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Can Nintendo Make You Better at Poker?

I know about 98% of the people reading this article are praying for a positive answer to the title question. There’s a natural crossover between poker players and video game players, especially in the online poker player community.

Even if were just posing the question as a sweeping, general one, the answer would probably be yes. There’s an increasing amount of evidence that, contrary to the beliefs of older generations, video game play is a highly stimulating cognitive workout that teaches the brain about logic, compartmentalization, problem solving under pressure, along with a plethora of other useful intellectual tools. Don’t believe me? Writer Stephen Johnson made that the central thesis of his interesting 2005 book Everything Bad is Good For You, and he articulates a defense for the notion far beyond what I could even begin to attempt in this brief article.

As it turns out, I’m actually talking about a specific game – hence the choice of ‘Nintendo’ for the title question as opposed to ‘Playstation’ or just a generic ‘Video Games.’ The game in question is called Brain Age, published for the Nintendo DS system, and as the title implies, intellectual stimulation isn’t a mere byproduct of this game – it’s the entire purpose.

Brain Age is actually a series of mini-games packed into one; think Mario Party for the Mensa set. Challenges range from basic (perform a series of simple calculations as quickly and correctly as possible) to complex (complete a visual maze which asks you to connect letters with their corresponding numeric value). All of the games take place in the larger context of your long-term training – the game records your daily performance, graphs your progress or regression over time, and assigns you a ‘Brain Age’ based on your results.

The premise of the game, loosely, is that your mind is a muscle like any other. Much in the same way that you’d do lighter weights and more repetitions if you wanted toned arms instead of bulging biceps, Brain Age assumes that an extended series of slightly challenging problems will do more to improve your overall mental agility than a small set of jarringly complex problems. The jury’s still out on whether or not the games actually make you ’smarter’ [largely because the jury is still out on what it means to be smarter in the first place], but we’re not really concerned with that question anyhow. Our concern is whether or not this game will help your game – more specifically, if you’ll get positive return at the table on the $160 or so a DS system and the game cartridge will cost you.

I’m voting yes, and here’s the justification drilldown:

General justifications
1. I already bought it, so if I vote no, I’ll feel like a jackass. Sarcasm aside, I’ve been working with it for a week, and I do feel a difference. I’ll get to the nature and quality of that difference in following items.

2. There’s a bit of reasonable evidence that the premise of the game is solid – that solving simple problems in rapid succession generates greater activity in your prefrontal cortex, and that increased stimulation of said prefrontal cortex improves your short term memory and processing speed.

3. It’s a series of addictive mini-games that will give you something to do when you don’t feel like playing poker.

4. it comes with a few hundred Sudoku puzzles and an awesome interface for said puzzles. If you’ve been doing Sudoku on paper, you’ll want to buy this game right about … now.

Poker-specific justifications
1. It’s helpful to have an activity that can ‘wake up’ your brain before sessions or after a break in between sessions. Brain Age is great for that.

2. The main criticism of the game is that it doesn’t make you smarter so much as it trains you to get better at the specific games it offers. That may be true, but it doesn’t matter. Here’s a for instance: The basic math calculations are the perfect pot odds prep for your brain – doing 20 or a 100 simple problems is a close kissing cousin to counting how many bets go into a pot, what stacks are still in play, what a bet represents as a percentage of pots and what odds a call is getting.

3. Several of the games are great training for the instant focus you need to be able to summon in critical hands [especially in tournament or no limit]. Even great players take a few hands off now and again – the trick is to be able to snap right back into ‘A’ game when a hand comes up. Several of the games in Brain Age require just that – intense focus summoned on demand. For example, the ‘High-to-Low’ game starts by presenting a series of numbers in boxes on the left screen [the Nintendo DS has two screens]. After a few seconds, the left screen goes blank and the same boxes appear on the right screen – without the numbers. Your task is to select the boxes in ascending order – a great ‘burst’ recall exercise.

4. The memorization-based games promote a type of compartmentalized structuring of information that is quite useful for poker, especially in live games where you don’t have the benefit of a hand database or on-screen notes function. One game offers you a list of forty or so words and allows 2 minutes for you to memorize as many as possible, and then three minutes for your to write as many as you can remember.

5. Sudoku puzzles [and some of the training games, to a lesser extent] are logic puzzles that offer great opportunities for sharpening your ability to rationally reduce a set of possible explanations to a manageable subset of probable explanations. As far as I know, that’s the fundamental challenge of poker in a nutshell – reducing the possible to the probable.

Good players work on their game at the table, while great players keep working long after they’ve left the table. Finding non-poker activities that can contribute directly to your card skills is critical for serious players – and Brain Age provides an opportunity to accomplish that while having a little fun to boot.

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