About a year ago, I picked up “Blink, the power of thinking without thinking” at the airport, to give me something to read on a 12-hour flight. I finished it on the flight, ignoring the (admittedly crappy) movie selection offered. It’s written by The New Yorker writer Malcom Gladwell.

The basic idea of the book is to shed some insight on how the brain works subconciously when it comes to what we call “gut instinct”. It - the book - has actually nothing to do with poker, at least not explicitly. It doesn’t mention poker at any point throughout the book (though I think he would have found some great examples among players), but it does touch on a form of gambling which was conducted as an experiment at the University of Iowa, which I thought was highly interesting to us as card players.

The basic premise of the experiment (I’d quote the passage from the book, but I don’t want to cause any trouble with copyright, so paraphrasing it) was that the subject was given four decks of cards. Two decks are blue, and two are red. Each card either wins you money, or loses you money. The point of the game, then, is to try to maximize your winnings, drawing the cards one by one. Although the subjects don’t initially know it, the blue decks are +EV and the red decks are -EV, but the red decks also have greater winnings on the “win”-cards or what we’d call higher variance. Gladwell didn’t use the terms “+EV” and “variance,” but I’m confident my readers are more familiar with gambling terms than his.

Back to the experiment! How soon does it take someone to figure out that the red decks are bad for them? Well, in this experiment, it took the “gamblers” (on average, I presume) 40 cards before they said that they had “a hunch” about what was going on. It took them 70-80 cards before they stated that they had understood what the difference was between the decks.

Okay, so that’s all and well. But the highly interesting part is what happened to their hands. The Iowa scientists had hooked each gambler up with sensors on the palms, to measure the activity of the sweat glands. Hands, and I’m sure most of you can identify with this, start to sweat as a reaction to stress, even if it’s ever so little. Why is this so interesting?

Because the players starting showing signs of stress to the red decks after only ten cards.

It took the conscious part of the brain another 30 cards to figure out something was not right. It took it another 30-40 cards after that to formulate what was wrong. But after only 10 cards, the hidden motor in the brain had noticed that the values coming up on the red decks were scary.

The entire book contains lots of examples like this, and although it’s in no way trying to claim that thinking consciously is a bad thing (although it sometimes is, there are examples on this as well), it does show that our brain operates on a subconscious level with patterns and cognition that our conscious mind has yet to pick up on.

As a poker player, this book taught me that if my gut instinct tells me something, but I can’t figure out logically why it is so, I have a stronger reason to believe it then I might previously have given it credit for. If you’re an experienced player, with tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands or more) hands played, chances are your brain has picked up on something and tries to warn you as you ponder pushing all your chips in.

I do not advocate throwing out poker theory, or dismissing pot odds, or playing 53o preflop because it “feels right”. I believe, however, that when faced with a tough decision, you might already know what to do. You just don’t know it yet.

The book is an interesting read. I’d recommend it to anyone, although don’t expect to read it like a manual on how to develop fool-proof instinct; there are no instructions in it for that. It does go into some detail on what he calls “mind reading”, though, dealing with how the face involountarily will give away signs that we may not even know we are transmitting. Of course, poker players have known that for a century.