Poker, Propaganda and Persuasion

Poker Strategy / Marcus Bateman / 08 March 2010 / Leave a Comment

By focussing on people's emotions, advertisers, propaganda ministers, and poker players are able to change an individuals mind about something, simply through suggestion to their emotive side.

The use of subtle (or not so subtle) pieces of advertising to influence people into behaving in ways they would not, is one of the most obvious and important aspects of modern advertising and politics. Although it is now in a different form to Nazi war propaganda or Kitchener's World War One poster campaigns, it is still as ever present in society as it was then, and an understanding of these techniques is very helpful at the poker tables when attempting to influence other players.

Poker is perhaps the ultimate game of Orwellian 'double speak'. Just like the government in his seminal work 1984, at the poker table you want people to effectively believe two fundamentally opposite and contradictory things about you - that you are both always bluffing, and that you always have a hand. Such a position enables you to get action on your big hands at a good frequency, yet also enable you to bluff often, meaning you maximise your chances of profit in both directions.

Being able to keep little bits of information that suggest both of these things going into your opponent's head is what will make them start slipping up, as they struggle to reconcile the fact that you seem to be both playing wild, yet also frequently have a hand. Using an emotional advertising campaign to sell two polar opposite kinds of products works well for this in poker, just as it does in real life.

If you make the same plays with air and the nuts, it makes people's life much harder in identifying clearly in their head what to do, as they face an emotional battle over picking between two near identical things. Just like a car company sells its cars on image more than substance, using music and rugged countryside in its adverts to make you identify with the product on an emotional - rather than intellectual - level, so it is in poker, where you are always looking to make people play emotionally instead of rationally. By focussing on people's emotions, advertisers, propaganda ministers, and poker players are able to change an individuals mind about something, simply through suggestion to their emotive side.

Forcing people into emotional terrain in an analytical game will always be a recipe for success, and thinking about the techniques for best achieving this can drastically change your table image with little effort, which will always add up to a lot of money in the long run.

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