If you like what Joe is doing with RecPoker, join our free community today, and you can also meet the rest of the RECing Crew!
Welcome to my RECing Crew Page! I am here to help you in your poker journey.
Great! So why should I listen to you?
Good question! I am a board-certified clinical neuropsychologist and associate professor at Yale School of Medicine. I further have been grant supported and published scientific literature in the area of cognitive and emotional processing, among many psychological topics. My professional roles also requires me to explain complicated material to non-experts. The bottom line is that my day job is to be an expert in these areas and explain it to people. At the risk of seeming arrogant, I am pretty good at what I do.
Uh-huh. Doesn’t sound like Poker to me!
That’s fair. The good news is, I am also a poker player. But quite frankly, not a very good one (all of the other people on the prior page are MUCH better than I am). I am getting better. I have been studying and playing regularly since 2018 and have had some success across modalities (I even have a Hendon Mob listing!) My more recent entry into the poker streets means that I have recent (and in fact ongoing) experience with the same enjoyment and frustrations of many Recreational poker players.
How is this supposed to help ME “Dr. Modestly Successful Poker Playing Psychological Flim-Flam Guy”?
That is also fair (although… Flim-Flam? I think that is a tad harsh). Let me give you an example. If you have played more than a few hands of poker, you have had that moment when you have looked at your play and wondered silently (or maybe even out loud, startling your dog), “WHY DID I JUST DO THAT!” More likely than not, you have scratched it up to momentary weakness, or “Tilt,” or “the unseen hand of the poker gods.” While these are all possible reasons for your actions, the truth is likely much more complicated. The culprit? At the risk of seeming insulting, it is your brain.
Hey, what did you just say about my brain?!?
Before you leave in a huff, what this actually means it is not YOUR brain alone, but rather HUMAN brains that are the problem. In large part our brains have a massive task, and as they evolved they had to develop cognitive processing “errors” and emotional responses to simplify the complexity of the universe allowing you to do even simple tasks, such as make a cup of coffee in the morning (Think of your Brain as the Genie from Aladdin… “Phenomenal Cosmic Power!..Itty Bitty Living Space”). The issues that are inherent to how your brain process information drive your actions on the poker felt, whether you like it or not. Is your defense to turn your brain off? Not advisable. (The consequences of that action are…grave). Instead, you need to understand how your brain processes information and use that knowledge to reduce your own mistakes (and recognize when your opponents are making those mistakes).
My primary goal as a RECing Crew Member is to help distill down the available scientific literature on cognitive and emotional processing and provide accessible discussions of those complex topics to recreational players. I also hope to provide reviews of some of the more popular sources of “Mindset” advice to help you make correct choices about what is good. More succinctly, there is simply a lot of crap out there. I believe my involvement in RecPoker will help you understand that what we tell ourselves are the reasons for our actions are different from what cognitive science has told us those reasons actually are. Hopefully, this will help you use this information to provide significantly greater clarity to your poker game. But beware, once you have your eyes opened to this view of the world, you can never be put back into the Matrix…