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Bicameral mentalities avoid human self-responsibility by seeking and obeying external decision makers. In poker, for example, bicameral tendencies leave players open to being controlled by any conscious individual acting as an external decision maker and authority. In addition, the single, biggest money-losing, mystical concept -- the belief in luck -- is rooted in the bicameral mentality. In fact, most gamblers rely on the phantom "authority" of luck to escape the only valid authority: their own rational consciousness.
Understanding bicameral tendencies in others can provide unbeatable advantages by knowing the external forces that control most people. That understanding enables one not only to predict the actions of others but to control their actions. A poker player, for example, can create unbeatable advantages by projecting any number of phantom "authorities" to which his opponents will obey, act, or react.
The principle of controlling the bicameral minds of others applies not only to poker but to all competitive situations involving two or more people. Poker, however, provides crisp, clear examples of using the bicameral mind to control people. More important, poker provides countless metaphors to which everyone can relate. Also, most poker players are gamblers. And gambling is a bicameral activity in which people abandon their own rational consciousness to phantom "authorities" such as feelings, luck, priests, and politicians.
Poker games exist because of the bicameral urge in most players to gamble. That urge resides in the desire to escape the responsibility for consistently making rational decisions needed to prosper by producing values for others. Gamblers try to escape (at least temporarily) that self-responsibility through an activity such as poker. And through their bicameral urges, gamblers can be controlled by others.
Even the best professional player can succumb to bicameral urges: By playing poker for a living, for example, he avoids involvement in a productive career that demands much more independent, rational thinking than poker. But, the good player can also use poker as a discipline to strengthen both his conscious integrating processes and his abilities to control others.
Through understanding those bicameral urges in others, a good player can generate unbeatable advantages. He creates those advantages by conjuring up external "authorities" for guiding his opponents into actions that benefit him. For example, an opponent is told to "open up" (bet more loosely) because good player X always bets aggressively in the same situation -- and good player X always ends up winning heavily. In that way, player X is set up as an external "authority" for misleading the opponent into making wrong moves based on facts bicamerally accepted out of context. Even greater advantages are gained by realizing that an opponent is bicamerally using rules, information, and odds gleaned from "authorities" such as authors of noncognitive poker books.
Bicameral tendencies can also be exploited through subtle maneuvers. For example, mumbling very quietly (almost subaudibly) words that will influence or trigger reactions in opponents who subconsciously hear those "voices". To those opponents, the subconscious voice automatically acts as an external "authority" to be followed. As another example, a player who is hesitant about attending a game after several losing sessions is fed whatever out-of-context facts or spurious "truth" he wants to hear such as, "The worst thing a player can do is quit just as his losing streak is about to end. That's when the odds are the greatest for shifting from a bad-luck streak to a good-luck streak. Managing luck streaks is the whole idea of winning. All winners know that." With such specious "truths" and non sequiturs, the good player establishes himself as an external "authority" in controlling his opponents.
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