How often do we create “facts”, or interpretations, or likelihoods that reinforce what we want to choose, and then use that to justify our choice of action? We have an action we want to take, and some of the elements for choosing that action are present, but we convince ourselves to go ahead with our preferred action by convincing ourselves of some other supporting “facts”, or we choose to ignore or downgrade the value of factors that support a different choice.

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The other day I was playing a private freeroll. Usually these play much better than standard freerolls because most of the people that can register for these are somewhat decent players. Many, like myself, aren’t playing for the money since it’s a freeroll and the prizes aren’t large enough to make a difference to our existing bankrolls, but we play because the level of play is not truly awful and because we know some of the other players.

There are still many poor players though, and when I got moved to a new table and picked up AKs in the BB second or third hand in I was ready for action as this was the best hand I’d had in two hours of play. When UTG raised, and someone typed in the chat box that he’d raised a bunch of hands in a row, that’s what I used to decide to shove over his raise. Could I have called? Yes, I had around 20 BBs yet. Could I have folded? Yes, I could even have folded as we were 8 away from ITM on this site where I don’t have any money, plus I was involved in a “last longer” bragging rights contest and the contestants were down to 3 of us remaining.

But I shoved, and lost to KK. Sounds too much like a previous post where I couldn’t fold AK again.

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So there must be a name for this tendency to misuse, misinterpret, or incorrectly value information to support a momentary decision that you want to make in spite of other factors that should lead you to make another choice. Here are some similar biases as per Wikipedia.

• Confirmation bias – a tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions and avoids information and interpretations which contradict prior beliefs.
• Wishful thinking – the formation of beliefs and making decisions according to what might be pleasing to imagine instead of by appealing to evidence or rationality.
• Optimism bias – the demonstrated systematic tendency for people to be over-optimistic about the outcome of planned actions. This includes over-estimating the likelihood of positive events and under-estimating the likelihood of negative events.
• Expectation bias — the tendency for experimenters to believe, certify, and publish data that agrees with their expectations for the outcome of an experiment, and to disbelieve, discard, or downgrade the corresponding weightings for data that appears to conflict with those expectations.
• Selective perception — the tendency for expectations to affect perception.

All pretty close or similar. Selective perception seems more like the placebo effect. Maybe my issue is more of a “wishful thinking confirmation” combination or something.

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While I’m at it, here are some other interesting poker-important biases to be aware of.

This one I’ve written about recently in my series about other forms of gambling other than poker: Gambler’s fallacy — the tendency to assume that individual random events are influenced by previous random events. For example, “I’ve flipped heads with this coin five times consecutively, so the chance of tails coming out on the sixth flip is much greater than heads.”

Ever wave your mouse around or talk aloud to players after you bet when you want someone to fold or to call? Illusion of control — the tendency for human beings to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes that they clearly cannot.

Ostrich effect — ignoring an obvious (negative) situation. This is tied into other biases, I think. Sometimes these look really obvious when we go back and review our hand histories. Then we have to be able to go back and see what caused this to happen.

Neglect of probability — the tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty. Hopefully this one doesn’t totally abandon us when we play poker, but I’m sure there are situations where the odds are not being considered properly.

Self-serving bias — the tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures. And to consider others lucky when they succeed at our expense. One of the biggest issues for poker players as this can really hinder development. Not only will you fail to improve your play in a similar situation (like folding AK near the bubble of a freeroll), but you miss out on the opportunity to open yourself up to improving yourself as you need to move past that particular block to get to the next related one that is hiding behind that current block.

Disregard of regression toward the mean — the tendency to expect extreme performance to continue. Ever run hot at something new and believe that it has something to do with you “finding your game”? It’s happened to me most recently with the super turbos and then with short stack play. I honestly haven’t found a way of getting around the falloff as in both these cases (and I think also in other earlier examples) when the cards/situations turned, I suspect that my game changed imperceptibly and helped me to run extremely cold.

Bias blind spot — the tendency not to compensate for one’s own cognitive biases. When you know you have a bias or leak, you gotta work at plugging it as best as you can. Sometimes though, in the heat of the moment, we forget.

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So what can we do with this information? These are all theoretical names and descriptions for common biases of humans. The names and definitions are only useful for compartmentalization or identification so we can separate it from ourselves and then try to focus on it and understand why this occurs, in what circumstances and how it affects us negatively as poker players. Once we’ve done that, then we can look at warning signs that we might be becoming affected and ways of counteracting it.

But these biases are a part of us so it can be difficult to see them. Sometimes it requires an outside review of our game, or reading a poker book (or blog!) to help point them out to us.

• Online poker, No longer an international game
• Rush Poker, and Chatroulette
• International Federation of Poker negotiates some legitimacy from the International Mind Sports Association?
• Feelings hurt by poker
• Embrace losing
• The Dance of Poker Aggression
• End of the intermediate stage; Blue belt in poker
• Should I move up to avoid the bad players? Part II
• Should I move up to avoid the bad players? Part I
• Tournaments vrs cash games; what’s the difference? Part II