The power of suggestion

	Sometimes it’s good to stay quiet, sometimes it’s good to put your oar in

Before you read this article quickly run through the following hypothetical hand in your mind and decide whether you should obviously fold, call or raise. It’s not that important how you play it, as you’ll find out later – it’s just for fun.

You’re in the small blind with A-5 suited and everyone folds before you. The big blind, a solid player who you respect, calls your standard raise. We assume similar-sized stacks. The flop is A-4-5 rainbow – a very pleasant top two-pair. You check. Your opponent also checks. The turn is a Six, bringing the obvious danger of various straights (and a flush draw) so you figure it’s time to get some chips in and see where you stand, betting half the pot. Your opponent flat-calls. The river is a Seven, completing even more straights and bringing the possibility of a flush – but what’s he got? You bet half the pot again and your opponent promptly re-raises you half his stack. Once you’ve decided what you should do, make a quick mental note of it – then feel free to forget about this bit and enjoy the rest of the article.

Are you sitting comfortably? You’ll need to be because your fundamental belief about poker is about to be shattered into a million glittering pieces before your very eyes – and you will gasp at the beauty of it. You see, this is how you can make any player, even a professional, fold the stone-cold nuts.

Yup, you read that right. This is a journey through the most incredible hand of poker that has ever graced God’s green baize. This goes way beyond cards. This is utterly magical.

You should be either very sceptical or vaguely terrified by now, because the two ways to win a hand of poker are traditionally set in stone (you either have the best hand or make your opponent believe you do) and neither applies if your opponent’s hand cannot actually be beaten. You can’t bluff the nuts, as they say. Guess what? Grab a chip and bite down hard because, oh-my-sweet- Lord, you can.

Speechless

This may all seem a bit confusing, so let’s go back a few years – to 1901, in fact – the year a certain Milton Hyland Erickson was born. At 17, a near-fatal case of polio left the young American paralysed and unable to speak for long periods of his adolescence. (The disease would also strike him down again as an adult.) While imprisoned in his own rigid body, Erickson found himself paying more attention to the minutiae of how people communicated with each other. His eyes and ears, at least, still functioned.

And how he used them. Before long, Milton was a consummate master at recognising the tiny, fleeting signals from body language, tones of voice and facial expressions that a certain gaming community likes to call ‘tells’. These self-taught skills became so well-honed that Erickson made them his profession for nearly 60 years and, after his death in 1980, resulted in him being regarded as a pioneering genius in his field. He would have made a formidable poker player.

Ah, yes… would have. Milton H Erickson didn’t play cards – or at least he isn’t famous for it. He used his skills to help others by other means than taking all their cash over a poker table; Erickson was a therapist. To his many adherents and admirers, he was the therapist – the discoverer and inventor of entirely new methods of helping troubled minds find their own solutions. His effectiveness was legendary. Blending hidden suggestion, hypnosis and his uncanny ability to read people, Erickson always knew precisely the right thing to say, and exactly when and how to say it. Most patients required only a single visit – and many just a single sentence – to be cured of lifelong psychological problems.

A couple of examples will suffice to show Erickson’s brilliance. One was the case of a five year-old boy who sucked his thumb – not such a big deal, admittedly, but the point is that his parents had tried everything to get him to stop. Nothing had made any difference, including several other therapists. Enter Erickson, who quietly told the lad that his mum and dad didn’t know what they were talking about, that it was perfectly normal to suck your thumb, and what they didn’t realise was that all children naturally grow out of it during their sixth year. You can probably guess what happened next; a couple of months later (and before his sixth birthday) the boy proudly announced he no longer needed to suck his thumb and quit for good.

Another case, often cited in discussions about Erickson, is that of a 26-year-old man who couldn’t stop biting his fingernails down to the quick. The good doctor simply enquired as to which was the more satisfying: biting an already scraped-flat nail or one with something to actually get one’s teeth into? With the obvious reply secured, he then pointed out that the man was therefore denying himself the greatest pleasure from his habit. As he could get by with, say, nine well-bitten nails, he could easily let just one nail grow more than the others, perhaps reserving it for special occasions… Of course, he was able to let them all grow back from that day onwards. Milton Erickson got results.

Bombshell

However intriguing these cases are, they’re just demonstrations of what Erickson could do without using hypnosis. Two small bombshells are now imminent… As mentioned earlier, Erickson blended psychology with hypnotism and, although brilliant at the former, he was beyond belief at the latter. Get this: Erickson discovered how to hypnotise someone, within seconds, without the subject even realising. Have you seen how Derren Brown induces instantaneous trance in complete strangers? He’s using Erickson’s methods – expertly, to be fair – and the effects are absolutely genuine. And if you think that’s powerful stuff, then brace yourself for the next bomb blast: Erickson invented a way to hypnotise people with nothing more than a handshake! Think about that for a second. Hypnosis by handshake – and it really worked. No wonder they used to tie witches’ hands together before burning them.

Fish bait

So what are we suggesting here? That you should be trying to hypnotise all your opponents with weird, freemason-like greetings? No, of course not. Even professionals would struggle to manage that, but the power of improvised, on-the-spot suggestion cannot be underestimated. Witness Joe Hachem’s cruel (yet bloody hilarious) manipulation of our beloved HillyTheFish during this year’s WSOP. With a King on the board and a second in Hilly’s sweaty paws, Hachem was well behind and knew it. Had he stayed silent it’s possible Hilly would have called him down and won the hand, but instead Hachem turned the screw, ‘This hand has cost you 4000 when it should have cost you 400 – how much more is it going to cost you?’ That sentence made Hilly fold the winning hand.

Sometimes, opening your mouth is the last thing you should do. If your opponent is on the verge of making the wrong decision without your help, you certainly don’t want to put them off – and there’s always the danger that your opponent will simply see through your attempts to psyche them out and do the exact opposite of what you want.

Phil Hellmuth has talked about situations where his silence has made opponents call him (and lose), because they ‘knew’ he liked to blab when bluffing. Suggestion has to be subtle to be effective – not saying anything is about as subtle as it gets.

Okay, so you get the idea by now. Sometimes it’s good to stay quiet, sometimes it’s better to stick your oar in and mess with their minds. But is it not true that all the very best players tend to stay absolutely silent? Actually, no it isn’t. They stay silent when they think their opponent knows them too well, otherwise (Phil Ivey excepted) they talk and talk and badger and cajole. Mike ‘The Mouth’ Matusow is famous for being the loudest – and possibly the crudest. But they all do it.

It’s very common for players to ask what their opponent is holding (as if they’re going to be told), running through various hands and betting patterns looking for that one flinch that possibly betrays the truth. That is not suggestion. However, if the player doing the enquiring actually holds the nut hand, then you can see how such behaviour takes on a different aspect entirely. No longer is it a trawl for tells, it is now an unabashed attempt at influencing and, although not everyone can read an opponent, anyone can use suggestion. Can’t tell what they’re thinking? Not a problem – just tell them what to think instead. Next month, I’ll examine how Jamie Gold talked his way to the 2006 WSOP title, knocking out dozens of ingeniously-confused opponents en route, and show you how to drop in powerful suggestions at the poker table, using Erickson’s methods, without opponents realising.

Lack of information

Here’s something to whet your appetite until next month: Remember the hypothetical hand you read at the start of this article? The reason you were told to do it ‘quickly’ and ‘just for fun’ was to obscure the fact that you never had enough information to make a decision. If you missed that, you probably folded what could have been the nut flush. It’s merely a brief glimpse of how you can be manipulated, even in just a few lines of text, let alone by a professional poker player in a stressful situation.

Didn’t fall for it? Then I’ll tell you what happened to that ‘how to make a professional fold the stone cold nuts’. You see, the only reason for that promise was to induce an ‘expectancy set’ in your mind. It’s a form of induced hypnosis that forced you to read this article to the end without stopping once. Gotcha…