This is the fourth installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.
If TV shows and movies can start with a song, why not a column? I present to you ‘Sweet Dopamine’ (sing to the tune of ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’):
I’ve been playing all night and I’m down a lot
I’m taking part in every single pot
There’s something inside me that just won’t let me fold
The voice of reason says it’s time to go
But I keep pushing chips, I’m in the flow
I’m addicted and I don’t like my turkey cold
Woh, oh oh, sweet dopamine
Oooaah, aah aah aah, sweet love of mine.
My neurotransmitters are out of whack
Every single time that I lose my stack
I buy in again till I’m 1000bb deep
I call king-high, I shove bottom pair
I cold-5-bet-jam with complete air
I’m losing my mind while the rest of the world is asleep
Woh, oh oh, sweet dopamine
Oooaah, aah aah aah, sweet love of mine.
How can we quit?
How can we quit now?
How can we quit (x 2)
sweet dopamine.
When I first started playing poker seriously, my friends and family thought I had gotten addicted to gambling. After a while, seduced by a combination of my arguments and my results, the latter probably more persuasive than the former, they accepted that poker was, indeed, a game of skill. But this is not the whole truth.
All games and sports involve both skill and luck. In cricket, for example, it is understood that a batsman can get a bad decision or an unplayable ball but it’s okay because, as the cliché goes, it evens out in the long run. In poker, though, the role of luck is far greater than in any other sport. Indeed, the management of luck is practically the key skill in the game, and outcomes in the short run are massively dependent on chance. (The longer the horizon of time you set for your yourself, the more skill comes into play.) If you watch players at a poker table in action, it will be hard for you to immediately make out whether they are trying to master a deeply complex game for profit – or whether they’re addicted to gambling.
Gambling addiction is a huge problem across the world, and studies in the west estimate that up to 4% of the population could be ‘problem gamblers’. I don’t use the term ‘addiction’ in a colloquial sense, but a medical one. While the American Psychiatric Association used to classify pathological gambling as an ‘impulse-control disorder’, it changed its mind a year ago and reclassified it as an addiction. The reason for this is the realisation that, like addictions to drugs or alcohol or porn, gambling addiction has a biological basis.
When a gambling addict makes an action—presses a button on a slot machine, pulls a lever, places a bet – the process that takes place in his brain is pretty much the same as in that of a cocaine addict getting a hit. There is a spurt of dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure that has been described as ‘the master molecule of addiction’. As time goes by, there is less and less dopamine released by the brain in response to the action or the hit, so we need more of it. More cocaine, more gambling, in a circle that never ends.
(I am simplifying it a bit. There is a lot more to dopamine, which has been called ‘the Kim Kardashian of molecules’, than addiction; and the biological processes behind addiction are most complex than just spurts of dopamine. Scientific American recently said that ‘pathological gamblers and drug addicts share many of the same genetic predispositions for impulsivity and reward seeking’, and that ‘gambling and drugs change the brain in similar ways’. )
Now, here’s the thing: every time we sit down to play poker, no matter how skillful we might be, and how scientifically we approach the game, we are also experiencing those rushes of dopamine in the brain. And in our weaker moments, we are prone to behaving like addicts: playing longer than we should, playing too many hands, craving action, and so on. Sometimes we rationalise this behaviour. (‘I called because he was polarised there’ is my favourite excuse.) Sometimes we know we’re doing something wrong but just can’t help ourselves.
Ever since humankind has existed, our biggest battle has been against our own selves, with our rational self fighting to take control of our primitive self. We are a collage of often contradictory instincts and impulses, some encoded in our genes, some mandated by whatever chemical processes happen to be taking place inside of us. So here’s the most important lesson I have learnt at the poker table: to be successful at this game, you don’t just have to beat others, you have to master your own self.
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Previously on Range Rover: