Keeping Focus

There’s a book entitled The Invisible Gorilla by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons which explains, in part, how our perceptions and decisions can be distorted when our attention is not properly focused on the correct action or event. The authors created a film in which players with white shorts and players with black shorts passed basketballs to each other.

This film was shown to thousands of people who were instructed to count the number of passes between the members of the team in white and to totally ignore the team wearing black. At times there are several basketballs going at once, so counting the passes is a challenging task. In the middle of the film, a woman in a gorilla costume walks into the group of basketball players, thumps her chest, and crosses the court. She is on the film for almost 10 seconds.

Approximately half of the people who saw this film and were trying to count the passes among the white-shorted players never noticed the gorilla. Anyone watching the film without the instruction to focus on the white-shorted players would have definitely noticed the gorilla. But many of the viewers concentrating on the passes missed the gorilla completely.

The Palms is one of the casinos where I play. Their cocktail waitresses wear a bustier-type costume that, on some of the women, covers the areolas surrounding their nipples with, at most, a few millimeters to spare. Although a peek of this darkened skin would not change a guy’s life in the slightest, most of us will look to make sure no “wardrobe malfunction” is happening in our presence. If one of these ladies had a big mole on her cheek, I suspect that a high percentage of men wouldn’t be able to tell you which cheek. Their focus was somewhere else entirely.

There are things you do in life that don’t require much focus — like leisurely walking. You and I could have a nice walk while discussing things, and no matter how serious the conversation, we could do both things at once. If we had to cross a busy intersection or walk through an area with uneven ground, we’d likely halt our conversation while we negotiated the hazard, and then resume the conversation where we left off.

For most people, playing video poker well requires the correct focus. There are a lot of games where A♠ K♠ J♥ T♥ 8♥ is played differently than A♠ K♠ J♥ T♥ 7♥. For 5-coin dollar players of 9/6 Jacks or Better, in the first hand the hearts are worth about 20¢ more than the spades and in the second hand the spades are worth 20¢ more than the hearts. For most people, distinguishing between these hands isn’t intuitive and requires some careful thought.

I haven’t done a scientific test on this, but I have watched a lot of people playing video poker. When a player is talking with someone else, his error rate appears to be MUCH higher than when he is not.

Some people get nervous if I watch them play — presumably because of my reputation as an expert. Although I do play well, I am nowhere near the perfect player who knows every hand in every game and never makes a mistake. I wish! The fact that I make these players nervous just by watching can bias the results, so in this article, I don’t want to write about those people.

I have some video poker playing friends who treat me as, more or less, just another guy. Sometimes I’ll go up to them in a casino and ask them a question they have to think about, such as, “How much play do I need to do at XYZ casino in order to qualify for xxxxxx?” Usually they have to think about this while they answer. If they continue to play, I’ll watch their holds and call out, “Don’t do that!” if they initially hold the wrong cards. I know I am distracting them and don’t want them to suffer bad results because of my question.

Players who play without talking to others probably play more accurately than players who chat a lot. If you’re focusing on the conversation, you’re not focusing on your play. But the degree of focus required depends on how well you know the game and how much practice you’ve had.

If you know how to play every hand perfectly, playing video poker is sort of like walking. It doesn’t take a lot of concentration. I am generally better prepared to play well than most other players and also tend to talk less to others while playing. These are two of my “secrets of success.” People know about my first secret — it’s not much of a secret anymore — but this is the first time I’ve addressed the second.

I know there are players whose casino play is a valued part of their social life. They sit with the same players every day and chat away while playing. These people value fun-while-gambling more than I do and are less concerned than I am with extracting as much money as possible from the casinos. To each his own, I suppose, but I’d rather bring home the bacon and find my social life elsewhere.

There’s only so much I can do to avoid talking while playing. In the video poker world, I’m a public figure of sorts. Tens of thousands of people have gone through my classes and whenever one of them comes up to me and wishes to say something, it’s only good manners for me to answer politely and appropriately. When this happens, I will usually stop play while responding. After a short period of talking, most people can recognize that I’m working and will not prolong the conversation. I’ll share an exception to this in my column next week.

Back when Shirley played video poker, we had a firm rule that if someone was talking to her she had to stop playing until the conversation was finished. She didn’t like the rule, but she usually complied. Partly because I trust my own play more than I trusted hers, I’m not quite so limiting of my own behavior. You’ll have to decide for yourself what your rule should be.