Face Value
October 4th, 2007I’ve been playing poker since I was little, though much less in recent years. To give you an idea of just HOW long, my parents divorced when I was nine, and the first day my dad left to go to his own apartment he handed my brother and I both a deck of cards. Thankfully he was back the next day (he would visit daily for many years), but the gift was symbolic.
Playing card games of all kinds is something of a tradition in our family, and something I think we’re pretty good at. And one of the things I learned early on about playing cards is that controlling your emotions and what’s on your face is a tricky thing. And in poker, it’s probably more important than even in other card games. The phrase “poker face” is so widely known that it’s often used in non-gaming contexts.
But putting on a poker face is not easy, of course. I learned how to do so in the trenches as a youngster. My dad used to play us kids double-or-nothing for our allowance, if we wanted to - five card draw if I remember correctly. The possibility of turning one dollar into two was pretty enticing for kid who didn’t have a lot of money. But therein lies the problem. By the time I ended up gambling with my dad (don’t tell the IRS!) I knew the mechanics of poker good enough to stand a chance. But when you start talking money, it’s easy to get emotional, especially if you haven’t even hit puberty yet.
Usually gambling like this is no big deal. I think most dads, if their kid lost, would laugh and give the money back, at least at first. Not my dad. If I lost that money, that meant a whole week without candy bars or comic books of any kind. Most people I describe this to think this was a cruel - but extremely effective - method for teaching kids how to play poker, and maybe it was. But the main issue is that it really put the pressure on me when I was playing. I wonder how easy it was to read my face at first. I must have been 100 percent transparent. (Have you ever seen a little kid trying to tell a lie? Yeah.) I eventually did get the idea, though.
But that’s not the end of the story. I always wondered if there was some more rigorous way to improve my poker face, and in later years, I stumbled on some more explicit advice for doing just that. While reading yet more Malcolm Gladwell articles (I’m a pretty unabashed fan, as you can see from the sidebar), I came across an interesting article on Paul Ekman - a psychological researcher - and his research on FACS (also on my sidebar).
FACS stands for the Facial Action Coding System, which is a in-depth system for classifying and dissecting visible facial expressions. Though I’d never heard of Paul Ekman or FACS before reading this article (like most people reading this, probably), I shared Gladwell’s fascination with the material.
For most people, that would be the end of it. Though Gladwell himself liked the article enough to incorporate it into his runaway bestseller, Blink, he seemed troubled by using FACS to “take” emotional information from others that wasn’t freely given. When I shared this article with a couple of friends, they said much the same thing. On top of that, as Gladwell notes, learning FACS is a somewhat time-consuming and odd endeavor. (Making funny faces as a kid doesn’t count as training, either.)
You might know by now that if I don’t mind reading something cover-to-cover like the Occupational Handbook (an immense reference book put out by the Department of Labor Statistics), such trivial things like free time and being social are easily set aside. I wanted to play a better game of poker, dammit.
And so me and a friend plunked down 275 bucks for a copy of the FACS training materials. The materials came in two parts: The FACS manual, and the Investigative Guide. (You can find a preview of both here) The FACS Manual breaks down the face into a bunch of Action Units (AUs) and tells you how to score them. The Investigative Guide, by contrast, is more applied, containing things like scoring practice, emotional interpretations of various facial configurations, and so forth. Both are lengthy technical documents borne out of decades of research and revision, which makes FACS an extremely versatile and practical tool. As Gladwell notes, FACS is used in everything from law enforcement (like in airports) to computer animation (Pixar/Dreamworks).
Just because FACS is useful, however, doesn’t make it easy to learn. I could easily make several posts describing me and my friend’s attempt to learn FACS (I wish we had taken pictures!), but I’ll leave that for a future post. Nevertheless, I feel fairly comfortable saying that I’ve mastered the material. I still have a lot to learn, but I feel like I at least have the system down pretty well. (And now I can also do useless stuff like flex my neck muscles and constrict my nose.)
Getting back to the topic at hand, though: based on what I know already, what exactly does FACS have to do with poker faces? It turns out that Ekman has written a relevant book on the subject called “Telling Lies” which incorporates FACS with his independent research on deceit. (It was an excellent read, I might add. It was the third book of his I had read, which surely speaks volumes about how much I value his writing.) His conclusions are encouraging for us poker players. Most people, Ekman says, do no better than chance at picking out liars, even when they know to watch for them in a video tape, and even though they knew that half were lying and half weren’t. Thus, unless you are going up against one of those rare superhuman lie detectors, most of the time other poker players are easily duped. (Was P.T. Barnum right?)
The problem is, even though most of us are poor lie detectors, many of us are also poor liars. Even worse, at the end of “Telling Lies” Ekman theorizes that, unlike lie detection, it’s hard to train people to be better liars. Either you have it or you don’t, and his decades of research and studies bear this out.
Most of the time I’d be inclined to agree with Ekman, but a poker game is a special situation. It removes a lot of the ethical issues behind lying; it’s OK to lie during a poker game (within the rules of the game, of course), as most people have come to expect such a thing. (Unless you’re one of Mr. Barnum’s “born every minute” types.) Taking out the ethical dilemma also mitigates a major source of lie detection, what Ekman calls “detection apprehension”. Detection apprehension is, simply, the fear of getting caught. When you don’t feel bad about lying, obviously that means you’re less apprehensive about doing so. (Having money on the line may bring that apprehension back real quick, though.) The other problem, however, is detection apprehension’s polar opposite, something called “duping delight”, where you actually enjoy deceiving someone else. Duping delight can also make you more emotional and thus make it harder to keep your poker face intact.
The biggest problem with lying, then, seems to be the emotional component. So the easiest way to get away with lying in poker is to stay calm, cool, and collected. I realize this is easier said than done. (Those of you who have gone “all-in” in a game of Texas Hold ‘Em know what I’m talking about here.) If you can do this, though, you have a big step up on the competition. It’s much easier to keep a poker face when you don’t have to hide some other emotion behind it. Your best friend in poker is your temper.
If this doesn’t work, though, you still have a few other options left. One is to hide your poker face with some other expression. While a blank poker face is the most useful and convincing, it’s also the hardest to maintain. Keeping a neutral face in pressure-filled situations is hard. (Ever seen a blooper reel? And those actors are professionals.) One slip and it will instantly register on your face. If you’re going to crack, better to put on some benign expression than to just lose it (and your money). The most obvious candidate is a smile. Ekman says, from his research, that the basic component of a smile (AU 12, or the flexing of the Zygomatic Major) is the most common way to mask a lie.
It’s also one of the most effective. (Why do you think politicians are always smiling?) From my hours of making faces at my friend and at a mirror - learning FACS is definitely an interesting experience - I noted that a smile is like an atom bomb dropped on your face. Any other expressions you were trying to make, especially on your lower face, are totally obscured. Very few other Action Units have this property. And it only takes one muscle to do (as you may have heard), so it’s easy to coordinate and do on the fly. Smiles are also positive in a very infectious way. As Ekman notes in “Telling Lies”, “It is hard not to reciprocate a smile; people do so even if the smile they reciprocate is one shown in a photograph.” If you can’t find a way to be impassive, try and find a way to work in a smile. (At least then they might not beat you up when you take their money.)
What if you can’t keep your cool, but you don’t want to smile either? You can always go for a mixed emotion or act crazy. Some of Doyle Brunson’s collaborators in his famed Super System and Super System II books suggest betting wildly and acting crazy for a hand or two to establish a loose image, so it might even work in your favor. Also, a mixed emotion is harder to read on your face than a simple one. You could try frowning, furrowing your brow, sucking in your lips or whatever you can think of that might confuse the look on your face. (Ladies, I would try to avoid that last one in co-ed games, as it might send out mixed signals of the kind you DON’T want.)
And what if none of that helps? At least then you’ll have learned a valuable lesson: you have a bad poker face. Plus, if you know what’s on your face, and you know your opponent is noticing, you can try to surprise them. In fact, if you need some practice, I’d be glad to take your money… ummm I mean play a game or two…
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October 5th, 2007 at 7:34 am
Telling Lies is fantastic! I read through it a couple times as part of a course I took on lying and deception, and it ended up being one of the few books I didn’t sell back to the university after I graduated. Really good stuff, and a lot of it also applied to the classes I took on non-verbal communication later on.
It’s not totally related, but if you’re at all interested in other parts of communication studies, I’d recommend picking up Robert Cialdini’s Influence, which is just about my favorite book in the entire field. Reading both Influence and Telling Lies will make you kind of a dangerous force when it comes to communicating with people unless you watch yourself, actually.
Feel free to recommend books anytime!
I’m glad you liked the book too. I felt it was really interesting since Ekman approached the whole thing from the face angle, especially with all those studies he’s done. Also, I very much appreciate your book recommendation. It sounds worth reading, I think after replying here I’ll go order it.
- Dave
October 7th, 2007 at 9:50 pm
Hey Dude,
Just got caught up on all of your posts. Doing great man! I think the blog covers your interests right on. You have a plan to make a Wolfram post soon?
I have found in poker games when I think someone is trying to read me I end up smiling. I usually do it when I am nervous anyway but I guess it kinda works out.
Bob, honestly I very much appreciate your reading the site. A Wolfram post is a good idea, but I’d have to find a social science angle on it. We’ll see.
I’m glad your experience in poker reflects what I wrote. I’d hate for what I write to be fake!
- Dave
November 8th, 2007 at 9:10 pm
[…] in passing), so I figured it was worth a shot. If I’m willing to do something crazy like learn the entire Facial Action Coding system so that I could read faces better, you know picking up a new keyboard layout is well within my […]
November 15th, 2007 at 11:01 pm
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