In everyday life, we learn a lot about what people think of what they say.But in poker, no one’s going to tell you anything.  

And unless you’ve got a friend who already knows your opponent and can tell you how he plays—that he’s loose-aggressive, say, or a calling station, a flounder, or a rock (or that your entire table is a rock garden, for that matter)—the only way to determine how your opponent thinks is to infer it from what he does. But inferring how your opponent thinks from what he does is extremely difficult. Suppose the guy two seats to your left raises before the flop.  

You don’t know anything about him, except that he’s wearing mirrored sunglasses, a green visor, and a t-shirt that says “Lucky Larry,” so you pay close attention to see what you can learn.  Before the flop, Larry gets called by one player, and then bets when the flop comes 2-6-9 (just as you were considering doing earlier with your A-K).  His opponent folds and Larry wins the pot.  What can you conclude about how Larry plays?  Not much.  His two actions (his raise and subsequent bet) could have been the product of many different sets of beliefs and wants.  Larry might have raised with A-K, believed he was weak on the flop and wanted his opponent out of the hand.  Or maybe he raised with the beautimous pocket A-A and wanted a call.  Or he had a middle pair (you know, like Snowmen or the Speed Limit), thought it was weak and wanted a fold.  He might even have been trying to steal the pot before the flop with nothing, gotten lucky when a 5 and 10 came on the flop and then wanted a call.  

These are just some of the many combinations of belief and want that could have led Larry to act as he did.  And that’s all assuming he’s a decent player, that he’s rational, and so on.   In this example, you did not get to see Larry’s cards, and sometimes you do.  And then it’s easier.  But not much.  For instance, suppose Larry did get called on the flop.  He and his caller then both checked the turn and river, and Larry showed A-K.  Can you conclude now that he’s the kind of player that typically bets with  A-K when the flop comes rags?  Not really.  After all, Larry could be betting here to make it appear that he’s that kind of player.  Or perhaps Larry has a policy of betting only once in twelve times with A-K and a ragged flop, and this was the 12th time. Or maybe the reason he bet is that he had a read on what his caller was thinking. Sometimes you need to think about what your opponent thinks about what another opponent thinks.Of course, the more you see Larry show Big Slick in this kind of situation, the more confident you can be that he’s the sort of player that typically bets with A-K when he misses.  You must steer clear here, though, of that vexatious “Fallacy of  representative Sample”: whenever Larry decides not to bet in such a situation, he will often subsequently fold, and you will not take note of his A-K.12  But more importantly, this precise situation just doesn’t happen often enough.  

Consider all the things that must be in place: Larry has to be dealt A-K, he has to raise before the flop, one other player (and only one) has to call him, the flop has to come rags, Larry has to bet on the flop, his opponent has to call, and finally, Larry has to show his cards at the end of the hand.  Entire tournaments could go by without that happening even once to Larry.So how, in just a couple of hours, does anyone ever learn how someone else thinks at the poker table?  The answer, I presume, has a lot to do with patterns that players have observed in past experience patterns like “People who play fewer hands are less likely to bet their A-K when the flop comes rags. How many hands Larry plays is something you can observe for a brief period of time.  Equipped with a battery of such heuristics (and no doubt they’re often more sophisticated), you can begin almost immediately to sketch schemes of particular players on the basis of them.

 Until new information about a player presents itself, at which point you’ll modify your schema in light of it, you attribute and act on the basis of the schema you have.  This is another, quite different way in which shared thoughts are involved and assumed in thought attribution at the poker table.  If such patterns of thought and play did not exist among poker players, this strategy would not be available.  Now, when you apply these patterns to new players, you’ll be taking a significant risk.  There’s no way around it.  There will be many exceptions to the patterns, and your application will sometimes backfire.  The exceedingly cautious might choose not to make such applications, but this is a losing strategy: these players won’t be using information that their opponents will.  

In a way, to be risk-averse in poker is to take the biggest risk of all.  The same is true when constructing a schema for a player without employing such patterns, as I was trying to do with Larry

 With Larry, I was in each case hesitant to conclude that Larry often bets with A-K when missing, because there were other possible explanations of his behavior.  Two important points: 

1. First, if I had known that those other possibilities occurred relatively infrequently in poker (if people hardly ever play Woolworths that way), I would have been more justified to assume that Larry often bets A-K.  Knowing how common particular thoughts and plays are among poker players is of decided significance, as it can allow you to ignore some otherwise worrisome possibilities.  This too is available from experience.
2.  Second, since there will always be other possibilities (no matter how much evidence you’ve amassed), every adjustment you make to a schema will require assumptions, which could be false.  Again you must embrace risk.  The risk is required even to develop a schema.   But here’s the really tough but critical question.  How confident     must you be about a particular assumption for it not to be too   dangerous for you to revise a schema in light of it? Intuiting this threshold is, I suspect, one of the great, unexplored skills of poker.There is a happy note to all this.  And it has to do with the shared belief and agreement that is guaranteed at the advanced poker table.  

Almost six thousand people traveled to Las Vegas in July 2005 to play in the World Series of Poker.  And that was just for the Main Event.  

There were 44 other events, including some for women only and some for seniors. Sitting at the tables were players from Vietnam, France, Lebanon, Canada, Brazil, South Africa, Iran, Sweden, Costa Rica, India, Australia, Japan, Russia, and many, many other countries.  And for the most part, everyone at these kinds of events is decent to one another, often friendly, chatting about past hands, discussing strategy, ribbing one another.  There is a palpable camaraderie.  I hardly place the solution to the world’s problems in the hands of poker, or poker players (though some are amazingly charitable with their winnings). However, it is, at least, worth noting that to this  day poker rooms are  a place with so many people from such diverse backgrounds all in one place.  And an even rarer one that continually requires such deep agreement among all of them.  It is nice to see.