Thinking Outside the Table

I recently sat down in a hold'em game, posted a late-position blind, and was dealt K-10. When four players called the blind ahead of me, I checked and waited for the flop. The flop came Q-9-8 in two suits, and I decided a discreet fold was my best option. A few minutes later I was dealt K-10 again, in the same position, but without having posted a blind bet. The same four players called the blind, and I flat-called. The same Q-9-8 appeared on the board, but this time I pursued my weak draw for that same single bet, eventually giving up on the turn. Of course, these are just caricatures of real hands I've played many times. But it's certain that you could find a slew of hands like these, in matched pairs, in my past. Although I'm sure I haven't been consistent in either case, it's also a fair bet that I've been more likely to fold after posting a blind than after posting a voluntary bet with the same hand.

So, why is it psychologically more palatable to fold in the first case than in the second? The sole difference between the hands is that in the first case, that single bet is a blind bet, while in the second, it was placed voluntarily. You might guess that this is just a variation of the sunk-cost fallacy – the mistaken belief that it's worth pursuing the pot because of the money you already have invested. There's an element of sunk-cost reasoning that's appropriate in poker: The money you've invested is part of the pot, and the larger the pot, the more likely you should be to continue. But it should be the pot size and not whether or not you have money invested that drives your decision on whether or not to hang on to your cards.

In this case, however, there's another factor at work. In both cases, you have money invested in the pot. But in one case, it's money you've invested voluntarily, while in the other case, your investment was compulsory. When you post a blind and fold on the flop, you've found the cheapest way out of the hand. Once you've invested money voluntarily, there's no way to find the cheapest way out of the hand. But perhaps more importantly, winning the pot begins to seem like the only way to validate your earlier decision. Although it's irrational – just because you don't win the pot doesn't mean your preflop call was an error – there's a tendency to want to make good on that earlier investment, even though the money is already spent. In that sense, it really is a kind of sunk-cost error – throwing good money after bad.

As much as I'd like to think that having some awareness of these factors makes me less vulnerable, I know that these kinds of biases are very hard to avoid. One of the reasons for this is that when you're at the poker table, situations arise in complex contexts that make it difficult to make purely principled decisions. Discarding 7-2 offsuit is usually easy, and so is raising with pocket aces. But hands like K-10 can be worth a raise, call, or fold, depending on the situation. Once you start including subjective factors such as your beliefs about other players into the equation, the door is open for other small biases to creep into your decisions. If you have an unconscious desire to hold on to hands in which you've already invested money, it might show up as a tiny increase in the probability you think you'll be able to steal the blinds. You may think you're calling because your hand has value, and if asked, you'd be able to justify your play, but you might never know that you're calling more than you should in certain situations.

The question then becomes how to avoid such biases. Poker is clearly a game that places great demands on your intuition, even for the most mathematically inclined players. Maybe you really don't care about sunk cost, and maybe you genuinely don't discriminate between a blind bet and a preflop call. But perhaps you have other biases to overcome; maybe your play changes when your football team scores, or when your opponent bears a mild resemblance to your former boss.

One tool that I've found helpful in stripping extraneous detail from my evaluation of close decisions is imagining each bet as an independent proposition bet instead of as one bet in the course of a hand. When it's hard to tell what the right decision is, pretend you've just walked into the cardroom and someone has offered you the right to enter the hand at this point, with your cards, for one bet. You can accept the bet and sit down or you can keep walking and get into the buffet line. By thinking about the game this way, it's easier to get out of the habit of thinking of some of the chips in the pot as your chips, or even as chips you've invested. And it's also easier to detach yourself emotionally from the other players at the table. Of course, decontextualizing the game in this way may hurt your ability to consider factors inherent in the flow of play, such as the fact that one player may be steaming and another has legitimate reason to believe he can bluff at you. But it still may be better to consider these explicitly rather than letting your intuitive sense of the game guide your play.

Of course, you don't want to slow the game down to do this, so it's best to reserve this mode of thinking for times when you're especially worried about undue bias. While it's often helpful to think of each bet as an independent investment, bets aren't really independent. Especially in a shorthanded or highly skilled game, you can't get into the habit of playing the same hand the same way every time. But every now and then, it may help to take a step back and reduce your decision to the bare essentials.

Daniel Kimberg is the author of "Serious Poker" and maintains a web site for serious poker players at www.seriouspoker.com.