Social Contagion and Why I Now Never Miss The WSOP Main Event
Social Contagion
In 1958, Disney released a wildlife documentary ‘White Wilderness’ which depicted the adventures of a group of lemmings scuttling about in the Arctic snow. In the film’s most memorable scene, a large number of the lemmings, seemingly spurred on by social pressure to follow the leader, walk off the edge of a cliff into the Arctic Ocean, where, according to the narrator, they eventually died.
In 2015, some researchers in Sweden published a paper on clapping, concluding that applause is a ‘social contagion’ and that the length of an ovation is influenced less by what is being observed or heard and more by how particular members of the crowd behave. The scientists found that it takes just one or two people to put their hands together for a ripple of applause to spread and that these claps spark a chain reaction, where, spurred on by the noise, other audience members join in.
Lead author Dr. Richard Mann concluded that there is a “social pressure to start clapping, but once you’ve started there’s an equally strong social pressure not to stop, until someone initiates that stopping.”
There are many other aspects to our lives which are interpreted by anthropologists as social contagions. Yawning is one, though there is no ultimate agreement on its function. Laughter is another, the main purpose of which, it is believed, evolved out of alerting others in the social group to danger by a warning cry. If you have a warning cry, you also need another signal to effectively ‘cancel that cry’ when the animal realizes that there is no real threat to the social group.
Laughter evolved out of that second signal – the false alarm signal. In the wild, echoing the laughter of others was functional because it amplified the signal and dispersed it to the entire social group, spread out over a considerable area. Hence the socially infectious quality of laughter and why many find themselves sheepishly laughing along with sitcom laughter tracks.
Sump Pit
Human beings are hot-wired to mimic. Consider how babies engage in mirroring behavior. Language, too, is socially contagious. I swear more and do so more creatively after watching an episode of ‘The Thick Of It” and, for a brief period in the Summer of 1997, I found a way to wedge the word ‘obviously’ into every sentence.
Clearly, mimicry was an important quality for our species to possess. Creatures that were good at reading changes in the behavior of others must have had a major advantage. If you react to your neighbour’s reaction to a rustle in the bushes rather than wait to hear the rustle yourself, you speed up the process of fleeing from a potential predator. This is all part of our makeup that has been genetically selected as per ‘survival of the fittest’.
Interesting as this all may be, you might be wondering what it has got to do with poker? Well, you see, every year until 2018, I used to get asked ‘Why aren’t you going to Vegas?’ and every year I responded ‘Why are you going to Vegas?’ I just never understood the appeal of flying for an entire day to be stuck in an over-wrought effigy of all that is wrong with humanity, a strip of desert half-way across the world with 122 casinos, utterly devoid of culture; the vulgar and seedy sump pit of America.
The Biggest Festival Of Wealth Redistribution
The way I saw it, every year, the vast majority of the world’s elite poker community (as well as huge numbers of enthusiastic recreational players) would descend on Vegas for the annual punting of bankrolls. Reckless shots would be taken by players who usually espoused the virtues of solid bankroll management. In the end, a bunch of players would walk away with a tidy profit, a few of them would become millionaires but the vast majority would do their proverbial bollocks during the biggest festival of wealth redistribution on the poker calendar.
The only explanation, as I saw it, was that going to the WSOP each year was a ‘monkey-see monkey-do’ social contagion; that much like yawning, laughing, language and clapping, a poker player’s annual pilgrimage to Sin City represented an evolutionary hangover that plausibly accounted for why the human mind worked off the principle that 100,000 poker playing lemmings cannot be wrong.
However, my attitude completely changed in 2018. Well it actually changed in November 2017 when my hand was forced by Unibet Poker, with whom I had recently signed as a brand ambassador. They announced that they were holding an event in the Wynn which I was expected to attend. I must admit that while I looked forward to the festival, when it came to Las Vegas itself, my expectations were very low. So you can imagine my surprise when I really enjoyed my first visit to Las Vegas.
A Happy-Hunting Ground
I embraced the insanity. I forgave the grubbiness. I ate Mexican food overlooking the Bellagio fountain. I drank in dive bars. I visited the Neon Boneyard. I walked up and down Fremont Street and The Strip. As soon as you realize that naff is the point, you enjoy what the city has to offer both ironically and unironically. It also didn’t hurt that the Wynn was opulent.
With a reformed attitude, I returned to Vegas for the WSOP seven months later, and I have gone back six times since, for the WSOP Main event and for the WPT Poker Championships. Rooming with my Chip Race podcast co-host Dara O’Kearney is always a pleasure (although running with him in the desert heat is a little less so). We both go into grind mode, two Irishmen in a desolate place with a dubious raison d’etre, playing and railing each other’s deep runs.
I feel fortunate that most of my trips to Las Vegas have been lucrative. I have made the top 3% of the Main Event twice in four attempts. Last December I cashed the WPT World Championship. I have also made a few deep runs in side events. In fact, my only losing trip came in 2019 and overall it has proved to be a very happy hunting ground.
I Grew To Love Vegas
The Pulitzer Prize winning journalist J. R. Moehringer once said “while I was busy hating Vegas, and hiding from Vegas, a funny thing happened. I grew to love Vegas.” I think that’s sort of what happened to me. I always knew that these variance-fests were oozing with value but I fixated on the variance part. Now I focus on the ooze.
It turns out that those lemmings depicted in that famous documentary didn’t commit suicide. A 1983 investigation by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation actually found that the filmmakers pushed the poor lemmings off the cliff, using editing and tight camera angles to suggest that they were purposefully ending their lives.
Next Thursday, I head over to play Day 1D of the Main, always the ooziest of the lot, no matter what alternative theories are floating around. Will I manage another deep run? That part is in the lap of the Poker Gods but what I do know is my conversion from sceptic to disciple is complete. If making the trip us a form of social contagion then I have not just contracted the pathogen but, with articles such as this, I am also a super-spreader.
