There is no magic formula to make you more self-aware about those biases, you have to do the work and hack your brain. Otherwise, we risk losing focus, overthinking our moves and overreacting when things don’t go as we want them.īut I guess you wonder how to avoid all those biases and improve your game… But we should still stay clear-minded on what we can and can not control to keep our sanity. Yes, our decisions will influence the other person’s actions and we can predict with some accuracy the behaviour of people thanks to the discoveries about the population tendencies. Which can create a lot of magic, don’t get me wrong! I know I may disappoint the Harry Potter inside of you, but unfortunately, the only thing we can control for sure is our thought process and our decisions. Some players even believe that they can influence opponents’ decisions with the power of their minds. Probably you came across the famous saying that we can pray to poker Gods for good hands. This is the tendency to believe that we can influence something over which we have no control. That’s a nice illustration of what psychologists call “Illusion of control” bias. One day, a policeman comes up to him and asks: ‘What are you doing?’ ‘I’m keeping the giraffes away.’ ‘But there aren’t any giraffes here.’ ‘Well, I must be doing a good job, then.” “Every day, shortly before nine o’clock, a man with a red hat stands in a square and begins to wave his cap around wildly. Here is a beautiful example from Dobelli’s book: At the same time, we rationalize and try not to admit the fallacies of our thinking at all costs.īut the key to improving our thinking lies elsewhere – keep reading to find out. What I find fascinating about biases is how often we fall into them without even realizing it. You have to do the math to be certain and if you do that and you’re still confident that you have enough value in your hand – then definitely demonstrate pot commitment. In other words, being pot committed is not the emotional “feeling” to make a call simply because there’s a lot of money in the pot. Being pot committed is defined as creating situations in which you’re a long shot to win a hand, but you’re still getting sufficient odds to make the call. !!! Note that the concept of sunk cost fallacy should not be confused with pot commitment. You can read more about it in the book “The art of thinking clearly” by Rolf Dobelli. This is one of the most popular cognitive biases that blocks our critical thinking and affects negatively our poker performance. The more we invest, the greater the sunk costs are, and the greater the urge to continue becomes. This investment becomes a reason to carry on, even if we are dealing with a lost cause. The sunk cost fallacy is most dangerous when we have invested a lot of time, money, energy, or emotions in something. With cognitive biases, we observe a clear example of this biological phenomenon. Actually, our heads run on autopilot most of the time to preserve energy in case an emergency situation occurs. While your priority is to apply logic, the priority of your brain is to conserve energy.īoth don’t go well together and your biology makes the decision for you. Your brain chooses the easier way – to keep the inertia of previous decisions and remain consistent with them. This is the so-called “Sunk cost fallacy” in all its beauty. You’ve already put a lot of money at the table and now you feel obliged to keep on putting more in an attempt not to lose the amount that went out of your pocket in the first place. Normally you’re skilful enough to do it with ease, but something gets in the way now and you can’t give it a logical explanation. Your priority as a professional poker player is to perform proper and logical math-based reasoning and evaluate your chances with maximum accuracy. At the same time, half of your stack is on the table already so you decide to make an emotional call instead of folding. You know that you made a few not too smart moves so far and you don’t have enough value in your hand to call.
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