The Triton Times

Confidence is often found in restraint.

As an industry-leading poker tour, which strives for perfection in every department, Triton Poker has undeniably the best branded clothing line in the business. That’s thanks to Janice Wong, Triton’s Senior Fashion Designer, who has for many years been the genius behind the threads worn with such elegance by so many Triton stars. New designs hit the Triton shelves several times per year, all of which originated in Wong’s richly creative mind. Most of the designs are available for purchase here in Jeju, where Wong herself will be able to advise on what will work best for everyone.

The full range is also for sale via the Triton online shop at shop.triton-series.com.

The Triton Times is delighted to welcome Wong to its pages to showcase two outfits on display in Montenegro in May. Here are some of Wong’s views on how her designs look at the Triton tables.

Designed with a structured oversized silhouette, the Black TPS Edition T-Shirt balances contemporary streetwear aesthetics with exceptional comfort. Paired with the Triton Signature Cap in classic black, the gold embroidered emblem provides a subtle point of distinction, elevating the look without overpowering it. Clean, versatile, and effortlessly refined, this pairing reflects the understated confidence at the heart of the TRITON collection.

The Triton Classic Hoodie is designed with clean proportions and thoughtful craftsmanship, where every element serves a purpose. The gold embroidered logo creates a confident focal point, while the signature monogram lining and matching drawstrings reveal themselves more quietly. Refined without excess, it is a timeless essential designed for those who appreciate confidence expressed through subtlety.

Heavy thinking

In a 2010 Science study, American researchers Joshua Ackerman, Christopher Nocera and John Bargh investigated whether the physical sensation of weight could influence judgments about something completely unrelated. Participants reviewed job candidates while holding either a light or a heavy clipboard. Those holding the heavier clipboard rated candidates as more serious, and showed other differences in judgments connected with importance. The experiments were investigating what psychologists call "embodied cognition", the idea that sensations experienced by the body can sometimes become involved in seemingly unrelated thoughts and judgments.

For poker players it is a curious thought. We spend hours physically handling chips while those same chips represent something much less physical: money, risk, pressure, opportunity. The researchers didn't test poker chips. Perhaps that experiment is still waiting for its funding.

Freud's revenge

Sigmund Freud, the Austrian neurologist who founded psychoanalysis, made the unconscious one of the most famous ideas in psychology. He argued that much of what drives human behaviour happens outside our conscious awareness. Modern psychology has moved on from quite a lot of Freud. The unconscious, however, never quite left the building. Today, researchers study automatic and non-conscious mental processes using experiments rather than the psychoanalytic methods Freud relied on. The modern scientific idea is not Freud’s unconscious filled with repressed wishes, but something rather more practical: our brains constantly process information without requiring our conscious attention.

For a poker player, there is an intriguing parallel. An experienced player may sense that something about a hand feels unusual before being able to explain exactly what caught their attention. That feeling is not magic, and it certainly is not proof that the read is correct. It may simply be the brain recognising a familiar pattern before the conscious mind has finished putting it into words. Freud might have called it the unconscious. At the poker table, we usually call it a read.

Rough customer

In 2010, American researchers Joshua Ackerman, Christopher Nocera and Yale psychologist John Bargh investigated whether something as simple as the texture we touch could influence how we judge an unrelated situation. Participants completed a puzzle made from pieces covered with either smooth or rough material. Afterwards, they read about an ambiguous social interaction between two people. Those who had handled the rough pieces tended to judge the interaction as more difficult and adversarial. The experiment, published in Science, was part of research into “embodied cognition”, the idea that physical sensations can sometimes find their way into seemingly unrelated judgments.

An interesting thought for poker players, who constantly form impressions of people they may have met only minutes earlier. First impressions can be useful. Just don't forget what your fingers have been up to.

The pain of almost

One river card. At Triton, that can be the distance between a trophy and a very long walk back to the hotel. Psychologists have a name for the strange power of nearly winning: the near-miss effect.

In 2009, Cambridge researchers Luke Clark, Andrew Lawrence, Frances Astley-Jones and Nicola Gray put gamblers into a brain scanner and watched what happened when they won, lost or narrowly missed a win. The near-misses actually felt worse than ordinary losses. But here’s the strange part: they also increased the players’ desire to continue. Brain scans showed that near-misses activated some of the same reward-related circuitry as actual monetary wins. A later review of 51 experiments found similar evidence that near-misses can increase motivation and produce measurable physical reactions.

Poker provides its own particularly cruel version. You can survive three days, hundreds of hands and dozens of all-ins, get the money in as an 80% favourite and still be one card away from explaining to everyone how close you came.

And the brain doesn’t necessarily leave it there. Psychologists call it counterfactual thinking: replaying an outcome and imagining how easily it could have gone differently. Research shows that near-misses are particularly good at triggering those thoughts. In poker terms: If only the river had bricked. If only I’d bet differently. If only he’d folded. Perhaps that’s why the hand you almost won can linger longer than the ones you actually did.

The mathematics calls it a loss. The brain, apparently, has a separate category: Almost.