Ability to Predict a Players Skill based on Intelligence.

[PostalService]

First off I would like to state that my SAT score is 1290: 690 Math 600 Verbal, thus we can say I am of average intelligence.

SpiderMnke had made a previous post called: Intelligence Assessment vs Poker Skill in which he tried to determine a few different concepts, of which got replies from many people that basically muddled his original goals. So with this thread I would like to lay down the goals and the constraints, which if followed may possibly lead to either interesting discussion or some profound insights into poker itself.

Goals:
1. Can we predict the POTENTIAL of a poker player using some sort of test such as the SAT I: reasoning test or College GPA/College Attended. I would like to define potential as the max stakes a player will reach and still be a "winning player" (aka profitable) before they embark on their poker career.
2. Poker is profitable because one player has a higher ability than the other players at the table. Their ability is previously unknown to the other players and thus gives them an advantage. There is however a phenomena which Spidermnke spoke of, whereby a player knowing the ability of the other player/players will still believe that they are superior when in fact they are not. I believe this phenomena is what makes poker extremely profitable. I can recount this in many aspects of life other than poker, which SpiderMnKe already made 1 reference to:

"Also at what level does a person become aware of their own competence. I've talked to < 1000 [SAT] people that really can't seem to evaluate their own skill at anything accurately. One guy believes he is good at WarCraft and is a big time loser online. He doesn't feel the need to study the game whatsoever.. then will tell me that he isn't great at any one thing.. but is "VERY good" at a lot of things. I haven't seen any evidence of very good anything."

So Goal #2 is the determine at what level are people unaware of their own incompetence, thus making poker profitable.

I would like to institute with these goals some constraints:
1. We are strictly discussing online poker, this is in an attempt to throw out the notion of social skill, which I am assuming to be vastly limited in comparison to B&M play.

2. Intelligence will be defined by Robert J. Sternberg of Yale as:

"The theory suggests that successfully intelligent people are those who have the ability to achieve success according to their own definition of success, within their sociocultural context. They do so by identifying and capitalizing on their strengths, and identifying and correcting or compensating for their weaknesses in order to adapt to, shape, and select environments. Such attunement to the environment uses a balance of analytical, creative, and practical skills."

3. The SAT I measures:
"The SAT I was designed with question types that reflect or show your reasoning abilities, not just the amount of information you've accumulated during school. As an example, many math items can be answered by using complex equations, but they can also be answered correctly if you can reason through the problem. Reading passages don't just test that you can read but require extended reasoning in order to answer the questions related to the passage. This means that you have to be able to make inferences, assumptions, and interpretations based on the passage provided, in order to understand what the author is trying to say." -The College Board

After reading this I believe that the SAT does measure intelligence and reasoning which would be vital to the ability to play poker. You may refute this if you wish. One of the reasons I would like to use the SAT is that it is something that many people have taken and thus we can compare across the board. For all of those who wish to say that it doesn't provide a good way to measure intelligence please include your SAT score in your post.

3. We will assume that everyone person who we would like to predict their eventual peak of poker ability will start with the same drive and determination for the game. We will assume that they all would like to become online pros. Where Pro means the ability to survive off poker alone. This constraint is to get rid of posts saying that a dumb person may have more drive than a smart person, or something of that sort. Lets assume we don't care about the ultra smart people, who are just casual players. We want to find the potential that someone will have based on their intelligence if they are highly motivated to become a winning player.

Conclusion:

I am looking to see if we can somehow determine that, if someone has the drive and want to become a pro poker player, where they will eventually max out at. I am already convinced it is directly related to your intelligence in general. One particular way to measure this is the SAT test, because many people have taken it. Is there a lower bound at which some people will never even become a winning player at even the smallest of stakes? If you reply to this post, please include your SAT score or college GPA, and what stakes/game of poker you play, and tell us if you are a winning player or not. I believe one of the things we will find is that people who post that intelligence is not important to the game, will either have lower SAT scores, or lower poker profitability.

Discuss.

[toots]

There was actually some recent study that found that the people who are the most clueless are also the most clueless about their own lack of ability. That is, the more competent someone is, the less confident they are in their abilities, because they better understand the limits to their own abilities.

As for SATs predicting intelligence... well far be it for me to equate intelligence to IQ, but as it happens, I helped conduct a study at a private university where we tested 10% of the student population, administering a full WAIS-III to each of them (all subtests, all optional items), and we had access to their SAT, and where applicable, ACT scores.

The usefulness of this study was limited by the subject selection - being at a mid-tier private college, there was an obvious bracketing of the IQ and SAT scores we saw (lower scores probably didn't get in to this college, higher scores probably went elsewhere).

The correlation between the various IQ scores (as the WAIS-III produces three major scales - verbal IQ, performance IQ and composite "Full Scale" IQ - as well as four other indexes) and the SAT and ACT scores were significant, but not hugely so. I ought to dig them out again to refresh my own memory.

Anyway, I seem to recall ACT scores actually being a better predictor than SAT.

But, the thing about SATs are that they're just supposed to predict performance in college, and in specific, the first year performance in college. Historically, they've tended to fail to some degree in this area in that they fail to predict the fact that on the average, women do better than men in their first year in college, although I attribute that factoid to amount of partying.

I'll see what I can find.

[toots]

M'kay. Found an old powerpoint presentation that summarized the study. Understand that the stats are a bit weaker owing to the restricted variance due to the rather limited subject pool, but what we found are that:

Full Scale IQ correlated to SAT-Verbal at .43, to SAT-Math at .50, and to ACT at .72.

Note that while a correlation of .50 sounds big, what it means is that 25% of the variance in IQ scores are represented in the SAT scores. That means the other 75% ain't explained by the SAT.

There was a predictably stronger correlation between "Verbal IQ" and SAT-Verbal (.60), whereas Performance IQ was correlated with SAT-Verbal and SAT Math, r= about .41 in both cases.

Breaking things up by gender, the correlation between SATs and IQ was stronger among women than men.

I can't find anyplace where I wrote down the findings with the "Processing Speed" and "Working Memory" indexes of the WAIS, but I think they'd be interesting with respect to poker.

Then again, little of this post has anything to do with poker, so much as it's directed at the alleged use of SAT as a predictor of IQ.

[Justin A]

This doesn't have much to do with the actual reason you posted, but I don't think the SAT I is a very good indicator of intelligence. The SAT is a test that can be studied for and scored can be improved. My brother is a very intelligent person as it is, but he was still able to improve his score from 1380 to 1510 between the first and second times he took the test. He didn't get smarter, he just studied better and prepared himself more thoroughly.

As far as intelligence and poker players are concerned, there are alot of attributes that are not directly related to mathematical intellegence that make up a good poker player. I think it is more important to be level headed at all times than to be purely intelligent. I'm not too familiar with emotional intelligence, but from the impression I get it would seem to be a better measure of poker potential than a test like the SAT would be.

[ QUOTE ]
"The SAT I was designed with question types that reflect or show your reasoning abilities, not just the amount of information you've accumulated during school. As an example, many math items can be answered by using complex equations, but they can also be answered correctly if you can reason through the problem. Reading passages don't just test that you can read but require extended reasoning in order to answer the questions related to the passage. This means that you have to be able to make inferences, assumptions, and interpretations based on the passage provided, in order to understand what the author is trying to say." -The College Board

[/ QUOTE ]

I just don't believe this to be true. While reasoning can help you some on the SAT, most of it is being prepared for the types of questions they ask. I am confident I could teach a decent math student how to score nearly perfect on the math section.

I like the direction of your post though, it would be interesting to see what attributes to make up the best poker players from a purely potential standpoint.

Justin A

[PostalService]

I believe that preparation is important to intellegence:

"The theory views intelligence as a form of developing competencies, and competencies as forms of developing expertise. In other words, intelligence is modifiable rather than fixed." Robert J. Sternberg

So your comment about someone improving their score, just shows that they indeed did become smarter. I would like to suggest that anyones SAT score, should be considered as the best job they could possibly do after as much preparation was needed. I feel that poker requires a lot of preparation and so people with higher SAT scores show that they can thus have higher poker potentials.

[PostalService]

I think that if your study was conducted on a wider range of people, you might even find a stronger correlation, but the fact that a correlation exists may make the SAT worthwhile. The WAIS is taken by many fewer people in the US than the SAT. So using SAT as a predictor of potential poker ability may be worthwhile.

For example, maybe we could say that:
If you made less than a 900 on the SAT, it will be difficult to become a winning poker player.
If you made more than a 1500 on the SAT, it might be wise to find some other field that would be more profitable than poker, even though you have the potential to become a strong player.

[toots]

Or, a weaker correlation. Not clear to me which.

I mean, with a wider population, you'd have a wider variance in both scores. Wider variance often leads to weaker correlation.

There's some argument to be made that those correlations may be higher than the population norm.

[PhatTBoll]

[ QUOTE ]
This doesn't have much to do with the actual reason you posted, but I don't think the SAT I is a very good indicator of intelligence. The SAT is a test that can be studied for and scored can be improved.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is why the name of the test was actually changed a few years ago, from the Scholastic Aptitude Test, to the Scholastic Achievement test.

Also, if all 2+2er's compared SAT scores, I would probably be in the 97th percentile or so, but if we compared poker skill, I would probably be around the 10th percentile (and I may even be flattering myself here). Take from that what you will...

[Blarg]

I really don't think SAT's correlate too determinatively to intelligence.

Here's the funny part. My SAT's were pretty mediocre, but I got extra marks for stupidity. I filled in all the blanks AFTER I answered the questions on the English part, I swear to God. I just didn't know better, and left more than a dozen questions I'm absolutely positive I got correct unfilled in. I sat there stupidly with my pencil in hand after the bell rang, and that was it.

I got plenty of awards in high school(and in college too), and had very good grades(and in college too). I took them in my junior year of high school, not senior year, and scores supposedly can vary on that basis. Plus, I've finally left youth behind, and when I took SAT's, there weren't any study courses that anybody I knew ever heard of -- at least not i Hawaii, where I took them. Nobody thought of test-taking as a skill, much less one that you could pay someone to help you develop. Now there are books that help you practice taking SAT's, that train you in test taking, courses of all types and all levels of expense that can make a enormous difference in your score. Especially if your family has the income to spare for you to take those courses.

You can't compare test scores from people in places or of income levels or from times when prep courses weren't available to the test scores of kids who have gone through prep courses today.

I used to take IQ tests all the time. Plus I kill at Jeopardy! [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img] But seriously, my first IQ test I ever took put me at 160, and since then I've probably taken 20 more. I just find them fun. I've gone as high as 172 and I think as low as 133, but with only rare exception do I come in at anything but 135 or 165, perhaps a point or two one way or the other. Mostly 165, but I don't know why so many 135's. Makes me think there's something in the test to make such a common difference of (mostly) exactly 30 points one way or the other. Perhaps a greater percentage or lesser of certain types of questions I either excel or stink at.

So, tests themselves can be quite variable even for the same person.

If you take an SAT once -- or an IQ test once -- are you really getting the full picture?

If you train in test-taking skills, is your likely much-increased score REALLY proof that you're that much smarter than the next guy who for whatever reason didn't? Well, it might prove that you're more practical or can afford such things....

Honestly, I think a disciplined mind is more important, and a keen determination to evaluate yourself thoroughly and often. Which is another way of saying you need a disciplined mind.

You have to be able to do the study needed to put the odds and basics of play in your noggin, and have the discipline to apply your knowledge under even the most stressful and emotionally-trying situations. Even when filled with self-doubt, you have to have the discipline to think straight, keep clear of superstitious changes in play style and belief, and constantly play each new hand fresh and emotionally unburdened.

If you can face each hand with clarity EVERY time, you're doing a lot, and that's well beyond what I think most players can do, even very good ones. Being able to do so is an enormous asset, maybe a critical one, and probably as important as any out there.

You need to have the discipline to evaluate yourself and your play constantly. Every tilt starts somewhere, on some hand, and you have to catch it fast. You have to recognize every learning opportunity that comes along while you're playing, and be sure you're aware when you're playing less than your best and do something about it -- either play right or quit for the hour, the day, the week, whatever it takes.

I think a certain intelligence being needed is a given, but that raw intelligence is probably exaggerated. There are and always will be extraordinarily bright people who make terrible poker players, and I don't think that's uncommon. And people of average intelligence who make surprisingly good players.

Raw intelligence counts for very little in the world.

I think it's the ability to actually apply your intelligence, with great and unfluctuating dicipline, even under stress and in emotionally difficult situations, that matters most in poker.

Maybe you can do it for only two hours at a stretch, and then your play starts to deteriorate, with or without you noticing or having the honesty to admit it. Maybe a bad beat throws you out the window, along with your intelligence.

Discipline and the self-insight to know when your discipline drops and you're not playing your best so you can wise up and snap yourself back to your best possible game are assets I would rank at the very top of poker skills, and well above having exceptional intelligence.

[PostalService]

Let me again post the definition we are using for intellegence:
"The theory suggests that successfully intelligent people are those who have the ability to achieve success according to their own definition of success, within their sociocultural context. They do so by identifying and capitalizing on their strengths, and identifying and correcting or compensating for their weaknesses in order to adapt to, shape, and select environments. Such attunement to the environment uses a balance of analytical, creative, and practical skills. The theory views intelligence as a form of developing competencies, and competencies as forms of developing expertise. In other words, intelligence is modifiable rather than fixed."

Quote:
"If you train in test-taking skills, is your likely much-increased score REALLY proof that you're that much smarter than the next guy who for whatever reason didn't?"

The answer is yes.

Quote:
"Maybe you can do it for only two hours at a stretch, and then your play starts to deteriorate, with or without you noticing or having the honesty to admit it. Maybe a bad beat throws you out the window, along with your intelligence."

Maybe this is why the SAT is 3 hours long. many test takers DO infact go on tilt in the exact way a poker player does.

Quote:

"I think it's the ability to actually apply your intelligence, with great and unfluctuating dicipline, even under stress and in emotionally difficult situations, that matters most in poker."

I believe that dicipline is intellegence. Talk to some intellegent people, and I bet you will find they are extremely diciplined, and most likely have the potential to be a good poker player.