Poker Physiometrics Study

The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health states that stress is becoming the prevalent reason for worker disability. A 1992 UN report and the World Health Organization called job stress "The 20th Century Epidemic" and a "World Wide Epidemic", respectively. Given the mounting social costs of stress, the possibility of automatically identifying and monitoring stress levels for intervention purposes is compelling.

As a baseline study to determine if it is possible to correlate non-invasive physiology with a variety of important contextual measures such as stress, attention, and interest, a pilot study has been initiated to establish the correlation between stress and physiology. This study was started to look at player stress within real live poker game scenarios, namely no-limit Texas Hold'em tournaments. In such tournaments, one can lose their entire bankroll in one hand, termed "going all-in". This has great potential in creating live stressful situations in controlled settings that can be monitored easily, with relatively objective outcomes.

As you play real games of no-limit Texas Holdem in a heads up tournament, we will analyze your speech features, movement, and non-invasive physiology (heart rate, skin conductance, temperature, heat flux) to correlate how these variables are affected when you bluff and/or get stressed during tense moments of a hand.

If you participate in the study, we will be monitoring your physiology and contextual stat using the MIT Wearable Lab's LiveNet health monitoring system (composed of a PDA, sensor hub, and physiological sensors). You will be instrumented with several non-invasive sensors (polar chest strap for heart rate, throat microphone for audio features, finger electrodes to measure skin conductance, and health monitoring armband for movement/temperature/heat flux). In addition, you will be asked fill out a questionaire at the end of each hand (indicating the general dynamics of the hand, including your excitement/stress level, whether you bluffed or semi-bluffed, general pot size, whether it was an all-in play, etc). These results will be correlated with your monitored physiology to see if it is possible to detect your stress level and over outcome measures (such as whether you are bluffing) through your physiology.

For this pilot study, we will be trying to schedule pairs of individuals to play heads-up no-limit tournaments. As financial interest is instrumental in generating the stressful situations for this study, you will be asked to play with real money buy-ins in winner-takes-all tournaments. We will pair up individuals with similar financial risk threshholds (baseline nominal buy-in will be $5/tournament). It is expected that each tournament will last between a couple minutes to no longer than 30 min. You are encouraged to continue to play as many tournaments with your matched opponents as you desire.

If you are interested in participating in the study, please indicate the general time blocks (minimum of one hour) that you are free to play, and maximum buy-in level that you are comfortable with (it is assumed that everyone is comfortable with a minimum $5/tournament investment). Please email these details to msung@media.mit.edu with the subject 'poker study', and we will contact you with the timeslot that you should show up to the MIT Media Lab for your tournament.