The art and science of deception

I just read this interesting article about what magic is teaching science about the flaws in human perception. Here's what I thought was the part most relevant to poker:

Teller designed his own house in the Las Vegas foothills, and he delights
in showing first-time visitors around. He starts the tour by pointing down a
hallway at a window, through which I see a beautiful view of the sprawling neon
city below.

"Go take a look," Teller says. I amble down the hall and—just before
reaching the end—smack into something hard, leaving a wet mouth-print on
polished glass. The "window" is merely a reflection; the hallway ends in a
precisely angled, mirrored door. "You didn't see the illusion because you
weren't expecting one," Teller says. "You assumed I wasn't fucking with your
head and that this hallway is actually a normal hallway. Those assumptions work
great until you walk into a wall."

The fake window is only the beginning. The house also has a bookcase
that's actually a door, lightbulbs that appear to change color mysteriously, and
a bronze bear statue that tells you what card you're thinking of. After
demonstrating that last prank, Teller watches as I try in vain to figure out how
it's done. He relishes the confusion of his audience—and even fellow
illusionists: "I had Criss Angel over here; he couldn't figure out how the bear
worked, either." Unless Teller sees the symptoms of astonishment—mouth agape,
eyes widened, pupils dilated—he doesn't consider the trick a success. "The magic
show is a competition," he says. "The audience is trying to figure you out. They
aren't suspending their disbelief—they're trying to expose you as a scam
artist." This is what makes magic so difficult: The magician must sell people a
lie even as they know they're being lied to. Unless the illusion feels more real
than the truth, there is no magic.

Isn't that how poker is? You have to convince your opponent that your hand is something other than what it actually is, because if he correctly deduces what your cards really are he will play perfectly against you and make no mistakes, in which case you can't make any money. But you have to sell this lie even as your opponent knows he is being lied to. You have to make the illusion feel more real than the truth.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I've walked into plenty of walls. It hurts. Then again, I've planted a fair number of walls and lured opponents into smacking into them. That mostly makes up for the pain.

Sometimes it's as simple as betting a strong hand and letting your opponent deceive himself as to its meaning. He might think, "If Grump had flopped a set, he wouldn't bet out here. He'd slow-play it to trap me, so he probably just has top pair with a queen, and my pocket kings are still good." That is, if your opponent is so strongly expecting to be lied to that he will interpret everything you do as deception, then you exploit that by being straightforward rather than deceptive. Jamie Gold, for all his faults, practiced this to perfection during his run to the Main Event championship in 2006, always telling opponents the truth about what he had and/or what they should do. Because they were expecting him to try to deceive them, they tended not to believe him.

As an interesting juxtaposition, just before reading this article I watched this week's "High Stakes Poker." The most entertaining part was Phil Laak trying to untwist Tom Dwan's actions, especially with a tiny value bet on the river. Laak knows instantly that he's not going to raise, so it's just a question of calling or folding, which means that he feels free to think out loud about his decision. He goes through not just what cards Dwan might have, but what Dwan's actions were attempting to say and do. He mentions that against a bad player his decision would be easy, but because Dwan is a genius player, he might be thinking one level deeper and pulling a double-reverse on Laak. In reality, Dwan is being straightforward this time, and both his bets and his words are honest reflections of his hand strength, which Laak just can't quite convince himself is the case.

Deceiving somebody who knows you're trying to deceive him is a fascinating game, as is trying to separate truth from lies when you're on the receiving end of possible deception. Maybe that's why I can't get enough of either poker or of Penn and Teller, who, better than anybody in the world, explicitly invite their audience into that Wonderland (Wondurrrland?) of smoke and mirrors, which you can't see, even when they're telling you that it's smoke and mirrors.