OT: Psychopaths the best poker players?

I read this article last week--- unsure if any of you read it, but I thought that it was interesting and one could substitute "poker player" for "financial trader" very easily.

Psychopaths could be best financial traders

[lorinda]

This would not surprise me in the slightest, although I suspect their wording is deliberately provocative in the article.

Lori

[good2cu]

Psychopaths could be easily replaced, with "people who don't let their emotions control their actions" or "people who don't go on tilt" or "people who aren't easily fooled by randomness". And these people, do make the best poker players and traders in the long run. This is article is intresting, but misleading.

[bearly]

hi, i believe the academic work would show that the term should be 'sociopath'. there is no question in my mind that the best players i have ever played w/ (live) over a period of time were border-line sociopaths. i'm not working off the top of my head here. i have had many conversations w/ a couple of the doctors who worked on the (probably) definitive work on sociopathy--the dr. ziskin study. prof emer. at usc, and a chief of staff (former, he recently passed away) at cedar-sinai. h

[Rduke55]

[ QUOTE ]
hi, i believe the academic work would show that the term should be 'sociopath'. there is no question in my mind that the best players i have ever played w/ (live) over a period of time were border-line sociopaths. i'm not working off the top of my head here. i have had many conversations w/ a couple of the doctors who worked on the (probably) definitive work on sociopathy--the dr. ziskin study. prof emer. at usc, and a chief of staff (former, he recently passed away) at cedar-sinai. h

[/ QUOTE ]

Why do you think so?
The DSM-IV basically lumps these two together under antisocial personality disorders.
Although typically it's thought that sociopaths are less intelligent than psychopaths which would make it seem like these guys are psychopaths.

[Huckle]

I don't really think it's just because they have some sort of mental disorder, I think it's more because they don't think about the value of money. This means that as long as you've played enough poker to do it by routine, or just play well within your bankroll, you should be able to be just as good, or better.

[Degen]

psy·cho·path (sk-pth) n.

A person with an antisocial personality disorder, manifested in aggressive, perverted, criminal, or amoral behavior without empathy or remorse.


lol

Thats me!

[bearly]

the only way i can answer you is to repeat the answers to the various questions i have asked : sociopaths seem to have less propensity for quick bursts of violent behavior. they can be charming in a way many cases involving psychopathy cannot. the data collected involved thousands of people (mostly men) the vast majority recently released from prison, or on probation. the concensus of the drs. doing the clinical work was that sociopaths were a 'better bet' to carry out the 'work' that they do best w/out being disruptive. since the general word 'con' covers the whole range of 'jobs' they do best, lower and middle stakes poker (live games) would seem to be a good fit. as treating physicians, many of the drs. of the patients, after their series of interviews were over,took them to places like used car lots for the purposes of securing jobs. now the relationship between psychopaths and ultra high-stakes poker was never discussed in my conversations w/ the drs. i new who were among the interviewers. b

[eastbay]

It seems rather obvious that an emotional detachment is an asset to a high stakes gambler whether he be a poker player or a trader.

If this is an asset, it seems misleading to call this person anything-pathic, when "pathic" basically impies a dysfunction due to disease.

Unless, of course, this same emotional detachment is applied to other areas of the person's life that might cause them to be cruel or inhumane.

I hope that I have the first part of that but not the second!

eastbay

[PrayingMantis]

It's really difficult to understand from that short article how exactly the study was handled and what where the actual results, and also it's important to remember that as usual when such things are published they get out of proportion (if the result of a specific study like that was "opposite", you would never hear about it).

So it's possible that a person with some emotional disorder, be it a psychopath, sociopath, or whatever, could take some profitable risks that a "normal" person wouldn't be able to take, but still this is very different from saying that psycopaths could make the best traders.

But I think that there's something even more crucial, with regard to poker and this question, and especially with regard to high stakes poker. IMO, while some of the best players could very well suffer from some kind of anti-social problem, each and every one of them _must_ have a very high ability to feel empathy, that is, to be able to understand very well what his opponent/s feel at each and every moment, "to put himself in their shoes". That's the whole basis for what we call "a read".

A psycopath, as the term is usually used, is a person who cannot feel any kind of empathy. He _does not_ understand what an emotion is, it is something that is completely foreign to him. In a way, he is blind to emotions. Imagine a person who does not feel pain. Maybe he'll be able to "learn" what are external symptoms of pain, when others feel them (they say ouch, they scream, they have a certain expression, etc...), but he'll always be very very bad at really getting a good "feel" of it. It will be like learning a foreign and difficult language as an adult, if he'll ever be able to do it.

Such a person will be a mediocre poker player at best.