Strategy: Information Overload

Recently I have been reading "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell." There are many lessons in this book about the power of using instinct and split decision making effectively as well as ineffectively.

One story that I was particularly struck by is called Paul van Rippers Big Victory. Paul was a big time military personality who was a bit of a rogue. He was brought into a military simulation that was run to test strategies for invading Iraq or Afghanistan (it is never specified but I suspect it is Iraq). He was supposed to run the enemy forces (red team) while the US forces (blue team) were to be given unparalled information resources.

Blue team had massive decision making metrics based on tons of information. Red team was at a significant technological and information disadvantage. Paul Van Riper was set up for defeat. He was supposed to be the fall guy. He was never supposed to win. Yet somehow within hours of the simulation Riper's Red team had sunk 12 ships of the US forces and had made a drastic blow with little more than simple strategies and effective decision making processes. The US in the simulation was devastated even though they had Riper out gunned and were at a superior information advantage (so they thought).

The problem that the US forces faced was that their decision making process was overly complicated. By having so much information at its disposal the Blue Team was unable to make effective decisions while Riper was able to make intuitive quick decisions that ran circles around the Blue team.

So what does this have to do with poker? For a long time I fell victim to the same kind of thinking when it comes to my poker HUD. The prevailing wisdom in most circles is that the more HUD stats you have at your disposal the better. However, now my HUD looks like the following.

VP$IP/PFR/# Hands.

And the truth is that I use it much more than I ever did when I had 15 different stats at my disposal.

For me stat use is as simple as trying to find out whether my opponent is a good or a bad player. If my opponant shows stats like 33/9 or 33/29 I am instantly aware that I am against a bad player. They play too many hands! If I see a player like 12/2 I also know I am against a bad player. They do not correctly value their hands and are very passive.

The only HUD stat that I worry about looks like 14/12. However that is not enough to know that a player is good. It is just the first step. After seeing hud stats like this I typically sharkscope them to see if they are a winner. If they are a winner I tag them with a red mark in my FT notes.

Once I can distinguish a good player from a bad player the stats are pretty much irrelevant. Bad players pretty much make similar types of mistakes. They typically shove too tight and call too tight. It is not really necessary at the low limits to know what type of bad player they are. They all make similarly bad mistakes in the Shove/Fold game. This allows us to really simplify and accelerate our decisions.

Good Luck at the tables,
Greg