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Superstition and Intuition in Poker
‘The universe is a strange and wondrous place. The truth is quite odd enough to need no help from pseudoscientific charlatans.’ Richard Dawkins
Superstition
Astrology. Psychic powers. Homeopathy. These and other forms of superstitious nonsense are deeply embedded in modern British society. Almost every daily newspaper employs a highly-paid astrologer to entertain the gullible. Channels such as Living TV show endless repeats of ‘ghost hunts’ and psychic displays. The National Health Service, paid for out of the pockets of British citizens, funds Homeopathic treatment. Yet none of the aforementioned phenomena has a basis in science, logic or reason.
Superstition and gambling go hand in hand. Certainly, if everybody were to look at gambling using logic and reason alone, many of the casino games that are heavily biased against the player would simply die out. People play those games because they believe they have a chance to win, because they feel lucky or because they think they can accurately predict what is going to happen. But how does superstition relate to poker? And can it harm your game? First, lets look at where superstition comes from.
In a way, superstition is understandable. The brain, when faced with random events, tries its hardest to organise them into patterns that we can understand. This can be explained to some degree by evolution – perhaps early in human development, those who had the ability to pick up patterns in the behaviour of other humans, predators, and the world around them, were simply better at surviving than those who lacked that ability.
The psychologist B.F. Skinner, in a famous experiment, showed that even birds are superstitious. He fed a group of hungry pigeons a food pellet at random intervals, but found that some soon began to associate the ‘reward’ of food with whatever physical action they were performing when it arrived. The pigeons developed rituals, such as turning around in their cage, nodding their heads, and so on – with that ritual being reinforced every time a new reward arrived. Skinner speculated that human superstition came about in the same sort of way, even going so far as to mention playing cards as an example.
Take a lucky shirt for instance. There is no logical reason to believe that wearing a particular shirt can change your fortune at the poker tables. But if by pure chance you do get lucky while wearing that shirt, your brain could start to link the two completely unrelated factors (wearing the shirt and getting lucky) together. Every time you got lucky while wearing the shirt thereafter, your superstition would be reinforced.
Results-Oriented Thinking
Another type of gambling-related superstition is Results-Oriented Thinking, which was briefly discussed in InsidePoker #44 (October 2007). Such thinking is very common in poker players, particularly those who haven’t been playing the game for very long. It’s the sort of thinking that causes people to say things like ‘I hate pocket jacks, I always seem to lose with jacks’, and then change their style of play. As a result, this player might play pocket jacks particularly weakly, or perhaps over-aggressively – and every time that they lost with jacks thereafter, the superstition that they always lose with jacks would be reinforced.
A more extreme example of results oriented thinking would go like this. I decide to get creative on the button after three players limp in, and raise before the flop with a trash hand, 8-3 offsuit. I get five callers, and the flop comes 8-8-8. One by one, all five of my opponents move all-in. I call, and win an enormous pot when every single one of my opponents shows an overpair to the board. ‘Great’, I’m thinking, ‘8-3 offsuit is a very profitable hand against multiple opponents’.
This kind of thinking is obviously damaging, but it’s extraordinarily common. The majority of poker players are long-term losers, but practically everybody who has had a good result or two thinks they are a good player. If you have any aspirations to play poker seriously, you must try to banish results-oriented thinking from your game, or you will sprout more leaks than a chocolate teapot.
Patterns in Randomness
Because our brain so actively tries to seek out patterns in the world around us, it can be completely baffled by randomness – seeing patterns where none exists. Let’s say that you and I are flipping a coin for money. Every time it comes up heads, I win £1 from you, and every time it comes up tails, you win £1 from me.
We flip the coin twenty times, and the results are:
- H-T-H-T-H-T-H-T-H-T- H-T-H-T-H-T-H-T-H-T
- H-H-H-T-T-H-H-H-H-T-H-T-T-T-H-T-T-H-H-H
- T-T-T-T-T- T-T-T-T-T- T-T-T-T-T- T-T-T-T-T
Even the most logically-minded of us are susceptible to this – it’s natural. Take a moment and answer honestly. What would have been the next result in each sequence?
The Benefits of Superstition
Some of poker’s greatest players are superstitious. Doyle Brunson and Daniel Negreanu have written extensively on their religious beliefs for example, and it’s not rare to see players on TV sporting their lucky shirt or using a lucky card protector.
Superstition can help your poker game in at least two ways. First, your superstition may give you confidence and comfort. In turn, those things help you to play better – you make better decisions, think more clearly, act more decisively, and give away less information through your behaviour. Secondly, superstitions can reinforce positive behaviour as well as bad – for example, by encouraging you to play cautiously with marginal one-pair hands in deep stack No Limit Hold’em after you lose a big pot with such a hand.
But just as a supernatural creation story isn’t needed to explain the origins of life, superstition isn’t needed for these positive attributes to develop. As you become more experienced and relaxed, and have good results, you’ll naturally become more confident. You might need the occasional boost during tough times, but if you’re able to impartially analyse your game you can always be confident that you’re playing well. Your positive plays will be reinforced simply by discussing the game, and hands that you’ve played, with friends or with other players on internet poker forums (and negative ones will be identified too).
How Superstition Hurts Your Game
Superstition almost certainly hurts your game more than it helps. One of the key components of superstition is that it relies on a belief in the supernatural, unexplained, or ‘spiritual’ – ideas which are completely alien to the logical foundations of poker. The whole concept of randomness and the mathematical absolutes of probability fall apart when you believe deep down that they can be subverted at will by a deity. Sure, you're 3-1 against to make this flush, but if you pray really hard, God can turn that magical card for you every time!
Holding yourself accountable for your own actions, and learning from your mistakes, is a major part of becoming a winning poker player, as is deservedly taking pride in your achievements. Once you start to believe that outside forces are influencing the results of your poker game, it’s easy to fall into bad habits, and blame bad results on fate or luck, rather than bad play. Superstition can make you forever underachieve.
Again, take a moment and answer honestly. How often have you played a hand differently because you had ‘a feeling’ that a certain card was coming, because you felt unlucky, or because you were thinking about what happened in a previous hand?
Thinking Through a Hand With Logic and Reason
So, if superstition is detrimental to your game, how can we think through a hand using logic and reason?
You’re mid-way through a major tournament, and you’ve opened in the cut-off with pocket tens. The big blind has put in a big reraise, committing a third of his stack to the pot, and the action is back on you. Should you call, fold, or raise all-in? If you were a logical player, your thought process might go like this:
‘I raised from late position, so his range of hands could be quite wide. I’ve seen him make this move before – that time he showed down pocket sevens, so he doesn’t need to have a strong hand to make this play. I’m going to assign him a range of 5-5 and J-10 or better. He’s raised a third of his stack, so my implied odds are not good and I don’t have much fold equity. However, my pot odds are about 2 to 1. My hand is a favourite against his range, and I’m only in terrible shape if he has a bigger pair than me. Based on that evaluation, I raise all-in.’
As you can see, logic and reason are extremely powerful tools when analysing a poker hand. Having good analytical skills alone can turn you into a winning player, which is not something that can be said for intuition or ‘card sense’.
Truly great poker players reject superstition, and rely primarily on good solid foundations – pot odds, betting patterns, hand ranges. They leave the supernatural nonsense to those blowing their bankroll at the roulette table, but use their people-reading skills and intuition to add flair to those foundations.
Intuition
Take a moment and suspend your disbelief. You’re not sat on the toilet (or driving to work, or operating heavy machinery) while reading InsidePoker. Instead, you’re on a fabulous game show hosted by that master of psychological illusion, Derren Brown (I promise to get to the poker soon enough).
In the fabulously garish studio, there are three doors. Behind one of the three doors, Derren explains, is a fabulous sports car. Behind the other two doors are booby prizes, and your task is to pick the door with the sports car.
You make your choice, Door number 1. Derren, who knows where the car is, now decides to make things interesting, and opens Door number 2. Behind it is the vilest of booby prizes – a night out in Liverpool with a Big Brother contestant of your choice.
Now Derren offers you the chance to change your decision. You can stick with Door 1, or you can switch and choose Door 3. What should you do?
If you haven’t seen this problem before, your instinct may be to stick with your original choice. After all, you had a 1 in 3 chance of being correct when you first chose a door, and you might think that Derren was trying to trick you into choosing incorrectly by switching. Indeed, doesn’t Door 3 also have a 1 in 3 chance of being the correct one, in which case there is no benefit to switching?
In actual fact, this is an excellent example of how intuition is misleading. There is actually a significant benefit to switching doors. Now that you’ve read that, your intuition might tell you that the chance of being right if you switch is 1 in 2, and the chance of being right if you don’t switch is just 1 in 3 (since you’re now choosing from two boxes, not three). But that too would be wrong!
The key is that Derren had to open a door with a booby prize behind it. Imagine that the car is behind door 3. Derren has to open door 2, because he cannot open the door that you’ve chosen, and he can’t open the one with the car behind it.
Because of Derren’s involvement, you must switch. To see why, let’s look at all the situations in which you switch:
- If the car is behind door 1, Derren can open either door 2 or 3. You switch, and lose.
- If the car is behind door 2, Derren must open door 3. You switch, and win.
- If the car is behind door 3, Derren must open door 2. You switch, and win.
- If the car is behind door 1, Derren opens door 2 or 3 and you win.
- If the car is behind door 2, Derren opens door 3 and you lose.
- If the car is behind door 3, Derren opens door 2 and you lose.
Poker is absolutely packed with counter-intuitive situations like the Derren Brown problem. Yet many players proudly proclaim to be ‘intuitive’ or ‘feel’ players, almost as if being a logical, clear-headed player is a weakness. In Super System, Doyle Brunson even wrote:
‘I believe some good poker players actually employ a degree of extrasensory perception (ESP).... You can’t imagine how often I’ve called a player’s exact hand to myself and been proven right... in the rare situations when all your card knowledge and best judgement leave you in doubt, go with your strong feeling and not against it.’
While there’s no rational basis for believing in ESP, Doyle was likely hitting on the importance of intuition at the poker table. Intuition is both a poker player’s best friend and worst enemy. If used correctly, it can be extraordinarily powerful. If interpreted in the wrong way, it can be utterly devastating to your game.
The Downsides to Intuitive Play
The key downside to intuition is that relying on it too much undermines our understanding and acceptance of probability, which is so important to being a winning poker player. It’s all too easy to ‘just know’ that you’re going to hit a particular card, and make an odds-defying call that you wouldn’t normally make. Alternatively, maybe you put your opponent on a very specific hand, because that’s what your instinct tells you they have, instead of thinking about your opponent’s possible range of hands in the situation. All too often, I hear a player remark that they ‘put him on A-K’, to the exclusion of the other 168 possible starting hands. Usually, this player has just gone broke!
However, it’s clear that intuition and instinct have an upside, or they wouldn’t be so vehemently espoused by so many of poker’s top players. Indeed, a top player uses both logic and intuition to come up with the best decision. Getting the balance right is one of the things that separates the pros from the wannabes.
Some plays in poker don’t make sense when analysed using intuition alone. For example, take the following situation.
You’re in a tournament, with six players remaining. The payout structure of the tournament is such that the top five players all get £1000, but the person who finishes sixth gets nothing (it could be a satellite, or a ‘double or nothing’ style tournament). Two players have a bigger stack than you, and three have smaller stacks. You pick up pocket aces on the button, but before the action gets to you, one of the short stacks moves all-in and is called by a bigger stack. Should you move all-in yourself?
Many players’ first instinct is to move all-in in this situation, but that’s a huge mistake. Because of the payout structure of the tournament, your goal is to simply survive until one more player is eliminated. There’s no extra value in moving up the pay scale beyond that, or winning the tournament.
By moving all-in, you put yourself in a situation where you might be eliminated – when you lose the pot and the short stack survives. There is no upside to getting involved, with a huge downside. If you do the maths, you’ll find that it’s actually unprofitable to push all-in here, even with the best possible starting hand. You are better off folding, hoping the short stack gets eliminated. If they survive, then you re-evaluate the situation on the next hand.
There are many common fallacies in poker that derive from a ‘gut feeling’ or misunderstood logic. One of the ones that I see over and over again is the idea that luck ‘evens out’ in the game. It doesn’t. Luck doesn’t even out because luck doesn’t have a memory. It does not know that the last four times you were all in preflop with pocket aces, you lost.
In actual fact, it’s incredibly unlikely for luck to exactly even out, and for your results in a particular situation to exactly match the probabilities. However, in the long run and over the course of millions of hands, what happens is that winning and losing streaks become increasingly insignificant. What seems like a long series of losses now might make very little difference to your overall results over years of play. That’s just another good reason to be emotionally detached, and think about the game with logic and reason rather than with intuition and instinct.
So if your instinct usually just clouds the issue and sets logical traps, should you listen to it at all? Yes, but only in the right circumstances and only after you’ve allowed your instinct to develop in the first place.
The Power of Intuition
Great poker players use a combination of instinct and logical techniques to come to the right decisions. Most of the time, they’ll rely on solid fundamentals, such as an understanding of hand values, betting patterns, probability and odds. But on close decisions, they allow their instinct to tip the scales.
When you start out in poker, your instinct won’t be very good and you should probably ignore it most of the time. Through hours of practice, repetition, and paying attention to thousands of hands, you’ll build up a subconscious memory bank of poker situations. Something will happen at the table to trigger that memory, and that will be manifested as instinct. You’ll be able to call an opponent’s hand, but you won’t know how you came up with it.
It’s very important that you don’t allow your instinct to control you, at least not until you’re highly confident in it. Test yourself first, before the really important decision arrives. Observe one of the hands your opponents are involved in, and try to guess what their hands are. Do it whenever you get the chance, and see how often you’re correct. The more often you guess right, the more you can rely on your instinct in difficult situations, and the more confident you’ll become.
Thinking Through a Hand Using Intuition and Instinct
We’ve touched on some of the downsides to intuition, but let’s also look at the upside, and how intuition and instinct can help you think through a hand. You’re mid-way through a major tournament, and you’ve opened in the cutoff with pocket tens. The big blind has put in a big reraise, committing a third of his stack to the pot, and the action is back on you. Should you call, fold, or raise all-in? If you were an intuition player, your thought process might go like this:
‘I raised from late position, so he might be restealing with a worse hand. I paused and looked around the table before I raised; did he pick up on that and read it as weakness? Why did he raise a third of his stack, but not go all-in? Is it because he doesn’t want to risk all his chips with a weak hand, or is it because he wants to encourage me to call? He looks quite nervous, but is that because he’s bluffing or because he’s got the nuts? Where have I seen that facial expression before? How do I feel about moving all-in?’
This is a read-dependent situation. Against some opponents, this is an easy shove. Against others, it’s a trivially easy fold. If you don’t know your opponent well, this might be a good time to see if your instinct will serve you well, and do what feels right.
Intuition can be a powerful tool, but remember that intuition doesn’t make the whole decision. Instead, it tips the balance on close decisions. Also, don’t forget that intuition is frequently misleading and that only through practice and paying attention can you improve its accuracy. If you can do that, you’ll become a fearsome poker player, and I hope to never meet you at the tables!
