OK, here's a wild thought for you all...
Watch the very best golfers. Yes, they practice night and day, and they are wonderfully skilled athletes. But let's face it, many times the fact that the ball actually goes in the hole (as they intended) is practically miraculous. Some people, the champions, can do it with an astonishing degree of success. Recently, at the British Open, Tiger Woods dropped the ball in the cup
when he couldn't even see it. ("Did it go in?" he asked his caddy. "It went in," the caddy said.) If you do it consistently enough, it's not luck. But to ascribe this degree of success entirely to physical skill, no matter how rarified, also seems nuts.
What if the very best ball-players also possess some degree of psychokinetic ability?
Now let's consider poker. Again, the difference between the average good player and the top players is insane. Yes, they have countless years of experience, superior people-reading skills, terrific math ability, and sometimes even photographic memories. Is that enough to account for their success? Sometimes I wonder...
What if the very best poker players also possess some degree of telepathic or precognitive ability?
Sometimes I just KNOW that the next card will make my straight. I actually did an experiment where I logged my hunches before playing them ~ or not ~ and then charted the results. I played a hundred hands. (OK, clearly not a statistically significant sample, but it's a start.) In cases where the outcome was determinable, my hunches were 75% accurate. What if your hunches (comprised of whatever combo of experience, subconscious calculation, intuition and ESP) were, say, consistently 85% accurate, and you learned to trust them?
What then? Well, you would win ~
a lot.
I'd love to see the top poker players tested for these abilities in a lab. Of course not one of them in his or her right mind would agree to such a thing. How could it possibly be in their interest to have a positive result?
[A note: last night I came in second out of more than 900 in a free online tournament. To get there I had to have a couple of runs of very good luck. I also had that lovely "in the zone" feeling for the last third of the match. But that's only the third or fourth time ~ out of many dozens of attempts ~ that I've made it to the final table in a large tourney. Now consider that there are people who can achieve that a quarter to a third of the time. I ask you: mere skill?]
Labels: speculation
