Since you’ve taken the time to visit my site, I thought I’d share the Introduction with you here. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you’re excited to read the book!

INTRODUCTION to The Poker Brain

Your bet hits the felt, and the dealer announces that you’re all-in. You keep a fingertip atop your cards to make sure they aren’t snatched away, and then you dare to peek across the table at your opponent. They simply stare, maybe at you, maybe at the board, maybe at nothing in particular. They neither move nor talk nor seemingly even breathe. “Clock,” someone eventually says. A beleaguered floorperson makes her way over and informs your opponent they will have 60 seconds followed by a ten-second countdown before their hand is declared dead. You try not to squirm as the floorperson watches the clock, afraid to look away. “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six…” but then your opponent budges. The cards slide toward the muck. What did they have? More importantly, what in the world were they thinking about all this time?

They say that 90 percent of an iceberg’s mass sits below the surface, invisible to the casual observer. The same is true of strong poker play. When someone bets, folds, raises, or calls, that’s merely the surface-level view of what is often a deep and profoundly complex thought process.

How can such elaborately detailed decision-making happen at the table in mere minutes, or even seconds? Indeed, sometimes the clock is very much a poker player’s enemy. Part of the beauty and the frustration of our game is that you can’t consider every last piece of information before coming to a decision. So often I’ve found myself lamenting my inability to spend 20 or 30 minutes at the table evaluating my opponent’s range, counting combinations, or even reviewing a tournament pay structure. Poker is not just a game of limited information, but of limited time.

To combat this problem, professional players work hard away from the table building up their knowledge of countless patterns to speed up their decisions at the table. Crucially, professionals have also mastered the art of prioritizing what to think about when. In short, the pros have streamlined their thought process. They know how to think through a hand in real time, and make the best decision they can within the limits imposed by the game itself. Their brains are capable of doing amazingly thorough analyses extraordinarily quickly. I’m here to tell you that you can have just such a poker brain for yourself.

What makes a poker brain different from an ordinary brain? While everyone’s gray matter is unique, there are a few essential qualities that almost all good poker brains share. Don’t worry if your brain doesn’t meet all of these criteria just yet—that’s what this book is for. 

First and foremost, the poker brain is unbiased. All things being equal, it has no preference for betting over checking, calling over folding, opening over passing. It wants to take all these actions in the appropriate frequencies, but it is not any “happier” or “sadder” choosing one over the other.

Almost as importantly, the poker brain is indifferent. It doesn’t let the rise or fall of a chip stack affect the analytical process any more than it should. It doesn’t care if you, the player, are winning or losing, except to the extent that such winning or losing influences the current decision. (Often this influence is quite small.) It has no investment in the results of any particular play. It only cares about the process.

A minor, but certainly required, attribute is that the poker brain is numerate. It is not necessarily a superhuman calculator or mathematical genius, but it is comfortable in the land of stack sizes, pot sizes, bet sizes, and the ratios between them. It never misses the numerical context of an opponent’s action, and it carefully considers the sizes of its own bets and raises, without necessarily needing to do much mental arithmetic.

Finally, and maybe paradoxically, the poker brain is ignorant. It knows that it doesn’t actually know anything. It is playing a game of incomplete information, and it always accounts for the game’s inherent uncertainty in its decision-making process. Even if it’s armed with encyclopedic knowledge of solver-generated solutions, it knows that it’s playing against human beings, and that there might always be something about its opponent’s play worth exploiting. As such, it is always open to new ideas and strategic viewpoints, and always ready to throw out old methods—even and especially when those methods have previously resulted in great success.

With these assets in place, the poker brain avoids many pitfalls so common in ordinary human brains.

It doesn’t let emotions interfere with its analysis (although it does take into account how opponents’ emotions are affecting their play).

It does not hate losing any more than it likes winning. “Loss aversion”, where losses feel more painful than wins feel good, is a near-universal feature of normal brains. But to the poker brain, losing a dollar is the exact opposite of winning a dollar.

It does not mistranslate numbers. Most brains see 1% and .01% as “very unlikely” and stop there. Even worse, most brains see 55% and 75% as very closely linked in the “more likely than not” category. Largely because it avoids translating them into language, the poker brain knows that these numbers are extremely different and it reacts to each of them accordingly.

It does not get complacent. For most brains, there is nothing worse than a little bit of success. They do something that works, and then do it again and again despite any new theories or information or research they might come across. The poker brain doesn’t make that mistake, because it knows its own limitations. It understands that an idea’s success does not equal a blanket validation.

To equip you with such a brain, we’ll first discuss how to think through a hand in the absence of any information about your opponent. You might have heard this approach referred to as playing “optimally” or “game theory optimally” or “GTO.” It all boils down to the basic idea of having a plan that stands up well to any of the ideas your opponent might come up with. We’ll look closely at the principles behind optimal play, and how you can use them to inform your thinking about a hand as it’s happening.

We’ll also take a deep dive into the myriad ways your thinking might change based on your opponent. Everything from prior hands your opponent has played, timing tells, bet sizing tells, verbal tells (including revelations about an opponent’s mood), non-verbal tells, betting patterns, and interpersonal dynamics may make it a good idea to deviate from optimal strategy. A strong player learns to identify all the various mistakes amateur players commonly make, as well as pick up on the “trends” at the professional level that tend to make even other strong players predictable. And of course, a good player learns the best way to take maximal advantage of each error.

We’ll examine how both optimal and exploitive (other writers use “exploitative”, which is fine—I simply prefer the shorter word) play change in different scenarios, and how such changes should affect your thought process.

Finally, we’ll lay out a framework for how to sort through the reams of information available in the heat of battle, and allow you to focus on the most important things first, and the least important things not at all. Should you be thinking optimally or exploitively? Or both? We’ll answer these questions and more.

Lengthy analysis away from the table can prove vital to developing your poker intuition, and the benefits to your poker brain will accrue in wonderful and surprising ways. Magnus Carlsen is both the best “bullet” chess player (games that take only a few minutes or less) and the best “classical” chess player (with games taking as long as eight hours or more). This is not a coincidence. By adding knowledge and expertise, chess players are able to evaluate new positions much more quickly. The same is true in poker. Do enough work away from the table, and you’ll find yourself capable of quicker, more accurate decision-making at the table.

To that end, I’ll be reviewing hands from my own play (and a few from my students) that incorporate the principles under discussion. Think through them at your own pace, and come up with your own answers to the questions I pose before you read on. The vast majority of my experience comes from tournaments, so this book only includes tournament hand examples, but almost all of the concepts apply to cash games as well.

If you’ve ever found yourself unsure what to think about first when you had a tough poker decision, or how best to consider the information before you at the table, or if you just have a nagging suspicion that there is something missing in your game that’s preventing you from taking the next step in your poker journey, then this book is for you. Come along with me, as we all try to improve our poker brains.

Can’t believe I haven’t said this earlier in this space, but buy my book The Game Plan. It’s good. And the ebook is now just ten bucks.

Our ability to filter and distill is fearsome powerful. We can pick out loved ones’ voices in a crowd, navigate four lanes of traffic on autopilot, follow multiple storylines while eating popcorn and Junior Mints. We can find Waldo. Distinguishing signal from noise and banishing the latter to the recesses of our brains is a big part of what allows us to navigate the world without blowing our circuits. Has this most potent weapon of ours been turned against us?

The Sunday before last, a gunman in Halifax killed 18 people, Canada’s worst mass shooting in 30 years. I’ll forgive you if you missed it. Killing sprees have become so commonplace that our brains have filed them away, factoring them into our everyday lives. Never mind that more people died in Halifax than in Columbine, a story which dominated our national discourse for days in a bygone age before such things were commonplace.

My almost three-year-old sleeps with a white noise machine. It’s loud enough that if we don’t calibrate correctly, it will constantly trigger the monitor throughout the night and contribute to the usual restlessness. But the white noise knocks out the din from streetlife and neighbors and allows my kid to sleep (mostly) peacefully. In other words, it does what it should. Background sounds are supposed to be harmless, irrelevant, and filtering them out should improve our lives. My son’s white noise machine is so effective that sometimes I’ll play in his room with him for two hours before realizing I never turned it off.

The white noise machine, in its natural habitat.

Since January of 2017, we’ve been in a constant battle to reshuffle the various noises, each new signal dropping from our attention and being reclassified as noise with ever alarming speed. Banning travel from majority-Muslim countries. Firing an FBI director for investigating the chief executive. Gutting environmental protections. Gutting health care laws. Provoking war with North Korea. Illegally bombing Syria. Illegally assassinating a foreign military leader. Using the presidency as a money-making enterprise. Separating family members, locking kids in cages, and letting them die. Extorting a foreign leader for personal political gain. Bypassing our system of background checks for unqualified relatives. Concocting inane defenses for these actions, and/or engaging in the sloppiest of cover-ups. Any one of these outrages, all listed off the top of my head, could’ve rightfully dominated our attention. Now they’ve all been relegated to the history books in the face of the latest entry: allowing, through inertia and incompetence, the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans, and causing the worst unemployment crisis of our lifetimes.

The term “white noise” doesn’t apply anymore. White noise is anodyne, inherently dismissable. What we’re hearing now is something else, and it’s no longer confined to metaphor. As I sit in the epicenter of the pandemic, down the street from the nursing home with the most deaths in New York, and in listening range of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the sirens never seem to stop. There goes another one. How many have I missed?

My almost three-year-old has adjusted, as kids always do, to the lack of playdates, the end of car trips, the new sonic landscape. Will the red noise soon register to him entirely as background? Will the blares and beeps that signal yet another life in peril, another soul gasping feverishly for air, become part of his surroundings, accepted without thought? This is the fear, and the disservice I do him whenever I don’t call attention to the distant sirens as we’re poring over a puzzle, or reading a book, or taking a walk. Red noise cannot become white noise, even if our brains want it that way. Evil learns from evil, and we’re all but guaranteed to see this horrifying tactic continue to overwhelm us long after the current crisis is over. I can only hope we’ll do better than I have so far, as another emergency may or may not have just echoed past.

In the summer of 2010, Dr. Bill Chen—math PhD, personal friend, and all-around genius (although he seems to lose his cash or his phone roughly every other day)—faced the great Phil Ivey heads-up for a bracelet in the $3k HORSE event at the World Series of Poker. Late in the match, the following hand came up during the Limit Hold ’Em round.

Bill raised from the small blind button and Phil called from the big blind. Phil led with a bet on the flop of As Th 2h and Bill called. Phil continued with a bet on the 9c turn, and then Bill raised. Phil called and checked the 7h river. Bill bet, Phil check-raised, and Bill folded. Action-packed hand, no? Don’t you wish you knew what they both had?

Well, now we will. Reliable sources tell me all hole cards will be revealed during Bill’s appearance on Jennifer Shahade’s The GRID podcast. We’re about to get a glimpse into the ten-year-old strategies of two of the top Limit Hold ‘Em players at the time, and rumor has it the results are more than a little surprising!

In advance of the podcast, I thought I’d do an analysis the usual way—without knowing the hands. While Limit Hold ’Em is my best game, I don’t have a ton of experience with heads-up play, so cut me some slack if I miss a trick!

Preflop, Bill will be raising his button with around 90 percent of hands, and Phil will be defending his big blind with at least that many. About all we can say so far is that Bill cannot have the very worst starting hands (72o, 93o, etc.), and that Phil is unlikely to hold a premium hand like a big pair or a big ace. Three-betting from the big blind is much more common heads-up than in a ring game, and Phil would want to build the pot with his best holdings, but we can’t completely rule out the possibility that he is slowplaying for deception.

Phil’s lead on the As Th 2h gives a hint of just how ahead of his time Mr. Ivey was. Limit players in 2010 (and indeed, most players in the $40-$80 games I play in today) were extremely reluctant to lead out from the big blind into a raiser, especially on an ace-high board. We now know from seeing solver solutions that this play should be a fairly normal part of the arsenal, but in 2010 this was the bet of a confident, world-class player bucking “standard” lines. That said, it’s hard to narrow Phil’s range very much based on this bet. He’s probably weighted toward weak aces, flush draws, and other one-pair hands, but he could have just about anything with at least some frequency. There are a relatively large number of hands in Bill’s button range that he simply has to fold to a bet on this flop (undercards to the ten, random queen-highs, suited jacks without the backdoor draw, etc.), so Phil potentially has good bluffing value with any two cards getting 4-1 on his money.

Bill’s call tells us nothing except that he doesn’t have one of the folding hands I mentioned above. Bill would likely slowplay his monsters here, as I know he subscribes to the (very solid) idea that it’s good to disguise information in the first two betting rounds before the bets double in a Limit game. Bill could have anything from queen-high to a set, and he could have any backdoor flush draw or gutshot straight draw or better draw.

The turn is where it gets interesting, and where we can finally start to narrow the ranges. Phil continues with another bet when the 9c falls, which means we can now pretty much rule out his total bluffs. But he can probably still have any gutshot, open-ender, flush draw, or any of the made hands he led the flop with.

When Bill raises, suddenly his range goes from very wide to quite narrow. His minimum value hand is probably a strong ace—say AQ—or better. With any worse one pair hands or hands with showdown value like king-high, Bill probably just calls. Any open-ender or flush draw could potentially be in his semibluff range (note that Js8s, a hand with which Bill would’ve peeled the flop, is now an open-ender, as is QJ). If he raises with all those possible bluffs he would be raising too many hands and Phil would likely show a profit calling down with anything. So Bill has to keep his frequencies in mind when picking his semibluffs. Whether he will assign those frequencies based on some predetermined, game theoretically sound method like looking at his watch, or whether he will decide based on game flow or opponent tendencies, or whether he will pick only certain hands to bluff with is something only Bill knows for sure. If Bill took the last approach, then he could, for example, choose not to semibluff QJ, and give himself a balanced-looking raising range of Js8s, flush draws with no showdown value, and his strong hands.

Phil calls the raise, which probably means we can rule out the very strongest hands from his range, as top two pair or better would like to three-bet for value on this draw-heavy board. How stubborn will Phil get with his calling range? He is probably hanging on to almost any pair getting 6-1 on his money, but he can safely fold his weakest draws like the 54 or 43 gutshots. If he did bet the turn with any low pocket pairs, he can probably fold those as well, since they often have only two outs.

The 7h on the river completes the flush draw, and also completes two straight draws—86 (which is an unlikely holding for either player) and J8, which either player can plausibly have. After Phil checks, Bill will likely show down with his one pair hands, and maybe even with his weakest two pair hands on such a scary river. With a good two pair or better, though, he’ll be compelled to bet for value. And since all his flush draws have now converted to value bets, he can probably go ahead and bluff with any busted straight draws in his range. But if he doesn’t raise the turn with QJ, he really doesn’t have any bluffs here! This is an example of why it’s usually better to tweak frequencies than to pick and choose specific hands to bluff with. As long as Bill threatens to have QJ, then he has a few bluffs to go with all his value on his river. Bill did say on Twitter recently (with no memory of what he had, by the way!—we’re relying on his friend Matt Hawrilenko to remember Bill’s cards for us), that “with QJ I may not bluff vs Ivey, just show down. That’s why it’s a little inconsistent.”

Indeed, if Bill would show down QJ here, then it’s even harder to find his bluffs, which means that when Ivey check-raises the river and Bill folds, Bill would’ve had to have a value hand! It’s rare in Limit Hold ’Em that you bet for value and then fold to a raise, but it is definitely correct to have this plan occasionally. Did Bill really make a thin value bet with something like AQ, only to fold it to Ivey’s raise? It seems hard to believe, knowing how much Bill hates folding.

Phil has some obvious value hands in his raising range (namely flushes and straights), which means he can and should have some bluffs to go with them. Like Bill, Phil’s most likely bluffing hand is QJ, but it’s at least possible to imagine him also holding Q8 with some small frequency.

Knowing that the results are going to be “fun”, as the insiders seem to be saying, I’ll risk looking very silly and make a guess as to what they both had. Bill: QJ, Phil: Q8.

Looking forward to listening to the big reveal on The GRID!

Matt Matros is a three-time World Series of Poker bracelet winner, poker instructor, and the author of the strategy/memoir The Making of a Poker Player. His new book, The Game Plan, is available now from Amazon. Want to see how the Game Plan would apply to a hand you’ve played? Write Matt at jacksup@mattmatros.com.

Sign up for Matt’s mailing list here.

Despite the similar fates of the luggage, it turns out these two films offer fundamentally different philosophies. Fargo’s characters hurt friends, family members, and accomplices in pursuit of the almighty dollar. Officer Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) actually says aloud to the captured perp in the backseat of her cruiser: “There’s more to life than a little money, you know. Don’t you know that?” In Hail Caesar!, the characters do know it, you know? But they also know they have to acquire a little money somehow.

Hail Caesar! is billed as a comedy, and looks like one—gonzo musical numbers, outlandish characters, and enough absurdist elements (poisoned chalices, lassos made of spaghetti) to qualify as “camp.” Sadly, I spent more of the film’s running time getting ready to laugh than actually laughing. Some viewers may thus dismiss this supposed comedy for not being funny enough, and I could hardly blame them. But in staying with the movie, and all its subplots of adoption paperwork and staged romances and twin gossip columnists, I found there was more to it than a lack of jokes.

The central players in Hail CaesarI wrestle with a version of the same question—how do we keep our morality intact while also providing for ourselves and our families?

Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), to keep himself going, confesses his sins daily. When he’s not strong-arming his employees in an effort to protect Capitol Pictures, he seems like a faithful husband and attentive father. He’s doing OK. But in the midst of various crises on various film sets, Mannix gets offered a job at Lockheed Martin. The pay would be great, the hours easy, and if he can just avoid thinking about the Bikini Island mushroom cloud photo that the Lockheed recruiter uses as a sales pitch, Mannix can envision himself in a new career.

The prize commodity of Mannix’s current employer, Capitol Pictures, is Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), who has skated through life as a talented pretty boy. Whitlock has blindly followed a path to stardom, enjoying all the booze and benefits such stardom confers, and has had little reason to consider the consequences of his actions. But after he’s kidnapped by a consortium of Communists (calling themselves The Future) intent on disrupting the “means of production,” Whitlock is perfectly ready to view Capitol Pictures—the studio that has provided him every luxury—as the enemy. There’s no telling what someone will think the first time he attempts thinking.

As for The Future, they’re a collective of screenwriters and other non-famous Hollywood functionaries who have enough money to live in a swanky house on the Pacific Ocean and hire a maid, but are still united in their belief that they’ve been screwed. These are not starving revolutionaries breaking windows for a crust of bread; these are intellectual revolutionaries who worship at the altar of economic fairness. Think of the oldest, richest, and most disgruntled of Bernie Sanders supporters (and not the massively underemployed millennial Bernie Sanders supporters). The Future doesn’t need Whitlock’s ransom money for itself. We know this because the money is earmarked directly for the Soviet Union. Then, when true believer Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum) is about to abandon America and join his comrades aboard a Russian sub, Gurney’s dog jumps from a rowboat to follow his master. Rather than see the mutt drown to death, Gurney drops the suitcase and catches the dog in his arms. The rowboat full of The Future contingent simply stares, with nary a thought to retrieving the suitcase before it falls to its watery grave.

Whitlock eventually gets returned to the studio, where he tries to convert Mannix to the red side. In the middle of Whitlock’s argument, Mannix slaps him in the face. Mannix may be passing on the Lockheed job—drawing the line at earning his salary by way of nuclear proliferation—but he’ll be damned if he’ll let his meal ticket turn commie. It never occurred to Whitlock that thinking for himself might be construed as disloyalty, and Clooney, open-mouthed and unblinking (there might as well be a “!?” floating over his head), plays his shock for all it’s worth.

Mannix offers no rebuttal to the academic theory Whitlock has memorized, but only insists that the films they make have value—that Whitlock is producing something of worth. Whitlock can believe this, and maybe Mannix can even convince himself. If he does, it’s easy for Mannix to ignore questions about how this worth gets measured, how the value he creates gets turned into wealth, or how that wealth becomes divided among those who helped to create it. He has to ignore these questions, because otherwise he’d have to confront them. After all, no one from The Future would deny a film’s inherent worth—they would only insist that everyone (especially the writers) get their cut.

Following Mannix’s diatribe, Whitlock quickly falls back in line and returns to the set, but not before Mannix issues one final directive: “Go out there and be a star.”

Fargo, a “black comedy,” ends in the happy home of Marge and Norm Gunderson, an expectant married couple who find joy in each other and in their careers. The greedy have been punished with death or jail, but we’re meant to believe that the world has plenty of rewards for those who aspire to do good. Darker, perhaps, is the ending to Hail, Caesar!, in which Baird Whitlock gives an impassioned, star-worthy speech on the set of the big budget Biblical epic (titled Hail, Caesar!, of course), only to ruin the take when he can’t remember the word “faith.” Whitlock doesn’t believe in what he’s saying or doing any more than Mannix believes it reasonable to assault his actors in the name of making a motion picture. But in Hail Caesar!, even good people have to pretend to believe in something. It’s the only way to get paid.

Matt and Jess welcome Young Adult author Heather Demetrios, who tells us what YA is and why it’s important. In the later segment (beginning at 31:00), Matt and Jess review the film Mockingjay Part Two.

In our first segment, guest Dave Tuchman joins us to discuss Daily Fantasy Sports, and specifically to react to the recent John Oliver segment and to the New York attorney general’s stance on the issue.

The second segment begins at 34:00. Jess and I review the recent film Mississippi Grind, the story of an unlikely friendship between two poker players trying to piece their lives together. (Warning! At 59:30 we start revealing big-time spoilers. Re-join us at 1:16:50 if you don’t want spoilers, but you do want our final thoughts on the film.)

If you only have one hour to kill, make it this Friday at 7 p.m. to hear me read fiction at BookCourt. I’ll be joined by Mallory Kasdan, Rachel Heiman, and Jamie Berk, and while I haven’t spoken to the other writers yet, I’m pretty sure we’re all planning on stirring things up. Hope to see a few crossover fiction/poker fans in the crowd (although my reading will have nothing to do with poker).

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Middlemarch by George Eliot

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante

The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison

The Last Illusion by Porochista Khakpour

10:04 by Ben Lerner

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Florence Gordon by Brian Morton

This is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett

Tenth of December by George Saunders

The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. by Adelle Waldman

The Noble Hustle* by Colson Whitehead

* – OK, so that’s the 15th book, and it would probably show too much bias to include it, but I loved it so I’m placing it in its own category: Best Book That I’m In

And for completists, here are the other books I read in 2014 (35 more, for a total of 50! A personal best! And a lot of these were very good too…):

Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Speedboat, Renata Adler
Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin
Lexicon, Max Barry
Lucky Us, Amy Bloom
Follow Her Home, Steph Cha
The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
The Awakening and Selected Short Stories, Kate Chopin
Invisible City, Julia Dahl
Duplex, Kathryn Davis
William Shakespeare’s Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope, Ian Doescher
The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
Silas Marner, George Eliot
The Days of Abandonment, Elena Ferrante
To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, Joshua Ferris
Cutting Teeth, Julia Fierro
Ride Around Shining, Chris Leslie-Hynan
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
Magic for Beginners, Kelly Link
Is Just a Movie, Earl Lovelace
The Assistant, Bernard Malamud
The Lola Quartet, Emily St. John Mandel
My Life in Middlemarch, Rebecca Mead
The Dog, Joseph O’Neill
The Patron Saint of Liars, Ann Patchett
The Leftovers, Tom Perrotta
Yes Please, Amy Poehler
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt
Zero Fade, Chris L. Terry
Annihilation (Southern Reach Trilogy, #1), Jeff VanderMeer  
This Boy’s Life, Tobias Wolff              

I have a new piece up, and it’s about overcoming an inability to solve puzzles through strategy. Check it out!