Psyched Out
The Top 9 decision making errors I'm seeing at the tables at the 2024 WSOP
This is the first week that I’m playing around with paywalled content, as I try to find the right balance for this newsletter. The first half of this list is free. The second, paywalled.
Last week, on the Risky Business podcast I co-host with Nate Silver, I talked through three common decision making errors I was seeing people make at the poker tables. After Nate and I finished recording and I gave the topic some more thought, I realized that there were far more than three mistakes—and that I could personally benefit from a more systematic review of decision making pitfalls, with the hope that writing about the errors, acknowledging them and exploring them, would help me identify them in myself more rapidly and prevent me from going the way of many a fellow player.
These biases aren’t new or revolutionary; they are the standard stuff of psychology and decision making. Indeed, many of them were the center of my dissertation work in Psychology! But that doesn’t make them any less pervasive or necessary to revisit. I still need reminders of their existence—and I’m still guilty of falling for every single one of these errors when I’m not at my best.
9. Gambler’s fallacy
We’ve all heard this one: if you’re on a losing streak, you’re due to win. The bad luck can’t continue forever. Right?
This is one of the most pervasive psychological errors when it comes to probabilistic thinking: the notion that probability is normally distributed. If a coin lands on heads three times in a row, the next time must be tails. Ok, fine, if not the next time, then the time after that… Except, probability is only normal over the long term. And the long term is infinitely long. In any given streak, runs are not only possible; they are likely. (Indeed, in many game designs, the outcomes aren’t truly random, because true randomness doesn’t feel random; it feels rigged.)
But even knowing, theoretically, that probabilities don’t follow a pattern that feels intuitively right doesn’t stop people from chasing losses and making poor decisions just because they feel they are due to hit. One player at my table in a recent event lost all his chips going after flush draw after flush draw despite not having proper odds to call. He was certain he had to hit soon, he told us, as he’d already missed his draw so many times. Instead, he found himself walking out of the tournament. Don’t be that player.
8. Rumination
Remember that awful hand from an hour ago, where you got it in with AK against that idiot’s AJ and he hit a jack on the river? I certainly hope you don’t, because you absolutely shouldn’t. Anyone who has read The Biggest Bluff knows my stance on bad beats in general—but even if you don’t avoid telling bad beat stories to your friends (or enemies…your friends deserve better), at least avoid playing them back in your head while you’re still playing. And if it wasn’t a bad beat but rather a mistake on your end? Deal with it later. Do not let it cloud your judgment in the moment.
Rumination is not a healthy mindset—and it’s not conducive to optimal decision making. If you’re still thinking about a hand that happened hours ago, you’re wasting valuable cognitive resources, resources that should instead be put towards making good decisions now. If you misplayed a hand, that’s a different story: write it down, get it out of your mind, review it later. But if you found yourself on the wrong side of variance despite being a favorite? Smile that you made the right decision, move on, and focus on thinking correctly going forward.
Rumination makes me think of cows chewing cud. And if I ever find myself stuck in the past, I picture a cow with my face. It’s not an image I particularly like and it snaps me right back to sanity.
7. Anchoring
In a negotiation, you never want to be the first to throw out a number. Why? Because that initial number will serve as an anchor for all future offers. And what if your number was too low? You’ll never know.
Anchoring is a powerful effect whereby we grab on to a known point and make it the departure for our decisions – even when that initial point is irrelevant. In poker, this often plays out by anchoring to your peak chip count: starting stack when you begin, and then whatever highwater mark you hit later on. Instead of focusing on how many chips you have now, you think how far you are from how many chips you had before, you know, after you won that big hand. Not only is this not rational, but it will likely cause errors in the types of risks you do or don’t take. The chips have no memory; they don’t care if there used to be more or fewer or them. You shouldn’t, either. All that matters is the stack in front of you right now and how you play it.
6. Risk aversion
In a recent tournament with a fairly fast structure—thirty minute levels—a gentleman who had 3-bet and was then re-raised to a big chunk of his stack folded his hand face up. It was AK. “It’s too early to flip,” he told the table, as his cards slid into the muck, leaving him with about 30 big blinds—soon to be 25.
I’m sorry, sir, but when will you think it’s not too early to flip? And what makes you so sure it was a flip and not something else? There are many, many decision making errors in this hand, but let’s focus on the one that players often exhibit during the WSOP, especially in bigger buy-in events: risk aversion. Not taking the gambles they should be taking from a rational standpoint because they don’t want to risk it. They want more certainty. They don’t want to bust out of the tournament. They don’t want to look silly. Or whatever else they don’t want.
If you don’t take risks that are +EV for fear of losing, you are probably playing in the wrong event. I get that this may be your one event of the WSOP and you want it to last. I get that it might be a big deal to be sitting there. But don’t you want to give yourself a chance to win? If you’re constantly folding in these spots, you’ll be lucky if you even cash, because all your chips will have dwindled away long before the money bubble. (And for non-poker-players, if you try to fold your way through life, you’re not likely to get particularly far, no matter how safe it might feel in the moment.)