Dunning-Kruger Effect
I just had the following convo on AIM with my buddy Ray Coburn:
Me: i’m really curious to see how soft the games are [at the wsop] this summer
Me: i just feel like it’s inevitable that everyone will get decent/competent
Me: ’cause tbh nlhe tournaments seem pretty easy to me
Me: so i keep waiting for everyone else to start thinking the same
Him: nahhh
Him: ever read the dunning-kruger effect?
In any given 12 hour day in a live no-limit hold’em tournament, I feel like I face one or maybe two decisions that seem genuinely difficult to me. It’s not that I think I’m some amazing player or anything, there are certainly a lot of guys who think on a better and deeper level than I do, it’s just that I don’t really find no-limit tournaments to be very challenging. For me, “playing good” is pretty easy and I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop at the WSOP where everyone is “playing good”.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect seems to suggest I’ll have to keep waiting.
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which “people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.”[1] The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than in actuality; by contrast, the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to a perverse result where less competent people will rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding.
The article also includes a quote from Bertrand Russell that I find particularly reassuring:
In the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect is relatively new in the world of psychology. It was only published in 1999. They ran a bunch of studies on Cornell students where they examined self-assessment of logical reasoning skills, grammatical skills, and humor. Basically the kids who scored poorly vastly overestimated their own rank while kids who scored well accurately estimated their rank. In other words, everyone thinks they’re good, but some people are fooling themselves.
This effect as it applies to poker is very powerful. I think just about every player at any given poker table in Vegas thinks they’re a good player, but obviously someone has to be losing. What is most meaningful, as this effect relates to poker, is that the bad players, on account of the fact that they think they’re good, essentially prevent themselves from gaining competence in the game. Basically, once bad always bad unless they’re able to admit they’re bad and work on trying to improve.
I find the Bertrand Russell quote to be particularly comforting. In general, I’d say I’m not nearly as confident of a person as I wish I was. Like anyone else, I have my moments where I feel really confident, but by and large I feel like I would say I have below average confidence. Before reading about the Dunning-Kruger Effect, I think I always used to view confidence as directly correlated to competence. Now I’m kind of thinking that a lot of the “confidence” out there is all based in falsehood.
For instance, I remember I was once at a blackjack table in Bellagio with this Iranian guy who was betting $2k a hand. He asked me what I do. As I slid my comparatively meager $50 bet onto the table, and I told him I play poker. He went on to say that he’s one of the best poker players in the world and would play me anytime for any stakes I wanted. My response to this was to shrug and think to myself, “well, he probably is.” Looking back, that just seems stupid. I’m not saying I should have played him or anything, but I should have had the confidence to realize he was almost certainly in the ‘cocksure’ category and that I probably would have been a favorite in a heads-up match against him.
Anyway, much thanks to Ray for pointing out the Dunning-Kruger Effect. I think it’s changed the way I view poker and the world.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
