经济学人下载:怎样成为扑克牌高手 诀窍之一

Science and technology
科学技术

How to win at poker
怎样成为扑克牌高手

A handy tip
诀窍之一

Keeping a straight face is not enough
喜怒不形于色？不太够

A POKER face. It is the expressionless gaze that gives nothing away.
所谓摆一张扑克脸，就是指那种不漏声色面无表情的凝视。

To win at poker, the face must be mastered, and master it is what the best players try their best to do.
在扑克游戏中要想成为赢家，面部表情务必要控制得滴水不漏。赌圣们也正是这么做的。

But a study just published in Psychological Science by Michael Slepian of Stanford University and his colleagues suggests that even people with the best poker faces give the game away.
不过，近期斯坦福大学迈克尔·斯莱皮恩与其同事在《心理科学》上发表了一份研究报告，即使一个人面容表情控制得再完美，也会泄露心机。

They do so, however, not with their heads but with their hands.
而出卖他们心机的并不是那张脸，而是作为赌徒的一双手。

Mr Slepian made his discovery when he showed 78 undergraduate volunteers video clips of players placing bets at the 2009 World Series of Poker.
斯皮莱恩做了一项实验：他为78名志愿参与实验的大志愿者学生播放2009年世界职业扑克大赛选手下注时候的录像片段。

The clips were 1.6 seconds long, on average, and featured different parts of the players' anatomies.
录像每段平均1.6秒，镜头截取了选手不同的身体部位。

Some showed everything visible from the table up: chest, arms and head. Some showed just the face.
从桌子上方看。第一种，志愿者学生能看到他们露在桌子上方的全部身形：胸部、上肢和头部；第二种，志愿者学生能看到上肢和双手；

And some showed only the arms and hands.
第三种，志愿者学生只能看到他们的脸。

Each volunteer watched only one of the three types of video, but was shown several examples.
志愿者学生只会看到以上三种其中之一，不过会看到不同选手的录像片段。

After each viewing, volunteers were asked to rate the quality of the player's hand on a seven-point scale.
每观看完一段录像，志愿者学生会给录像中选手手牌评分。

Then, when they had finished watching all the clips, they were asked to rate their own experience with poker on a similar scale.
之后观看完全部的录像，他们还会给自己的扑克水平打分。

Mr Slepian found that students were poor at judging the quality of a player's hand when shown just that player's face.
斯莱皮恩发现，如果只看录像中选手的面部表情，志愿者学生在给选手手牌打分时会显得捉襟见肘。

Indeed, he noticed a negative correlation of 0.07. This is not huge.
而他也确实从中得出一个0.07的负相关。数值并不大。

But it meant there was a statistically significant tendency that the better a volunteer believed the hand to be, the worse it actually was.
但是，在数据上的确显示了很明显的趋向：如果仅从面部判断，志愿者学生认为哪个人手牌好，那么实际上这个人手牌很差。

When a player's whole posture was considered, this misapprehension went away: if a volunteer could see everything about a player from the table up there was no correlation between his judgments of a hand's value and its actual value.
而选手的身姿全部纳入观察视线中时，这一负相关便会消失不见。如果志愿者学生可以观察到选手在桌面以上所有身形时，那么学生通过赌徒身形对手牌好坏的判断和手牌实际好坏之间不存在相关关系了。而

When a volunteer could see only arms and hands, however, Mr Slepian found a positive correlation, of 0.07, between his guesses and reality.
总结那些只能看到上肢和双手志愿者学生所观察的数据时，斯皮莱恩发现猜测与实际之间的关系呈现出0.07的正相关。

To confirm his discovery, Mr Slepian re-ran the experiment with a different set of clips.
为减小实验结果的误差，斯皮莱恩用不同的一套录像片段重新做了一次实验。

The results were the same.
结果并无二致。

Students, even those who were poker novices, could judge the quality of a professional poker player's cards from the behaviour of his hands.
即使是那些不会玩牌的志愿者学生也能够从一位职业扑克玩家的手部动作判断出他手牌的好坏。

The next question was, how?
那么，他们是怎样判断的呢？

Mr Slepian knew from previous studies by other people that anxiety has a tendency to disrupt smooth body movements, and he suspected this might be the explanation.
斯皮莱恩从之前其他人的研究中得知，人的焦虑情绪会影响肢体动作施展的连贯性，他认为这很可能就能作为自己实验结果的解释。

To find out, he showed 40 new volunteers the clips he had used in the previous experiment.
为了证实这一猜测，他给40名新的志愿者学生播放了之前用过的那套录像资料。

Rather than asking them to judge the quality of a player's cards, however, he asked them to rate either that player's confidence or how smoothly the player pushed his chips into the middle of the table.
之后不再问他们选手手牌好坏，而是让其判断选手是否自信，或者在选手将筹码向桌子中间推的过程中，动作够不够流畅。

He found that when students rated players as being confident or having hands that moved smoothly, the cards they held were likely to be good.
斯皮莱恩发现，只要是志愿者学生认为选手是自信的或者选手在向前推筹码时动作一气呵成，那么他们的手牌就会很不错。

There was a positive correlation of 0.15 when the students considered confidence and of 0.29 when they looked for smooth movement, so they were actually more capable of determining hand quality from these variables than when asked to estimate it directly. 所以在判断选手手牌好坏时，相对于直接估量，志愿者学生可以从这些变量中更好地做出判断。
志愿者学生认为自信的选手，猜测与实际就是0.15的正相关；志愿者学生认为动作连贯舒展的选手，呈现出的是0.29的正相关。

The moral of the story for players, then, is don't look your opponent squarely in the eye if you want to know how good his cards are.
本文的寓意则在于，如果想知道对方手牌好坏，选手在比赛时不要只是直勾勾地盯着对方眼睛看。

The secret of his hand is in his hands.
秘诀在于他们的手上动作。