"Predictably Irrational"

A friend gave me this book a couple of months ago, and I've been reading it a bit at a time, finally finishing it up Saturday night.

As you might gather from reading a bunch of the rants I've posted here, I'm endlessly fascinated by the irrational things that people do at the poker table--superstitions, blaming dealers for bad cards, kicking themselves for not playing 9-3 offsuit when the flop comes 3-3-9, donking off their last money rather than pocketing it, etc.

So I had kind of hoped that this book would shed more light on such subjects. As it turned out, it didn't. I would really have to stretch to find poker connections and analogies for the kind of systematic mental errors that the book is dedicated to exploring. They are almost all economic in nature. Even though my mental landscape is such that I see poker and poker analogs everywhere, and even though I kept hoping that at least one of the chapters would make an obvious jumping-off point for a good blog post, I came up basically empty-handed.

That isn't to say that the book is uninteresting. On the contrary, it was fascinating through and through. It just ended up not being enlightening on the particular forms of irrationality that I see pervading the poker universe.

But if you think you might be interested in knowing stuff about, say, how we decide whether a particular item is worth a particular price, and the myriad irrational factors that go into such decisions (and how marketers have a pretty good grasp on those things and can use them to manipulate our decisions), or how and why and to what extent people will tend to cheat and steal and what factors tend to mitigate such actions, or how and why we will go out of our way to exact revenge even if it costs us money, then you might find this book as interesting as I did.

Just don't expect to learn much that will enlighten you about the poker dunderheads of the world. (And we all take our turns at being the poker dunderheads.)