Is AI Useful but Dangerous for Poker Players?

How AI Usage Affects the Brain: Scientific Conclusions from July 2025

Between October and December 2024, Dr. Michael Gerlich from SBS Swiss Business School, who specializes in research on AI’s influence on people, conducted a study on AI tools’ impact on cognitive offloading and critical thinking.
His findings were worrisome:

• The study revealed a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities, mediated by increased cognitive offloading.
• Younger participants exhibited higher dependence on AI tools and lower critical thinking scores compared to older participants.
• Higher educational attainment was associated with better critical thinking skills, regardless of AI usage.

He also found that high dependence on AI tools for routine tasks can lead to a decline in all associated cognitive abilities because people don’t have the opportunity to develop and practice them. In the future, this can make them less functional on their own and even more dependent on AI.
With these discoveries in mind, Gerlich stressed the importance of targeted critical thinking training for every AI user as one of the most effective ways to reduce the negative impact of AI on cognitive functioning in an AI-driven world.

A more recent MIT study, “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt When Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Tasks,” conducted in the first half of 2025, added further insights using electroencephalograms on participants:

• Brain-only and Brain-to-AI participants — those who started with using only their brains and then performed tasks with AI help — exhibited the strongest, most distributed networks of connectivity and higher cognitive activity than AI-only users. They also demonstrated higher memory recall, deeper topic understanding, and a stronger sense of ownership of their essays.
• AI-only participants showed low connectivity, cognitive activity, and memory recall, struggling even to accurately quote their own work. They also underperformed at all levels — neural, linguistic, and behavioral.
• Interestingly, Search Engine users were very similar, or even identical, to Brain-only and Brain-to-AI participants in their results, except for showing a more moderate level of engagement.
• However, the Brain-only group was the only one with consistently stronger results and better scores throughout the four months of the study.

How Poker Players Can Use AI Tools Without Harming Their Brain

The simplest choice is to stop using AI tools altogether. However, avoiding AI can backfire and cost you in the coming decades, as others may use it to study more efficiently.
So, you don’t have to abstain from using AI — just apply some rules of “brain hygiene.”

❌ Don’t Depend on AI When Analyzing Your Opponents

While machines can process large amounts of data much faster than humans, they can’t perform many related tasks, for example:

• Accurately predicting players’ behavior, considering human and environmental factors, or illogical decisions stemming from inexperience.
• Implementing conclusions in real time with adjustments based on live tells and reads.
• Estimating tilt, anger, enjoyment, relaxation, or general mental state to adjust strategy.

AI tools also can’t play for you, tilt opponents (because they can’t know what tilts specific individuals), or inject their calculations into your brain for instant in-game decision-making.
Moreover, relying on AI can make you unable to analyze your opponents during the game without external help. It can lead to cognitive overload, poor decisions caused by stress, and even tilt from feeling mentally unprepared.

✅ Use AI Tools for Learning Only After You’ve Tried Other Methods

As tempting as solving poker with AI may be, you can’t train your brain to function at the poker table if all your insights and decisions come from someone — or something — else. Your brain needs to practice critical thinking, analysis, and conclusion-making during study to be prepared for performance at the table.

And you won’t develop a proper poker mindset if you shift the responsibility for learning entirely to AI.
That said, you can still use AI in two productive ways: to check your conclusions and to help you find learning strategies. But remember — in the 2020s, AI tools are deeply flawed, especially when it comes to highly specialized topics like poker.

❌ Don’t Trust AI Tools Blindly

AI learns from sources of questionable quality and offers information with varying degrees of accuracy. Because of that, it frequently gives completely false conclusions as if they were facts. So, even if you’re 99% sure that what AI tells you about poker is true, respect the remaining 1% of doubt and cross-check the information with knowledgeable people or reputable human-made resources.