The Problem With Perfect Strategy? Real People Aren’t Perfect.

It was a bad spot to bluff, and I knew it. My opponent across the poker table was about 5 drinks in, hadn’t seen a hand he didn’t like, and had (loudly) proclaimed several times that he didn’t come to the casino to fold. Yet, there I was, preparing to push all my chips into the middle in a futile attempt to get him to throw his hand away.

I felt in my bones it wouldn’t work. But I summoned my courage, and with a confident facade, looked up at the dealer and announced, “All in.” My bet was credible, I assured myself. It looked like I had a really strong hand. And most importantly, it was solver-approved. According to game theory, a big bluff was the optimal play.

That reassurance lasted all of about five seconds. My opponent looked at me, looked at my bet, and shrugged as if to say it couldn’t be helped. Then, without a second thought, he called. And unceremoniously, I lost. It had happened again: I made the “correct” play only to get punished for it. I chalked it up to bad luck and my opponent’s poor play. It’s not like I had made a mistake, right?

Wrong.

I wasn't playing the man sitting across from me. Not really. I was so obsessed with executing a theoretically optimal strategy that I blinded myself to my opponent’s obvious tendencies. He’d been telling me all night how he played—but I wasn’t listening. I trusted theory more than the evidence sitting right in front of me.

That’s the problem with “perfect” strategy: real people rarely cooperate with it.

Optimal Against Whom?

If you’re familiar with poker, you may have heard the term “Game Theory Optimal” (or GTO) thrown around. Basically, GTO is a mathematical model that outlines the “perfect” poker strategy. Sort of like how chess engines recommend the best move in any position, GTO solvers provide the theoretically optimal decisions to make—how often to fold, bet, or check, and with which hands—in any given configuration.

The details are technical, but the goal is simple: become unexploitable. If you follow GTO perfectly, your opponents won’t be able to get an edge on you, no matter what they do. That’s incredibly useful, which is why serious players spend so much time studying it.

But there’s a catch: GTO gives you a great strategy against opponents in the abstract. It doesn’t tell you how best to beat the real flesh-and-blood players sitting across from you. And more often than not, that’s where true success lies—not in becoming perfectly unexploitable yourself, but in optimizing against your competition.

Think about it this way: imagine you’re playing a game of rock, paper, scissors. Game theory tells you to play each option precisely 1/3 of the time. Completely unexploitable. But let’s say you know your opponent really likes to throw rock—and maybe you’ve seen him play rock about three-quarters of the time. Of course, you could stick to your GTO approach and randomize. But if your goal is to win the most often, you’ll want to throw paper against him. Every time.

That’s why a so-called “perfect strategy” can be misleading. People aren’t perfect. They make mistakes, have patterns, and preferences. And that information changes the game. The mistake is refusing to adapt when new data comes your way.

Real People Don’t Play Perfectly

In life, real people make choices for a whole assortment of biased reasons: habit, emotion, sheer laziness—you name it. Rarely are we the perfectly rational, self-controlled, internally consistent decision-makers our economic models assume we are. It’s a thing. So much so that our economists even have a sardonic name for the make-believe people who populate traditional economic models: Econs.

The term, coined by behavioral economist Richard Thaler, describes a person who dispassionately weighs every available option, responds logically to incentives, exercises flawless self-control, and consistently makes choices in their own best interest. If you know someone like this, I’d like to meet them. Because I know a lot of people. I don’t know any Econs.

Real people get tired, scared, greedy, or disinterested. They get attached to bad ideas and occasionally make questionable decisions, especially when their pride or ego gets the better of them. And often, our mistakes—when we make them—are repetitive and persistent. We’re not random; we’re inconsistent in very consistent ways.

As if to make my point, researchers in 2014 studied repeated games of rock-paper-scissors. They found that players didn’t randomize their choices the way game theory suggested. Rather, the players’ decisions followed recognizable patterns based on what happened in previous rounds. People responded to winning and losing in predictable ways. Those patterns illustrate a key principle: the messiness of human behavior doesn’t make strategy impossible—but it does force you to abandon the belief that people are Econs.

Customers aren’t Econs. Neither are voters, reporters, lawmakers, coworkers, or your boss. And you, dear reader, are not one either. We all have ego, fear, habits, histories, loyalties, and blind spots—that’s part of being human. Any strategy that ignores those variables ignores part of the game.

Strategy Must Survive Contact With People

Hear me on this: I’m not saying models are meaningless. Frameworks, best practices, and economic toy games are all tremendously valuable. They keep us from flying blind, and they’re a solid foundation for future decision-making. But they’re a starting point—not the final product. Sound strategy needs theory the way a house needs a foundation. It keeps you on solid footing, but you’ll need more when a storm rolls in.

Eventually, every strategy has to face the people whose behavior you’re trying to influence, and that’s when mere abstractions won’t cut it. Reporters have beats and deadlines, policymakers have constituents, your boss has a reputation, and your coworkers have office politics to navigate. Everyone has something that matters to them—something a one-size-fits-all plan doesn’t account for. The best strategies speak to an individual in a specific situation and address their unique incentives. Meet your audience where they are, not where you’d like them to be.

When a message doesn’t resonate, people often make the mistake of simply repeating themselves or increasing their volume. But the problem is rarely that they aren’t hearing you. Your strategy isn’t working because you’re missing something that matters to the person you’re trying to persuade.

You can build an airtight argument for why a particular economic policy benefits a community. It can be logically sound, focus-group approved, and even poll well. But if the legislator you’re trying to influence doesn’t trust corporations, another corporate white paper probably won’t move him. The problem wasn’t what you said, but how you chose to say it. You didn’t sufficiently account for how the person you were engaging actually saw the issue.

Have a local employer, a community leader, or a parent deliver the same argument, and perhaps it suddenly gains credibility in the policymaker’s eyes. The facts are the same, but the messenger makes all the difference.

Walk a Mile in Their Shoes

The key to influence, then, isn’t just honing your own argument—it’s understanding the game from the other person’s side of the table. Research backs this up. According to a series of studies by Galinsky, Maddux, Gilin & White in 2008, it (literally) pays to adopt another's perspective. In negotiations, participants who engaged in perspective taking—actively thinking through the other party’s interests and viewpoints—uncovered more hidden agreements, found common ground, and achieved better outcomes.

You don’t need to feel what they feel or even agree with them, but understanding them goes a long way. It helps you answer questions like: What do they want? What scares them? What pressures are they under? And what reasons do they have to oppose you?

From there, you can tailor your approach to maximize its impact. But beware: this is where things can go off the rails, especially if you start following your gut wherever it leads you. Understanding the human element doesn’t mean abandoning a disciplined framework to embrace vibes. There’s a fine line between recognizing a behavior pattern in your audience and inventing one in your mind.

Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein explored this distinction in their work on expert intuition. Their conclusion? Intuition becomes reliable when you operate in environments with repeatable patterns and quick feedback loops. Without those guardrails, your gut might feel like expertise, even as it leads you astray.

A read is backed by evidence and grounded in theory. A hunch just feels right. That distinction matters, and the best strategists know the difference. They start with a sound framework, watch how events unfold, and adjust when evidence gives them a good enough reason to. Theory remains the foundation, but experience helps you recognize when it’s time to deviate.

Looking back at that poker hand with 20/20 hindsight, the solver wasn’t wrong—I was. It had given me a sound solution to an abstract problem. But the man sitting across from me was about as defined as they come. He’d spent the evening telling me what his plans were. I chose not to listen. The question wasn’t whether bluffing was theoretically optimal. It was: optimal against whom?