I admit that I watch way more YouTube videos than I should. The algorithm, of course, is meant to keep suggesting videos that grab my interest per my viewing history. So I was a bit surprised one day when YouTube kept recommending a bunch of poker videos to me, specifically Texas Hold’em, the most popular form of poker but a game I’ve never played. In Texas Hold’em, players receive a total of seven cards to make the best five-card hand possible, but the cards are dealt in stages. The players make a series of betting decisions as a hand unfolds. It is a strategy rich game because each player has private knowledge of their “hole” cards, knowledge of common public cards, and the uncertainty of cards not yet dealt. Psychologists embrace the game as a prime example of decision making under uncertainty (see Duke, 2019; Konnikova, 2015), I watched some of the videos, and they taught me a lesson about teaching that I wasn’t expecting. Brad Owen is a professional poker player who records his games and then narrates the videos with extensive, ongoing commentary about his reasoning, strategizing, and decision-making given the cards dealt and the play of his competitors. Basically, he is thinking aloud as we watch him play and either succeed or fail. The videos are meant to be instructional for novice players, but that is tangential to the insight they gave me about teaching.
