Two-minute warning
Our goal is to get our reflexive minds to execute on our deliberative minds’ best intentions. Poker players don’t need to know the underlying science to understand the difficulty of reconciling the two systems. Poker players have to make multiple decisions with significant financial consequences in a compressed time frame, and do it in a way that lassoes their reflexive minds to align with their long-term goals. This makes the poker table a unique laboratory for studying decision-making.
Every poker hand requires making at least one decision (to fold your starting cards or play them), and some hands can require up to twenty decisions. During a poker game in a casino card room, players get in about thirty hands per hour. An average hand of poker takes about two minutes to complete, including the time it takes for the dealer to gather, shuffle, and deal the cards between hands. Poker sessions typically last for several hours, with many decisions in every hand. This means a poker player makes hundreds of decisions per session, all of which take place at breakneck speed.
The etiquette and rules of the game discourage players from slowing down the game to deliberate, even when huge financial consequences ride on the decision. If a player takes extra time, another player can “call the clock” on them. This gives the deliberating player all of seventy seconds to now make up their mind. That is an eternity in poker time.
Every hand (and therefore every decision) has immediate financial consequences. In a tournament or a high-stakes game, each decision can be worth more than the cost of an average three-bedroom house, and players have to make those decisions more quickly than we decide what to order in a restaurant. Even at lower stakes, most or all of the money a player has on the table is potentially at stake in every decision. Poker players, as a result, must become adept at in-the-moment decision-making or they won’t survive in the profession. That means finding ways to execute their best intentions (deliberated in advance) within the constraints of the speed expected at the table. Making a living at poker requires interpolating between the deliberative and reflexive systems. The best players must find ways to harmonize otherwise irresolvable conflicts.