depending on how much you know or don't know in each situation.

So how can all of this help us make better decisions? Some people, even if they find the topic interesting, say, well, look, how can this help me? they actually make better quality decisions and I think the puzzle for these people arises because we are all used to knowing how to make use of categorical information, if someone tells you that it is going to rain tomorrow, there is no doubt that you take your umbrella, but if Someone says Look, there is a 60% chance it will rain tomorrow. What are you doing? Do you take your umbrella or not?

They don't really teach us how to make decisions based on uncertain information, so I want to end by describing just three. Simple ways you can use probabilities when making your decisions. The first way is to simply set a threshold. For example, you might say: Well, I'm only going to ask this person out if I think there's a 60% chance. that they will say yes and the great thing about this method is of course that everyone can set their thresholds differently at different levels depending on how desperate you are to get a date and how much you hate being rejected the second way of making decisions.

Based on the probabilities is the size of the BET and this means betting an amount that is proportional to your confidence, so for example you could decide to buy more or less shares of various companies depending on how strongly you believe that a Every company will do well, but of course this crucially depends on having an appropriate degree of trust. Overconfidence will be fatal in this case, so again you can only use this decision-making method if you have good risk intelligence. The third and most complex way to use probabilities when making decisions is to use the concept of expected value and expected value is an abstract concept, it does not refer to any actual gain or loss, it refers to the average amount you would gain or lose if you did the same bet an infinite number of times but this ethereal abstract figure takes on an almost physical character for the expert players I have interviewed when they look at a roulette table or a game of blackjack and the former expert Camas does not see the maximum amount they could win or lose, they are not hypnotized by this like the rest of us, they simply see the average amount they could win or lose per bet, the expected value, that is what is really at the forefront of their minds and when placing their decisions, so To put it that way, in the By thinking about this decision this way in terms of expected value, they put their decisions in the context of a much longer time horizon, so they rise above the now moment, one of the long uh term, as Keen said.

Everyone is dead, so even expert players are mortal and have a finite number of decisions, but despite what the guy said in the video we just watched before we finished, the importance of remembering that we are mortal has a disadvantage, it tends to make people reckless if you think this is the last race, the last roll of the dice, you can bet everything, expert gamblers in a sense, seeing things in a much longer time. Horizon almost acts as if they are immortal and because of that, they gain a certain peace of mind when making decisions. They can take it or leave it, as one expert player told me.

There is always another race. I don't have to bet my money on this dice Thro or this one. horse race now I can come back tomorrow and that's when knowing no, when not to bet is really one of the crucial things that distinguishes the experts from the leisure gamblers, the problem gamblers now, of course, luck can always go against you , there is no guarantee that Even if you have excellent risk intelligence and even if you use these decision-making methods, you will always win, but if that thought bothers you, then you have not yet come to terms with the irreducibility of chance, as says Nick Pulovski about the character played. by Clint Eastwood in the newbie if you want a guarantee buy a toaster, so I want to end this lecture by saying that I urge you to make peace with chance, simply accept that you cannot control it or cool it, accept that it does not care about you and she never will, but don't despair, for Damon raced once said that the race is not always for the swift nor the battle always for the strong, but that's the way to bet, thank you.