Thoughts on “more/less likely” phrasing in poker tells content, and on unexamined blind spots

For a long time, I’ve been doing a bad job phrasing a very basic and integral poker tells concept. For a long time, I sometimes have used the shorthand phrasing “more likely” or “less likely” to refer to how behavior might affect the likelihood of a player having a strong hand or a bluff, and this bad phrasing on my part has led to unnecessary ambiguity and confusion on part of readers/viewers. And I think this blind spot on my part is an interesting example of how people can have unexamined and intellectually weak blind spots that they can go for a long time not being aware of.

For an example of what I’m talking about, my books/videos will sometimes say something like, “This behavior makes it more likely this player has a strong hand.” This is shorthand for a more complete phrasing that I also use that goes, “This behavior makes it more likely than usual that this player has a strong hand,” which is more what I’m trying to say. To rephrase it again, what I’m trying to say is: “This behavior increases the likelihood this player has a strong hand.”

The “more likely” phrasing on its own is ambiguous and can lead to an interpretation that I mean simply “A strong hand is more likely than a weak hand.” But this is not what I mean at all. For one example of how this is a bad phrasing: there are often spots where a value-bet is fundamentally more likely than a bluff (as is the case with most significant bets), so if it was interpreted as simply “a value-bet is more likely than a bluff,” there wouldn’t be any value in the sentence; it would be redundant and meaningless. In my defense, I do often use the phrase ‘more/less likely than usual’, which I think is clear enough, but then I will switch sometimes to just saying ‘more/less likely’ without the ‘than usual’ qualifier, which leads to ambiguity.

This came to my attention recently because pro player Daryl Jace had read my book Exploiting Poker Tells and was understandably confused about my use of that phrasing, and I was explaining the way I meant it to be interpreted. Then I sent out an email to my email list explaining my use of the ‘more/less likely’ phrasing, and I received several emails from people saying essentially, “Why don’t you just say ‘x increases the likelihood of y’?” Then it was immediately apparent to me that that was of course the right answer and I felt pretty dumb that I’d been using such a bad phrasing for so long.

This was kind of an interesting blind spot for me. I have long known the ‘more/less likely’ phrasing was an ambiguous/subpar one, but I kept using it because I was under the impression the surrounding work made the phrasing clear enough, and because I thought there wasn’t a quick, easy way to communicate the same idea, when in reality the solution was quite simple with a few moments thought. I’d been using the ‘more/less likely’ phrasing for so long that I think I assumed I’d already put in the work long ago in thinking about the phrasing, when in reality I apparently hadn’t put in much thought at all. It’s interesting because it shows how we can have unexamined, blind, intellectually-weak spots where we assume we’ve done the intellectual work behind something, only to be shown that no, there wasn’t much intelligence behind the decision-making process.

I do make corrections to my books occasionally, and I plan on correcting this phrasing in, at the very least, the Exploiting Poker Tells book, and I plan to add a note about this to an introductory video to my video series.