Ability to Change Your Mind: The Most Useful Skill for Success in Poker?

It’s Okay to be Wrong but Even Better to Admit You Are Wrong

CoinPoker ambassador Patrick Leonard has sparked a new round of discussion on the ability to change your mind on X/Twitter, sharing his findings after years of being active in the poker community:

“I think one of the most important skills you can have in poker is being really good at changing your mind.

Poker players spend so much time trying to be right.

We debate hands, defend our lines, argue about strategies and sometimes attach way too much of our ego to whether our original opinion was correct.

But I think the best players I’ve been around are almost the opposite.

They can passionately believe something on Monday, see better evidence on Tuesday and by Wednesday they’ve completely abandoned the idea.

No ego. No trying to justify why they were kind of right. No moving the goalposts.

Just “yeah, I was wrong.”

I think that’s an incredibly powerful skill.”

According to Patrick, the speed and frequency of change in poker inevitably renders some beliefs, if not incorrect, then outdated and in need of adjustment to new realities — but not all poker players recognize this and are willing to change:

“I’ve had strategies that I was absolutely convinced were good, probably taught them to other people with huge conviction, and then six months later realised I was completely wrong.

I don’t think that’s embarrassing. I actually think being able to do that is one of the reasons I’ve managed to keep improving.

The dangerous player isn’t the one who gets things wrong. Everybody gets things wrong.

The dangerous player is the one who needs to keep being right after the evidence has changed.

Your job isn’t to defend the player you were yesterday. Your job is to make the player you are tomorrow better.”

To work on your thinking flexibility, Patrick recommends taking the following path with each belief:

• Have conviction in what you believe
• Argue your side and try to prove
• Challenge other people’s ideas
• When somebody shows you something better — steal it to replace your old opinion

And remember the motto: “Being wrong for one day costs you nothing. Being too stubborn to change your mind can cost you years”.

Many poker players responded to padspoker‘s reasoning.

For example, Jon Shoreman extended his findings to people in general, stating:

“Not unique to poker players, this is a general human trait. Often seen in trading, someone takes a long position and the market moves against them and the person doesn’t want to believe they are wrong, and rather than close the position down and accept their loss, they double down their long.”

Jeremy Ausmus supported Patrick’s line of thinking, adding:

“A lot of this has to do with being open minded in the first place. If you lack that you may not consider the other options at all, especially after you’ve made a decision.”

Finally, Mike MacDonald participated in the discussion, sharing his recent insights on the topic:

“AI has really made this glaringly obvious to me. In poker you want to make the right decision, and we’ve collectively wasted so much time confusing “explaining a decision” or “rationalizing a decision” with actual decision making. 

Seeing how well AI articulates many of its wrong conclusions is a good reminder that just being able to explain something well has almost 0 to do with the actual quality of the decision you made.”

How Does Change of Mind Work?

According to some cognitive studies, people typically change their minds when the new facts make new information more compelling — and a shift in belief is necessary for work or personal adjustments.

However, in politics and other emotionally sensitive areas of life, it works differently even for smart and mentally stable people. In these areas people form opinions based on emotions, so to change, they require a powerful emotional stimulus that overrides the one on which their current belief is based or which fuels it.

Therefore, if poker is an emotionally charged field for you, you may find it difficult to change your mind on related issues — even if someone presents you with compelling, even irrefutable, evidence that you’re wrong.

Also, stubbornness, in this case, becomes a significant factor against the development of ability to change mind because it adds an additional challenge to changing someone’s thinking. A stubborn person must “discover” new information themselves in order to use it to change their mind, because facts brought to them won’t penetrate the wall of their stubbornness, even when armed with powerful emotions.

An important aspect of changing your mindset is the willingness to question your opinions, beliefs, and conclusions. While this is an essential part of developed critical thinking, it can also cause a significant decrease in self-confidence in people with sensitive minds and low self-confidence.

As a result, a person begins to question literally every conclusion they make — and often their thinking becomes fickle, that is, they jump between different versions, not gathering enough facts for each of them to “win” in favor of any one.

Guide to Changing Your Mind from Psychologists

Most psychologists recommend a similar set of actions for the healthy development of general mental flexibility. It’s especially worth following when you’ve made a mistake:

1. Start your self-analysis by choosing one recent mistake or difference of opinion. Take the most suitable situation to use for practice — where you know for sure that you made a mistake or couldn’t let yourself agree with a different point of view.
2. Remind yourself that your mistake was made or your belief was established based on what you knew at that moment. Often, a mistake occurs because some fact was missed, unknown, or misunderstood at the time the decision was made — and that’s okay.
3. Remind yourself that your beliefs come from you but they are not you. People often perceive things they’re confident in as part of their personality — and so changing them feels painful, due to the illusion of changing themselves. But changing your mind is as normal as changing your food preferences or hobbies. 
4. Practice curiosity. Instead of dismissing a different opinion or explanation based on your certainty, ask yourself: “Can I learn something new if I pay attention?” Then try to approach the situation as an object to be explored, not an adversary to be confronted.
5. Start connecting with people outside your bubble. Our environment sets and reinforces certain thought patterns that solidifies our beliefs. By stepping outside of it, you expose your brain to new, different information. This helps it simultaneously expand perceptions and learn to accept differences in views and opinions in a “safe” way via human connections.

If you find it difficult to feel like an individual without identifying with your beliefs, or if you react to mistakes and doubts in your views with strong emotions, resisting the very possibility of being wrong, seek help from a mental coach or therapist.