Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream — Malcolm Muggeridge.

Everybody loves a winner. Any time we see someone, or something, emerge victorious in a difficult situation, that always makes a big impression. The natural human desire to want to attach ourselves to known winners only increases whenever money is at stake. This is why so many investors in the stock market engage is what’s called momentum investing — purchasing only securities that are currently on the rise, while selling any securities that are in a downswing. The result is often the antithesis of the financial axiom to buy low and sell high, as investors pour their money into “hot” stocks that are nearing peak prices, and dump off “cold” stocks that are wandering around the low end of their price range.

Short-term perception is often at odds with long-term reality. It’s too easy to get caught up in the immediacy of the moment. Fearful of missing the bandwagon, investors latch onto upward-moving stocks regardless of whether or not the companies have sound financials or healthy P/E ratios. The perceived value triumphs over the actual value, at least for a time.

Poker players, too, can fall prey to this momentum-induced love haze, albeit in a different fashion. But it still comes down to the same fundamental mistake: focusing too much on recent results at the expense of the long-term view. Let’s call the poker version momentum playing.

Perhaps nothing typifies momentum playing more than the poker player who goes on a big rush. For the fortunate player at the center of the rush, virtually everything he touches turns to gold. Strong hands hold up, draws come in, second-best hands suck out. As long as the heater continues, this player is the human embodiment of momentum playing at its most seductive because the rush encourages him to keep tossing more of his chips into the middle, more often and more aggressively. Winning begets more winning, or so it seems.

And at least for a time, the rush-happy player has reason to believe he’ll get a better-than-average return on his bets and raises — not because he’s in the midst of a massive lucky streak, but because so many of his opponents will be convinced of his supernatural luck. Those opponents will be extra-intimidated by his wagers and as a consequence the rusher’s fold equity increases dramatically. But just like the overvalued stock with the stratospheric P/E ratio, the party can’t last forever. When the end comes, our formerly-fortunate player must be prepared tone down his loose-aggressive play pronto.

Or consider the poker player who has had great success with one particular type of play. He may be tempted to repeat that maneuver again and again, without fully taking into account how changing game conditions have affected the likely outcome. Bluffing is a prime example. If Butch the Bully bluffs Ned the Nit out of a large pot during a NL tournament, no doubt that would be an extremely gratifying experience for Butch. And since Ned is a nit, it’s perfectly understandable if Butch thinks he’ll be able to repeat the bluff with equal success later in the tournament.

But Butch needs to be careful. Whether in poker or investing, the momentum created by previous success gives a false sense of security, an excessive sense of empowerment. If Butch thinks that all he has to do is shove a big pile of chips in Ned’s direction any time he wants to pull off another bluff, he may be in for a very rude awakening. All it takes is one failed bluff attempt to evaporate a huge chunk of Butch’s stack and potentially deep-six his tournament — and any number of factors can change an impressive bluff into a snapped-off disaster. What were the conditions of the original bluff and are they in place now? Maybe this time around Ned has a smaller stack and has committed too many of his chips to let go of the hand. Maybe Butch’s next bluff is a clumsy wager that comes out of nowhere and doesn’t match up with his betting on earlier streets, allowing Ned to figure out what he’s doing (Ned may be a nit, but he’s not stupid). Perhaps the community board isn’t threatening enough to make Ned fear a big hand. Or maybe Butch is missing the signs that Ned has a real hand this time.

Whatever the reason, a play that was profitable one minute ago might be an expensive mistake now, because game conditions are constantly in flux. Momentum can coax us into forgetting that.

Why do we have favorite hands? Sure, sometimes it’s a sentimental thing, because the number of pips add up to an anniversary date, a birthday, or some other personal touchstone. But more often than not, we favor a hand because we remember winning big with it sometime in the past. Nobody would blame Doyle Brunson if he said his favorite hand was 10-2, but you still don’t see him actually playing the hand all that often. And if Doyle Brunson, as brilliant as he is, knows that he can’t win consistently by playing a weak hand like 10-2 — no matter how spectacularly successful the hand has been for him in the past — who are we to think we can play substandard, sentimental-favorite hands and expect to win?

But if momentum can encourage us to overplay hands just because we happened to win big with them before, it can also induce us to underplay hands that are known to be profitable, just because we haven’t been winning with them recently. The classic example (which almost all of us have been guilty of at one time or another) is not raising before the flop with premium cards such as Aces, Kings, or A-K when we haven’t been running well with them lately. Yeah, sure, there are some scenarios where it’s correct to slowplay premium hands before the flop, but those scenarios are few and far between. Like the momentum investor who can’t sell a stock fast enough because the price fell five points last week, we merely limp with aces because we remember vividly how our Aces got cracked last time. Or we limp with A-K when we know the pot should be raised, because the last several times we were dealt A-K it never connected with the board and we always had to fold.

The cards have no memory. It’s one of poker’s most famous axioms and it’s absolutely true. But we do. We remember previous hands — how these cards worked out for us and those cards didn’t, how this opponent got lucky against us and that opponent never has. Remembering and analyzing the action from previous hands is a critical part of being a skilled poker player. But our memories can also betray us. Whether it’s warm-and-fuzzy memories of victory or nauseating flashbacks of failure, if the past intrudes into the present and causes us to misjudge the value of a hand or the profitability of a play, that’s the moment we become victims of our own momentum.

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Culling the Shots at the Poker Table

Picture a man, sitting on a hillside. He has a gun and he’s firing random shots at the side of a barn some yards away. Before long, the wall of the barn will be riddled with bullet holes. Despite the randomness of the shooter’s aim, the holes will be unevenly distributed. Inevitably, there will be gaps and clusters. If he wants, the shooter can walk up to the barn and paint a circle around the biggest cluster of bullet holes. To the casual observer, it will now appear that the man is a terrific sharpshooter. This is known as the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.

Now imagine you’re at the poker table, sitting in the cutoff seat. The action is folded to you as you look down at the AQ. You open with a standard raise and the button – an aggressive, trash-talking, chip-shoving blockhead re-raises. Folded back around to you and after a few raises back and forth, the two of you finally see a flop, which arrives Q84. Faster than you can say “pot-committed” all the chips are in the middle and the cards are on their backs. Your opponent shows a pair of red kings. He has you covered.

But you still have many outs and a good shot at taking down this huge pot. Your blockhead opponent knows this too and yet he cannot hide his disappointment when one of your outs, the A, spikes on the turn. You almost feel sorry for him; all the swaggering bluster has gone out of him now. He’s just a another poor player about to lose most of his stack, ironically on one of the few occasions he had a real hand that he played well. Of course, there is still one more card to come but now your opponent’s chances are reduced to just one solitary out – the king of clubs. Any other card on the river and victory will be yours. You make a nervous joke about dodging a one-outer as the dealer peels off the final card, and there it is. The king of clubs. The blockhead pumps his fist and erupts with more colorful trash talk as he rakes in the massive pot.

Many, if not most, poker players in this scenario would feel that something personal had been at work in this particular loss. There was only one out in the entire deck that could snatch away victory and give it to your enemy. One! A 44-to-1 shot! Maybe you jinxed it, tempted fate with that joking comment about dodging one-outers. Maybe, in a situation like that, it’s hard not to believe that the poker gods were exercising some sort of personal vendetta, determined to make you lose against an obnoxious, much-inferior opponent.

But if you allow yourself to think like this, you’re only looking at a small part of the picture. You’re painting a circle around one bullet hole on the side of a barn. Yes, that king of clubs was a 44-to-1 shot to spike on the river. But the same can be said for any other final card. If the river card had been the 2, that also would have been a 44-to-1 shot to get there. Each and every time the river is dealt – every out that rescues you, every card that crushes you, every meaningless brick – that card must overcome long odds to arrive when and where it does. They’re all bullet holes on the side of the barn. You draw a circle around the king of clubs because that’s the bullet that went to your heart. But it’s still just one random hole among a multitude. Nothing personal about it.

Poker players are forever drawing a circle around some random cluster and then declaring it a bullseye. Every time we complain, “I never win coinflips” or “I can never win with this dealer” or “Idiot opponents always suck out on me” – we are just as guilty as the would-be sharpshooter of trying to make a meaningful pattern out of randomness. Objectively, rationally, most of us know these things aren’t true. We don’t always lose coinflips and the morons don’t always suck out. It just feels that way sometimes. But no matter how many coinflips you’ve lost recently, or how important they were, it’s still just a nasty little cluster of arbitrary holes.

Fixate on that narrow bit of data, stand too close to the barn, and you only get a partial, myopic view of what’s really going on. But if you step away, view the building from a distance, the cluster loses its significance. Loses its power to make you feel as though fate has singled you out to be a victim.

The real danger happens when we allow these I’m-so-unlucky beliefs to influence our play. If a poker player is convinced he can never (or almost never) win a race – and then is faced with a borderline decision to shove his chips on a likely coinflip, can he make the correct choice without the wussifying influence of fear? Can the poker player who feels that it’s his special curse to get unlucky against morons continue to play his best game when he finds himself in a hand against one of those overly-fortunate idiots? When the answer is no, losing becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Weak-tightness creeps in, as we don’t get enough value out of our winners, fold hands that would have been winners, and perhaps worst of all, fail to protect hands that should have been winners. What poker player hasn’t ever been guilty of failing to bet or raise enough with a made hand because we were half-convinced the idiot opponent was going to suck out anyway? Fearing a loss, we end up guaranteeing it.

But the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy isn’t just about the way we view bad luck. We’re often just as guilty of painting a circle around a few chosen bullet holes when the cards are falling in our favor. Belief in good luck is dangerous too. “I always win coinflips” is every bit as fallacious as “I never win coinflips” and just as expensive, if not more so, if even once that belief coaxes you to put your money in bad. Yes, it’s good to have confidence as long as that confidence is rooted in genuine skill. But the poker player who comes to the battle believing he is going to prevail because “I always win with <insert favorite junk hand here>” is asking for trouble.

It’s a matter of perspective. By drawing a virtual circle around a few chosen bits of information – a handful of bad beats here, a lucky break there – we can convince ourselves of almost anything. And like the ersatz sharpshooter, it’s all about making ourselves look better than we really are. Looking back on a tough losing streak, we paint a circle around the bad luck and disregard the bad plays. Or after a big winning session, we paint a circle around the great plays and ignore the hands where we got lucky. It’s soothing , it’s reassuring, and it’s a trap. Every time we do this, we’re shooting ourselves in the foot.

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1. The Front-Loaded Nature of Texas Hold’em

I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes – Carl Sandburg

Humans behave irrationally when making economic decisions. This notion is central to the study of behavioral finance. And nowhere is that irrationality more evident than when it comes to the sunk cost effect. This effect describes the human tendency to continue with an endeavor once we’ve invested money, time, or effort into it. We do this regardless of whether or not the endeavor is currently to our benefit. Because we don’t want that money, time, and effort we’ve put in to go to waste, the sunk cost effect compels us to stubbornly follow through on things that are not only no longer helping us, but have actually begun to hurt us.

Let’s start with a simple non-poker example. You walk into an ice-cream parlor to get an elaborate (and expensive) hot fudge sundae that you’ve been craving ever since you saw it in a TV commercial. Halfway through eating the sundae, you start to feel sick. Do you stop eating and throw the rest away? It’s too late to get your money back and you can’t exactly take it home in a doggie bag. Or do you keep eating, feeling obligated to finish the massive sundae because you don’t want the money you spent to go to waste? Wolfing down the rest of the sundae won’t bring back one penny of your money, and indeed may end up costing you more in the form of lost time, lost pleasure, and antacids.

Or say you buy stock in Acme Answering Machines and for the first year or two the value of the company shoots up as people all over the world are buying Acme’s awesome answering machines. Then just as quickly, the company’s stock plummets as answering machines lose massive chunks of market share to voice mail and call-forwarding. Do you sell your stock at a loss, accepting the harsh reality that this company is no longer a good investment? Or do you stubbornly hang on, determined not to sell any shares until you can sell at a profit, or at least what you originally paid, somehow convincing yourself that answering machines are on the brink of a major comeback.

Of course these are both hypotheitcals, but in situations like this every day, all over the world, it’s amazing how many people will go for Option B, tenaciously sticking with something long after it’s clearly not working out for them. The sunk cost effect is to blame. So great is our aversion to losing money that we’ll do almost anything – eat food that makes us sick, hang onto an investment that’s an obvious dud, keep pouring more cash into a project that should be abandoned – rather than admit the money we spent was wasted.

But no matter what decision you make at this point, the money you spent before is gone. It’s sunk. Nothing you can do now will ever bring that money back, so the only decision that makes sense is one that’s based on what is best for you right now and for your future.

There are many ways the sunk cost effect can influence us at the poker table, but the first and most obvious has to do with the money we put into the pot. On any given betting round, you should always consider the size of the pot. And you should consider what it will cost you to stay in the hand on this and future betting rounds. What you shouldn’t consider is how much of the current pot came out of your stack. Whatever money you put into the pot during previous rounds is a sunk cost.

For example, you’re playing $10/$20 limit hold’em and you raise from UTG with pocket jacks. Your only caller is a loose-passive player in the big blind. You put him on a big ace. The flop falls 2-5-8 rainbow and he check-calls your bet. The turn brings an ace and your opponent bets out. In deciding what to do, you need to think about the $85 currently in the pot and the $20 it’s going to cost you to call. You need to think about the likelihood of another bet from your opponent on the river, how confident you are in your read that he has an ace, and of course you need to think about your outs – both of them. But the one factor you shouldn’t consider in this scenario is how you put $40 into that $85 pot. As soon as those chips hit the middle of the table, they ceased to be yours. You might be able to win that money, but you cannot lose it.

The harmful ramifications of sunk cost effect go beyond the simple economics of the pot. Money isn’t the only thing we invest in poker. We also invest a lot of time and effort, and naturally we’d like to see some kind of a positive return on these investments. The time and work you put into a poker session is a prime example. While you’re sitting at the table, you’re busting your tuchus trying to read opponents, interpret betting patterns, calculate odds, figure outs, and evaluate all the many other variables going on around you – all in a noble effort to make the correct decision when it’s your turn to act.

But as we all know from bitter experience, sometimes you can play your heart out, make all the right decisions, and still lose. And all the blood, sweat, and tears – not to mention lost money – that has gone into the poker session is a cluster of sunk cost. The only real return you might have gained comes from whatever you’ve learned during the session. If you’ve acquired any new insight about the game or about an opponent, that’s your compensation. But don’t expect more. If you stay and keep playing when you would otherwise quit – because you’re tired, tilting, or game conditions have deteriorated – purely because you expect to get something positive in return for everything you’ve poured into this particular session, then you’ve fallen victim to the sunk cost effect.

The decision to leave the game or keep playing should be based solely on what’s in your best interest right now. Are you still playing well? Are the game conditions still favorable? If the honest answer to both those questions is yes, keep playing. If the answer to either question is no, you should quit. This is simple and self-evident, and yet even the most intelligent poker player can get lost in the sunk cost effect. It’s a potent effect because we have such a powerful emotional attachment to believing that our money, time, and effort have been well-spent.

Particularly in the case of money, whatever we paid becomes a threshold – the price of a stock, the amount of a buy-in. We don’t want to move on until we’ve crossed over the threshold, but if you’re not careful the sunk cost effect can turn that threshold into a barrier, holding you back.

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1. Women in Poker: A “Honey-Maker” Effect?

Poker is a demanding game. It requires clear, rational decisions in the midst of a complex and constantly shifting landscape. The more bad decisions we make, the more bad results we get. And in a poker game so many things can influence, interfere with, and generally muck up the decision-making process for us, including a little-known problem called the anchoring bias.

Anchoring is a cognitive bias that describes the human tendency to rely too extensively on one piece of information, the “anchor”, when making a decision. An investor looking to buy a stock might focus too heavily on the current price relative to the 52-week highs and lows, and neglect to take into account the P/E ratio or the future earnings potential of a company. Similarly, a home buyer might zero in on square footage to the exclusion of other critical factors such as the age of the house or the location. Anchoring undermines our ability to see – and then make an informed decision based on – the big picture.

For poker players, this bias can affect us in a number of ways. At any given moment in a poker game, we have many factors to weigh and consider when making a decision. Position, pot odds, number of opponents, playing styles, stack sizes, etc – and that’s just in a cash game. Tournament poker brings a whole new host of new things to take into account. And realistically, most of don’t weigh all these various factors as much as we should because, just like the stock investor and the home buyer, we have a “favorite” factor, a go-to factor, that we consider first and above all others.

One player might overly focus on position and fail to think about stack sizes, while another may fixate on an opponent’s playing style and neglect to consider the texture of the board. “Mathies” will focus heavily on pot odds and counting outs, but it may be at the expense of position and playing styles. For mathematically-challenged poker players, it will likely be the opposite. But the preferred factor becomes an anchor, a liability, because it encourages us to stare at a doodle in the corner instead of stepping back and gazing at the whole canvas.

But anchoring has another application. Whether we’re aware of it or not, humans have a tendency to fixate on the very first value we are exposed to in any given situation. To illustrate: psychologist and behavioral economist Dan Ariely once asked a group of MIT students to write the last two digits of their social security number on a piece of paper. The students were then asked, as a simple yes-or-no question, if each of them would be willing to pay that specific number in a dollar amount for various items that Ariely and his associates had brought to the class, ranging from books to electronics to bottles of wine. Finally, the items were auctioned off as the students wrote down the maximum amount of money they really would be willing to pay for each item. It turned out that the students with the highest-ending social security numbers were willing to fork over significantly more cash than their low-numbered counterparts. The students in the highest 20 percent, social-number-wise, put in bids that were 216 to 346 percent higher than the bids put in by students with low-ending social security numbers.

So in any decision that involves hard numbers or values, the first piece of information we encounter becomes the anchor – even if it’s totally unrelated to the task at hand. For poker players, that usually means the face value of a card. Let’s say you’ve been dealt a small pocket pair in middle position. The UTG player puts in a standard raise. This opponent is fairly new and so you don’t have a great read on him yet, other than he seems relatively solid. Your immediate thought upon seeing this raise is that he has A-K. Now, you know very well that you should be putting him on a range of hands – he could be raising with any big ace, any large-to-medium pocket pair, or for that matter two big suited cards – and on a conscious level you do exactly that because you are a skilled, thinking player and not some yahoo who plays hunches. But on a deeper level, the very first thought that popped into your head, A-K, will become your anchor.

The problem with anchors is that they keep us from moving. As educated poker players, we know that after putting an opponent on a range of hands, the next step is to narrow and adjust that range based on the betting action (or lack thereof) in subsequent rounds. But anchors hold us down. It’s not that we don’t adjust, but that our adjustments will be biased towards the anchor. In the above example, though you may go through the motions of putting the villain on a broad range of possible raising hands, A-K is still at the top of your list and influencing your read.

Suppose it’s just the two of you to the flop. With only one opponent to be concerned about and “A-K” floating in a thought bubble above your head, just about any flop that’s free of aces or kings is liable to fill you with the warm-and-fuzzy feeling that your hand is good. Let’s say the flop comes J-9-9. Sure, you know that A-J is one of the villain’s possible raising hands, but because of the anchoring bias, you may be too quick to discount that possibility, simply because it’s not A-K. Ditto for the possibility that he raised with A-9 suited or even K-J suited.

If your opponent shows strength by betting out on the flop, it’s easy to dismiss that as a standard continuation bet, the kind an opponent would make even if he did whiff on the flop. But if the villain continues to show strength by betting again, that’s another story and the point where most players would at least consider that they’re behind. But a player who is anchored to A-K will be less inclined to give the opponent credit and more inclined to dismiss any bets or raises as bluffs.

Every time you see an opponent call preflop and think, “suited connectors” – that’s an anchor. Every time you think, “he’s on a draw” when an opponent flat-calls on the flop, that’s an anchor. Which is not to say we shouldn’t be trying to put our opponents on specific hands. Of course we should. But you must be acutely aware that getting too specific too early – even if it’s just an instinctive hunch that crosses your mind for a moment – can be very problematic. Once the image of a specific hand enters your mind it’s very difficult to expunge that image later, regardless of what happens in the betting action. Poker is hard enough without anchors weighing us down.

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1. Jedi Mind Tricks and Poker

Conflict is what poker’s all about. This is a central truth of the game that we all deal with every time we sit down to play. We’re trying to beat the other guy, take his money, and knock him out of the tournament. If you don’t want to do these things, you’ll never make it as a successful poker player. But in a broader human context, there is another central truth – that conflict is often dangerous and unpleasant. Conflict carries the potential to hurt, perhaps severely, the person you’re in conflict with. This in itself can be distasteful to a lot of people. But even more distressing, conflict puts you in danger of getting hurt yourself.

And so many of us take refuge in conflict avoidance. This term is generally used to describe behavior in personal and workplace relationships, where people resort to tricks like changing the subject or postponing a difficult conversation rather than risk any kind of an unpleasant dispute. These conflict-allergic people would rather conceal their feelings than take any chance of being disliked or getting hurt. Conflict avoidance is the antithesis of poker, but poker players are not immune to its effects.

Poker is a formalized, ritualized type of conflict, with its own special set of rules. And trash talk aside, it’s a civilized battle for the most part. But poker is also undeniably personal. Few things in life cut more deeply than somebody else taking away your money. Poker may be just a game, but it’s a game that bites. No matter who you are or what you’ve accomplished in life, losing hurts and losing money hurts more. All players know this going into the game, but only a few are truly ready for it.

A hard-core poker player should be ready and willing to bust his own grandmother, to paraphrase the late great Jack Straus. But easier said than done. Even when the folks we’re busting are complete strangers, the experience can be a bit unsettling. It’s only human nature to crave approval, to want to be liked. And as much as we may tell ourselves to be cold and ruthless at the poker table, believing that and putting it into practice are two completely different things.

When we talk about poker conflict, it generally comes down to one of two things: betting and raising. If we have any kind of hand – and sometimes even when we don’t – the usual  response is to fire out chips. Raising an opponent’s blind instead of letting him walk. Raising a limper who just wants to see a cheap flop with a marginal hand. Making a large bet on the flop so that a drawing hand won’t be getting the odds to call. Raising enough to put an opponent all in, forcing him to risk his tournament life. Bluffing. Every time a player shoves his chips into the middle of the table, he is telling his opponents: If you want to continue in this hand, you must pay. It’s not a particularly friendly message.

All these plays and more are the bread and butter of a winning poker player. But even in the intense competitive environment of a poker game, we are not free from the desire to be liked, or at least, the desire not to be hated. Aversion to conflict is a natural human instinct – and under the right circumstances, a very effective survival mechanism — and we’re not going to abandon that instinct just because we happen to be sitting at a poker table. Aside from the reluctance to inflict harm upon others (and not everybody shares this “handicap”) and the desire to be liked (ditto), conflict inevitably puts you in a situation where you could get hurt. And that’s one aversion we all share. We can’t fire out chips without putting ourselves into the line of fire.

Because of this, the impulse to bet or raise – to initiate a conflict, as it were – can get co-opted by the impulse to stay out of danger and evade confrontation. So we engage in conflict avoidance, poker-style. We can “change the subject” in a number of ways. Instead of raising preflop with a pair of aces, we can convince ourselves that it’s better to be deceptive and camouflage our aces by not raising. In the same vein, we can convinced ourselves that it’s better to check the flop with a strong hand, or merely call an opponent’s bet, again using deception as the rationalization – when the real reason our chips remain snug in their stacks instead of getting pushed out to the middle of the table is our fear of getting raised or checkraised. Or perhaps we convince ourselves that a bluff wouldn’t work when in fact the conditions are perfect for a bluff.

This is not to say there aren’t times when discretion is the better part of valor. Sometimes it’s good to be deceptive and just call with aces preflop or check-call a strong hand after the flop. Of course. But be clear with yourself about why you’re making the play. Is it truly for strategic reasons, or has conflict avoidance temporarily paralyzed your trigger finger?

We can also “put off the difficult conversation” by postponing the bet or raise to a later time. It’s one thing to do this for strategic reasons, say, if you’re floating, or if you want to wait until the betting limits double on the turn. But if you’re putting it off just for the sake of putting it off – I know I should raise preflop with A-K but I don’t want to, so I’ll just call now and I’ll raise with it next time – that’s another story.

This is how bad plays happen to good poker players. The mind says push, but the heart shies away from confrontation. Poker is a game of aggression. This is especially true of hold’em. If you don’t want to be aggressive, you shouldn’t play – or at least you shouldn’t expect to win. Conflict is dangerous and evading danger has its place, in poker and in everything else. But unfortunately it’s not always easy to determine when it’s time to fight or when it’s time for flight.

Conflict avoidance encourages you to err on the side of flight. Every time you fail to bet or raise with the best hand, you are costing yourself money in the form of smaller pots won, not to mention giving the other players in the hand a free or cheap chance to outdraw you. The real problem with conflict avoidance is that no conflict can ever be deflected or postponed indefinitely; sooner or later there is a price to be paid. In poker, that price is literal and steep.

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Whether you play poker for a living, as a means of extra income, or as a passionate hobby, one of the greatest things about being a poker player is the chance to be your own boss. While you’re at the poker table nobody tells you how to play your hands or how to manage your money. It’s all on you. But the freedom that comes from being your own poker boss also carries with it a great deal of responsibility. The ultimate welfare of your poker enterprise rests on you and you alone. And one of the most critical decisions you will ever have to make as your own boss is when – or if – to give yourself a “promotion” to the higher-limit games.

In a world based on hierarchy, it’s only natural that we should want to play poker at the highest possible limits. Bigger stakes offer more prestige, a greater challenge, and most of all, the promise of more money to be won. That is, if you’re truly ready to take on the new job. In the corporate world, promotions are based on job performance, or at least they’re supposed to be. Do well at your current assignment, and you’ll be rewarded with the chance to move up a rung or two on the corporate ladder.

Theoretically, poker promotions should work the same way. If you’re crushing the game at your current limit – and have been doing so long enough that you know it’s not just a statistical fluke – then you should be ready to move up in the poker pecking order. But the situation is rarely that clear-cut. Because you’re acting as the boss, it’s your responsibility to give this employee an objective “performance review” before granting the promotion to higher stakes. But as the employee, it’s virtually impossible for you to be objective.

In the corporate world, the practice of continually promoting employees who have performed well has led to a phenomenon known as the Peter Principle. Taken from the book of the same name by Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull, the Peter Principle states that employees who are steadily promoted for doing well at their previous job will inevitably get promoted to a level where they cease to be effective, their “level of incompetence.” And that is where they remain. They don’t get demoted for being incompetent but simply stay where they are, out of their depth, becoming dead weight. The company carries on, but now all of the constructive work is being achieved by employees who have not yet been promoted to their level of incompetence.

Can the same idea apply to poker players pushing their way up through the limits? Is there a “Poker Peter Principle” where players keep promoting themselves to higher and higher stakes until they finally reach a “level of incompetence” where they don’t leave? Well, no and yes. No, because poker has its own built-in automatic demotion system. Any poker player who is playing over his head is doomed to go bust. It’s only a matter of time. But the answer is also yes because that time can be dragged out interminably. Any player who is stubborn enough and determined enough can beg, borrow, even steal the money he needs to keep playing poker at the higher limit for an almost indefinite period – during which time he’ll take a nasty pounding, both financially and emotionally. Poker players who are too quick to promote themselves, too eager to earn that higher BB-per-hour salary, risk putting themselves on a collision course with the Poker Peter Principle.

But there can also be a danger in promoting yourself too slowly. Stay too long at the lower-limit poker games and all the challenge goes out of the experience. This complex and glorious game can turn into the equivalent of a monotonous assembly-line job, the kind where you just sit for hours tightening the same bolt over and over and over again. You’ve learned how to do it to the point where you could almost do it in your sleep. And you’re drawing a steady paycheck, which is no small thing for a lot of players. But you’re not challenging yourself, you’re probably not learning anything new about the game, and you’re certainly not earning as much money as you could. You’re the essence of untapped potential.

It can be very tricky to find that middle ground between the drudgery of never promoting yourself to a new poker game and the financial burnout of putting yourself on the too-fast track. Aside from the poker bankroll requirements, which we’ll get to in a moment, a good place to start is by asking yourself why you play poker – and why you play at a particular limit. Are you craving loftier limits for the sake of prestige, e.g. because you want the “job title” of a high-stakes poker player? Do you want to get away from the call-happy low-level players who never respect your raises and always seem to find some way to suck out on you? Or is it because you’re already learned all you can about the game at your current level and you’re ready for the new challenges, not to mention the more lucrative profits, that the higher-stakes games can offer?

On the flip side, are you staying put at your current level of play because you are genuinely comfortable and happy playing poker at this limit? Or are you denying yourself a poker promotion out of fear? Higher stakes go hand-in-hand with greater risk and some players just naturally have a lower risk tolerance than others. We all know from painful experience how brutal a losing streak can be and you must be prepared, both emotionally and financially, to withstand a big negative swing at your new limit. Financially, that means respect for the tyranny of minimum bankroll requirements. For limit games, that means you should have at least 300 times the big bet. For no-limit the recommendations are a bit more varied, but at a bare minimumyou need at least 20 buy-ins and should probably have closer to 30 or even 40 buy-ins as you move up through the higher limits.

Even if you have the right bankroll, and even if you’ve racked up an impressive win rate over the course of at least 20,000 hands, that doesn’t automatically mean you are primed for a promotion. Different levels of play require different poker skill sets – especially if you’re graduating from limit to no-limit. Even if all you’re doing is nudging yourself up one level, you can easily find yourself playing against a different class of opponents. It’s a challenge to be sure, in the best possible sense.

But just as the low-level employee promoted to a managerial position needs to develop new skills, so too must the neophyte high-stakes poker player learn to think about the game in fresh ways. Perhaps we could take a page from the corporate book and adopt a poker “training program” for ourselves. By studying the higher-limit poker games and taking occasional “shots” at the bigger stakes before moving up permanently, we may be able to assure ourselves of a much smoother transition as we progress up the poker ladder.

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In the study of behavioral finance there’s a concept known as opportunity cost. The official definition goes something like this: It’s the value of the option that you must give up when choosing between two mutually-exclusive alternatives. It’s the price of the road not taken. If you buy a stock, the opportunity cost is the profit that could have been made if you had invested that money in something else. If you sell a stock, your opportunity cost is the chance to sell that stock at a higher price later on. Virtually every decision you make in every walk of life carries some kind of opportunity cost, and nowhere is this more true than in a poker game.

From the moment you sit down to play poker you are faced with an series of decisions to make; some of these decisions are difficult and some are so easy you could practically make them in your sleep, but every one of them has an opportunity cost. Starting with your decision to play at all. The time you devote to playing poker could be spent doing something else, such as putting in more hours at your job where you might have earned more money than you make at poker. Or the time could be spent acquiring new knowledge and skills that could pay off in a big way later, career-wise and finance-wise.

But opportunity costs are not merely gauged in terms of dollars and cents. The time you spend in a card room or staring at virtual poker tables on a computer screen is time that you could have spent with your family and friends. That also represent a kind of opportunity cost. Alternatively, if you should decide to quit playing poker in favor of focusing more on your job or spending more time with your family, the opportunity cost then becomes the enjoyment and mental stimulation you would have gotten from poker, and – if you’re really skilled at poker – the money you would have earned.

Opportunity costs are typically related to future outcomes, which of course can never be fully known – if they weren’t, the choice would always be easy. Because of this, and because opportunity costs take into account such things as personal enjoyment and fulfillment, they are virtually impossible to calculate with any real precision. Nevertheless, opportunity costs are a very real and important factor to consider whenever you’re faced with a difficult choice. And few things in this world will present you with a greater quantity and quality of challenging decisions as playing in a game of poker.

The most common and elementary decision in poker is whether to call or fold at the start of the hand. Obviously, if you have something like 8-3 offsuit the decision to fold isn’t exactly excruciating, and when you get a premium hand the decision is not call or fold but call or raise, so for the sake of this discussion let’s say you have a borderline-type hand. Call, and the opportunity cost is the money you would have saved by folding. If you go on to win the pot, the opportunity cost is nonexistent. If you whiff and fold on the flop, it’s only one small bet. But catch enough of the flop to make an expensive second-best hand and the opportunity cost swells to painful proportions. If you get irritated with yourself for making that expensive call, so much so that you start tilting even a little, the opportunity cost inflates even more. And if you’re playing in a major poker tournament and that one semi-loose call ends up felting you short of the money, the opportunity cost is out of this world.

When you fold, opportunity cost becomes a factor if it turns out that you would have won had you called. Which is not to say you should play results-oriented poker. Far from it. But if you’re one of those poker players who kicks himself for not being psychic and knowing when the flop/turn/river would have hit your hand, that becomes an opportunity cost of folding. Or in any important poker decision for that matter – if making what turns out to be the “wrong” choice is going to tilt you, that’s a kind of opportunity cost as well.

The tougher the decision you face, the more important it becomes to consider the opportunity cost. For example, you’re playing in a NL tournament, let’s say a sit-n-go. Four players left, on the bubble, and you’re third in chips. Your remaining opponents are all reasonably solid players. Preflop, you’re in the big blind with A-K offsuit; UTG folds, then the next player, the short stack, raises (not enough that he’s pot-committed), and the button responds by shoving all in. You’re convinced the short stack will fold if you make the call, but he might call for all his chips if you get out of the way. The button is an aggressive player and you really don’t think he has aces or kings, which means you’re probably either racing or have him dominated if you call.

Say you fold, hoping that the button will take out the short stack, thus putting you into the money. Here, your opportunity cost is the chance to double up (plus the dead chips from the short stack) at a critical point in the tourney, which would allow you to virtually coast into the money and have a much better shot at winning the whole thing. On the other hand, if you call and the short stack does indeed fold, your opportunity cost is the chance to have one of your opponents get eliminated right now, ensuring that you’ll make a profit on this tournament.

Obviously there are other variables here that will influence your decision. Is your main priority to squeak into the money or win the whole tournament? Do you believe the short stack holds an ace or a king, thus taking away one of your outs? And then there are the fine points of the situation, precise playing styles, stack sizes, etc.

The concept of opportunity costs can be enormously beneficial for poker players because it encourages us to really think through the value of each option as we ponder all those thorny decisions that await us at the poker table. Whether to play a strong hand fast or go for the slowplay. Whether to bluff-raise now or float until the next round. Whether to call all in for your tournament life or fold and wait for a better spot. Because the true cost of any choice lies in what you had to give up to make it.

Related posts:

1. Fear and Goading at the Poker Table
2. Acting at the Poker Table
3. Is it Bad to Feel Good at the Poker Table?

He who exercises no forethought but makes light of his opponents is sure to be captured by them – Sun Tzu

In poker, everything is relative – including and perhaps especially your level of skill. In the end it’s not about how good you are, it’s about how good you are in comparison to your opposition. Just as you cannot figure out the best way to play a hand without having some idea of where you’re at – whether the cards you’re holding are ahead or behind of the opposition – you also need to get a solid idea of where you’re at in the session. Not in terms of how many chips you’ve won or lost, but in terms of how your ability matches up against the other players sitting around the poker table.

And when it comes to sussing out the poker competition, no error is more common, more pervasive, and more deadly than the simple mistake of underestimating our opponents. One way or another, we keep finding ways to downplay our adversaries. A savvy poker player purposely shows down a couple of garbage hands and gets permanently labeled as a lucky moron. A tight-fisted rock switches gears and bluffs his way to a massive stack before anybody at the table starts catching on to what he’s doing. An elderly player enters the game and opponents assume he can’t be aggressive. Or a woman sits down to play and her male opponents immediately label her as bluff-bait.

Our tendency to underestimate our adversaries goes hand-in-hand with our inclination to overestimate ourselves. Especially in a super-competitive environment like poker, we all want to see ourselves as better than the other guy. It’s how we define ourselves in this game. Beat the other guy more often than he beats you, and you’re a good poker player. Don’t, and you’re not. In this eternal fight for supremacy, nobody ever wants to be considered average or, god forbid, below average. So we’re left with the statistical impossibility that the majority of people who play poker consider themselves above-average players. There are several fancy psychological terms that could be apt here, like illusory superiority or the Lake Wobegon Effect, but essentially it all boils down to plain old-fashioned wishful thinking.

Poker has often been likened to a kind of warfare. Our chips are “ammo” that we “fire out” at the enemy. We speak of sophisticated plays as “weapons” in our poker arsenals. And the ultimate goal is to capture the enemy’s territory, i.e. chips. Most of the really serious poker players approach the game with this combative mindset, so in that sense it can be instructive to consider some lessons from military history. In his book, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, psychologist and former military man Norman F. Dixon looks at some of the biggest military blunders throughout history and compiles a list of 14 “frequently recurring factors” all of those fiascos share in common. Number four on this ignominious list is, “A tendency to underestimate the enemy and overestimate the capabilities of one’s own side.” If some of the most powerful men in history have repeatedly fallen prey to this mistake, how can the average – excuse me, above-average – poker player hope to be immune?

The consequences of misjudging your enemy at the poker table are not nearly as dire as they are on the battlefield, but try telling that to the player who has just suffered a major loss. The poker player who underestimates his opponent is giving that opponent opportunities he would never give away otherwise, simply because he doesn’t recognize the magnitude of the threat. A common example is the hopeless bluff. How many times have you seen an intelligent, capable poker player bluff off a huge chunk of his stack, attempting to steamroll a supposedly-weaker opponent out of the pot – when it should have been clear all along that the “victim” was likely to call? Or consider the flip side: letting an opponent steal a large pot away from you, because you were convinced he was too passive and/or too timid to make a move like that. Either way, the player stacking his newfound chips got a huge assist from the opponent who underestimated him.

But the reasons why we underestimate our opponents go well beyond a quick ego-boost. Stereotypes are another big cause, particularly in live poker games where we can see and hear our opponents. Sexism is still alive and well in the poker world; any woman who sits down to play poker against a table full of men is often seen as too easily intimidated and generally unschooled about the game, all before she has even played a single hand. Older players are regularly looked upon as nits, incapable of creative plays, while very young players often get labeled as overly aggressive and impulsive. Racism can also be a factor for some. How our opponents dress, the way they speak, their personal attractiveness (or lack thereof), their height, their weight – all this and more influences our assessment of them not only as humans, but as poker players. And while some stereotypes do hold true for the most part – younger players are generally more aggressive, while older players lean more towards conservative play – there will always be exceptions.

This problem is analogous to what can happen during the play of a hand, when we mistakenly put an opponent on a specific hand too soon, clinging to that initial judgment come hell or high water, even in the face of contradicting evidence. Only when he flips over a completely different hand at the river do we realize the error. As we know, the correct way is to begin by putting your opponent on a range of hands, and then narrow down his potential range of hands based on his play in subsequent rounds. That’s the most effective approach if we want to avoid nasty surprises at the showdown.

The same principle can be applied to reading the opponents themselves. Instead of jumping to the conclusion that somebody is a maniac, a nit, or just plain stupid, put him on a range of possibilities and then narrow down that range as you watch him play more hands. If a player at your table calls off a bunch of chips with a junk hand, chances are that he really is a mindless calling station. But maybe, just maybe he’s a tricky player who showed his bad cards on purpose to mislead the table. Or maybe he was temporarily on tilt, or he just lost his focus for a minute and made a mistake. The possibilities are numerous and you need more evidence before you can accurately judge. Since poker is a game where success or failure lies in our ability to adjust to our opponents, correctly assessing the skill level of those opponents – even if it means contemplating the uncomfortable notion that they might be just as good or even better than us.

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Everything in moderation – Socrates

It’s no secret how negative emotions can impact the way we play the game of poker. Fear can transform even the strongest of poker players into a weak-tight milquetoast, while anger can make him spew chips faster than a wood chipper on overdrive. The correlation between the negative feeling and the undesirable result is usually immediate and easy to recognize. But what about the other end of the emotional spectrum, the so-called “good” emotions? How can feelings like love, happiness, and compassion affect the way we play? We’ve become conditioned to associate these pleasant, admirable emotions with all that is good in life, so it’s only natural to think these great feelings will help us to be better poker players. But not necessarily, and not always.

Truth of the matter is, any emotion can become a destructive force when it’s taken to the extreme. Think of love. It may make the world go ’round, but any time that love – whether it’s love for another person, a hobby, or even for an object such as a car – becomes so overwhelming it begins to take too much focus away from other important areas of your life, that’s a problem. Once the passion has reached the point where you begin to neglect other relationships, your job, or even your health, then love is no longer a benign, benevolent force.

In the cutthroat world of poker, love is simply out of place. Arguably, love for the game itself can be a problem for some players, sucking up too much of their time and energy – and for losing players, far too much of their money. When players are either too lazy, too stupid, or too impatient to learn how to play poker properly, a love affair with poker is an infatuation they literally cannot afford.

On a more personal level, love for another poker player can pose a predicament if said player is sitting across the table from you as an opponent. Legendary poker player and 1982 WSOP Main Event champ Jack Straus once famously stated that he would bust his own grandmother if she played poker with him. To succeed at the highest levels of this game, where it’s eat or be eaten, that kind of attitude is almost compulsory. But for most of us regular folk who play in regular games, it’s difficult to be a poker shark when your prospective victim also happens to be a loved one. The trade-off is fewer chips and less glory in exchange for a more harmonious personal relationship. Naturally it’s up to each individual player to decide when and if that trade-off is worthwhile.

Perhaps the most insidious form of poker amour is the affection we develop for the cards themselves when they take on the appearance of a surefire winner. Big pocket pairs, flopped miracle straights, promising draws to the nuts – all these hands and more can wield an hypnotic, seductive power when they stare back up at us from the felt. They draw us in with silky promises of chips to be won and opponents to be conquered. And for a dedicated poker player, this is the kind of lust that knows no bounds. No matter that one wrong card from the dealer can transform the alluring winner into a grotesque and expensive loser. Love is blind. As anyone who has ever been in love can attest, it can be excruciatingly difficult to say goodbye. In life, the cost of refusing to let go can be catastrophic. In poker, the cost is a loose call or two…or twenty. Or more. Which soon adds up to catastrophe.

If love is bad business at the poker table, compassion is even worse. Taking advantage of weaker opponents is what poker players do. Whether it’s stealing a tight opponent’s blind, steamrolling over a desperate small-stack, or playing circles around a dim-witted schlub, predation is the name of the game. But when you’re up against an opponent who is not only a poor player but who is clearly incapacitated in some way – drunk or high or under some kind of extreme emotional duress – is that opponent still fair game? Do you still feel good about taking his money? Perhaps you feel a twinge of guilt but still go ahead and take his money anyway. Or does the temptation to soft-play begin to creep its way into your consciousness?

What if you know this unfortunate soul is playing with money he cannot afford to lose? This is where the line between your livelihood as a poker player and your ethics as a human being can really get fuzzy, unless you know ahead of time exactly where you want to draw it. Compassion, one of the most admirable and noble emotions we can experience in life, is just another Achilles’ heel when it comes to poker.

Even a feeling as sublime as joy can be counterproductive in the context of a poker game. Exhibit A: celebration. When elation over a win gets so excessive that the player on the losing end begins to see it as gloating, that’s the kind of problem that can come back and bite you later on. Even without Tournament Directors everywhere standing at the ready to punish players who break the excessive celebration rule, losing-end opponents will be eagerly waiting for the chance to mete out their own punishments.

Celebration is also cause for alarm when it’s premature. This can take many forms, from the small-stakes poker player who’s so busy mentally counting the pot he’s about to win that he doesn’t even realize the river card counterfeited his hand, to the tournament chip-leader who somehow manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by blowing a massive lead at the final table. What it all really boils down to is just another form of overconfidence, which itself is a prime example of a good emotion becoming destructive once it’s taken to excess. The common denominator here is loss of focus. It’s impossible to fully concentrate on achieving your goal when part of your brain is already celebrating the win – conveniently glossing over the fact that the contest still ain’t over.

There’s a strange paradox in all of this. All of us began playing poker in the first place because on some level, the game made us feel good. It was fun. And that’s why most of us continue to play. So we play poker to feel good but if we want to play the game well, we can’t let ourselves feel too good – at least not until we’ve walked away from the table. Feelings like love, joy, and confidence, which enhance our lives immeasurably, can all become liabilities at the poker table if we let those feelings get out of hand.

Related posts:

1. Fear and Goading at the Poker Table
2. Opportunity Costs at the Poker Table
3. Acting at the Poker Table

We have met the enemy and he is us – Walt Kelly

Why do otherwise sane, smart poker players occasionally play like fish? I’m not talking about recreational poker players who don’t bother to know better, or the just plain stupid players who can’t know better. I’m talking about serious players, people who have studied the game, read books, bought software, and analyzed hands. The players who really should know better, but who inexplicably make bad decisions at the poker table, not just once or twice but again and again.

Most of us have fallen prey to this phenomenon at one time or another. Have you ever found yourself making a call that you knew was too loose, a call that you knew would end up costing you money, and yet you went ahead and made it anyway? It’s almost like an unconscious reflex, a tic or spasm that works independently of our brains. Your mind is saying, No! But there goes your hand, tossing chips into the middle of the table. Or perhaps your particular weakness is playing too aggressively when you know perfectly well that the situation doesn’t warrant it. Or maybe the problem is that you keep passively flat-calling when you know that you should be raising it up.

Make a mistake like this once in awhile, and it shouldn’t be a big deal. But as we know there are some poker players, reasonably intelligent players who have studied the game, making these types of mistakes again and again. Either we’ve seen this player or we’ve been this player, or both. The one who knowingly makes a bad choice, a choice that he knows will probably end up biting him in the ass, then when it does bite him in the ass he acts surprised, and then worst of all, he makes the same bad choice again later. It’s a very effective form of self-sabotage, a kind of poker masochism.

And for what? Why do otherwise astute poker players behave in ways that are so obviously contrary to the goal of winning? It’s a complex question but the answer is fairly simple: because on some level, those bad choices are actually working for them. Nobody repeats a behavior over and over again unless he is getting something out of it; something positive – a payoff. Some hidden benefit that is ultimately more important to him than being a winning poker player.

For example, let’s take one of the most common poker mistakes: loose calls. Whether it’s playing too many starting hands, refusing to let go of a second-best hand, or chasing too many long shot draws — as long as the size of the pot doesn’t warrant the loose call, it’s a dreadful and potentially very expensive mistake. But it’s amazing how many good players, even top-notch players, can fall prey to this problem. In a pot-limit or no-limit game, just one loose call can wipe out your entire stack. But even in a limit game, the constant drip-drip-drip of one loose call after another can be disastrous to your bankroll.

So what alternate payoff could possibly be worth losing all that money? In a word… action. It’s not very exciting to sit on the sidelines and fold hand after hand. The immediate “buzz” that the player gets from being involved in the hand is actually more important to him than the more remote payoff of being a long-term winner. In a real sense, he comes to the game hoping for two different payoffs: to win money and to have fun. But unless he is blessed with an unusually good run of cards that day, those two goals will often be in conflict. With a typical run of cards, he must either sacrifice the fun and fold a lot, or play a lot and sacrifice the profit. When faced with choosing between two different and conflicting payoffs, most people will go for the one that is quicker and easier to get. It’s a sure thing now – the instant gratification of being involved in a hand – versus the more elusive and distant payoff (which is still by no means a guarantee) of walking away from the table a winner.

While aggressive play certainly is critical to poker success, for even the smartest player there can be times when aggression goes overboard. Timing is everything, and the supposedly-smart player who can’t stop himself from overplaying hands is burning through his money just as surely as the one who calls too much. Maniacs have a good excuse for playing this way: they don’t know any better. But again, why would a thinking player regularly commit this kind of error? What is the payoff that makes this kind of play worthwhile? Every poker player is different, but revenge against an opponent is one possible payoff. However the most likely explanation is the simplest. For many players, it feels more glamorous – and for the guys out there, more “macho” – to be a hyper-aggressive player who can steamroll over any opponent. Even if that opponent is a non-steamrollable calling station. It’s a feel good payoff that ends up being just another form of poker sabotage. This player also wants two payoffs at once: to win and to keep up his image as a fearsome aggressive poker player. If he can’t have both, winning gets chucked out the window in favor of image.

For the poker players who can’t seem to stop themselves from playing too passive – the ones who only raise with the nuts even when they know they should be bumping it up with a lot of other hands, who continually check-call instead of betting out for fear of getting raised – the payoffs can be varied but they all boil down to some form of avoiding risk. The risk of losing more money is the most obvious, but there are other, more subtle forms of risk to be averted as well. The risk of confrontation, of being disliked by an opponent, or even the risk of standing out in the crowd is an issue for some people. So the payoff of remaining “safe” and secure becomes more important than making money at the game.

What good is it to study poker, read books, analyze hands, and gain a lot of knowledge about the game, if we don’t actually use that knowledge at the poker table? It’s one thing to go against the “book play” because of a read on an opponent, a gut feeling, or even as a result of tilt. It’s quite another thing to regularly ignore the correct poker strategy and make unprofitable plays when we should know better. If you ever find yourself making a play that you know perfectly well is bad strategy, and then if you keep doing it over and over again – ask yourself, what are you getting out if it? What is the payoff, the thing that is more important to you than long-term profit that impels you to undermine everything you’ve learned about poker strategy and keep committing this mistake? Once you’ve figured that out, then and only then can you break the cycle of poker sabotage.

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