Poker News / Short-Stacked Shamus / 11 December 2009 / Leave a Comment

Those who play and/or follow poker might have had reason to pick up one or more of Malcolm Gladwell's best-selling books before. Born in the U.K., raised in Canada, and now residing in New York City, the award-winning journalist has a real knack for making compelling, cause-and-effect-type arguments about contemporary culture. He's been a regular contributor to The New Yorker since the mid-1990s, and like I say, his books have all dealt with subjects I would consider to be of particular interest to poker people.

His breakthrough best-seller The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (published in 2000) provides a fascinating analysis of how particular ideas, trends, or products sometimes take off and become full-blown cultural phenomena. Following the so-called "poker boom" that occurred around 2003, some looked back to Gladwell's book to help explain how poker had successfully reached a "tipping point" and suddenly caught fire the way it did.

Gladwell's other books have captured the attention of some poker players, too. In Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005), Gladwell tackles the subject of first instincts, assessing why it happens that oftentimes we do better to "go with our gut" than to second-guess -- a subject of obvious relevance to poker. And in Outliers: The Story of Success (2008), Gladwell investigates some of the factors that set the superstars of a given field (e.g., sports, business, medicine) apart from others, yet another topic that intrigues those of us who follow winners of high-stakes cash games and tourneys.

Not long ago I picked up Gladwell's latest title, What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures (2009), which compiles a number of his New Yorker pieces from over the years. One of those essays, titled "Open Secrets," struck me as potentially interesting to poker players, and so I thought I'd share a little bit from it here.

"Open Secrets" first appeared in early 2007 and takes as its starting point the trial and conviction of Jeffrey Skilling, the former president of Enron Corporation who was found guilty of multiple felony charges connected to the collapse of the energy company. Skilling is currently serving a 24-year prison term.

Gladwell shares details of the complicated case, and I'm not going to rehearse all of those here. To summarize, Gladwell ultimately argues that even though the popular view of Enron was that the energy company had failed to release information about its business practices to its shareholders, the fact was Enron released a heck of a lot of information. Too much, in fact, as eventually -- thanks to some painstaking investigative work by various entities -- their public reports yielded enough to demonstrate that the actual value of the company wasn't nearly what it was saying it was worth.

Gladwell presents the Enron case as an example of a situation in which many thought certain information was hidden -- that it posed a problem that couldn't be solved without the missing pieces -- when in fact all of the necessary information was there for anyone skilled enough to interpret it.

In order to clarify the difference, Gladwell evokes a distinction once made by policy analyst and national security expert Gregory Treverton between "puzzles" and "mysteries." Gladwell explains that, for example, al-Qaeda leader "Osama bin Laden's whereabouts are a puzzle. We can't find him because we don't have enough information." However, "the problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery." In the latter case (argues Gladwell), all of the needed information to solve that "mystery" was available -- it just needed to be interpreted correctly by those examining it.

Gladwell offers other examples to explore the distinction further in his essay, but I think you get the idea. When facing a problem in need of a solution, one can approach it either as a "puzzle" and assume that one will have to uncover a missing piece of information before finding the answer, or approach it as a "mystery" and assume all of the needed information is there, it is just going to take some close study to interpret it and thus solve the problem.

You're probably already seeing the poker connection, yes? If so, nice read! If it is still a puzzle to you, let me explain.

As I reached the conclusion of Gladwell's article, I realized that one way the distinction is evident in poker is in the difference between unskilled and skilled players. Players who are new to the game, or who aren't very good, tend to view the hands they play as "puzzles." There's a piece missing for them -- usually the contents of an opponent's hand. And the solution to the problem isn't going to come until that piece is discovered.

On the other hand, players who are experienced -- say, who have developed the ability to interpret bet sizes, to put opponents on hands or hand ranges, to interpret tells (like the chip glance or shaking hands), and the like -- tend to view hands as "mysteries." They know all of the information they need is available to them, it is just a matter of interpreting it correctly.

Of course, it is probably a little too neat to suggest a cut-and-dry distinction like this. Most hands probably involve both a bit of "puzzle" and a bit of "mystery." Still, it seems useful to use the distinction as a way of characterizing different kinds of players -- that is, to distinguish those who have yet to discover that even though poker is a "partial information" game, there is nevertheless a lot of information out there to help solve the problem of a hand, from those who have already figured all that out.

I'd like to claim I'm more often than not part of the latter group. I mean, after all, I call myself a shamus, right? In my mind's eye, I'm a detective at the tables, reading those clues, and solving the "mystery."

But if I'm going to be honest, I have to admit that oftentimes I belong to the other group -- the "puzzled."

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