Beyond Tells: Power Poker Psychology - anyone read it?

[bygmesterf]

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And as others have pointed out, the beginning is a lot of psychobabble about "scripts" and "permission" and "response-able" players. Totally useless.


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I think the key to understanding this book is that the author is trying to apply transpersonal psychology (Think "I'm Ok, You're Ok") to poker. This type of psychology assumes that people tend to tend to engage in ritualized interactions with each other to achive certain "payoffs", typically respect, self esteem or sympathy.

For example somone whining about bad beats might be doing so because he seeks respect for his preflop hand selection skills and sympathy for his bad luck. Essentailly the person is saying "Look at Me!!, I play good hands preflop!, I'm trying to win but this assclown gets in my way with his 83o. My luck is so horrible, please give me sympathy"

Ideally if you know this person's "script" would can help them change it, or exploit it.

For example, I was playing in a 5/10 Omaha/8 game, The victem raised in the cutoff with AA24, and I called in the BB with KQ23s. The flop came AJ8 and I jammed it up (Inside broadway and nut low draws), the turn came a 9 which set up a back door flush (bet raise call) and the river came a ten which made my straight. (Bet-call)

The hero now went on about how stupid I was for jamming the flop when he had top set of aces. I recognized that he was basicly playing out "I'm trying so hard" and "If it wasn;t for you, I'd be a winner" scripts.

So I explained that I was trying to bluff him by betting the turn, and that I went four bets on the flop to "take control of the hand away from him". He was pissed, since my responses played right into what was driving his tilting.

I think he steamed off another $200 or so before leaving after claiming that he'd "Never seen such bad cards in my life" and "I just can't win with players like you in the game"

I personally got some value out of this book, but it's written pretty badly and the author doesn't have a good grasp of poker terms.

[Aytumious]

I read a few hundred pages of McKenna's book while killing time at a book store. I thought the player "scripts" were interesting and something I hadn't put enough thought into. Unlike the other posters in this thread, I think the book has value just because of the profiling of different players.