Why do some people stand up when they go all-in during a tournament? Why do players blame the dealer when they lose a hand? Why do people say that Nines are running hot today? Why do so some people think that they are just unlucky? The answer to all of these questions concerns the psychology of superstition, which plays an important role in poker, but few people understand how superstition actually works.
On the most basic level, superstition functions by replacing correlation with causality. In other words, two distinct events that happen in the same place or time are experienced as forming a strict cause and effect. For instance, if one remembers losing many big hands delivered by the same dealer, one starts to think that the dealer has caused the misfortune. In fact, I know some players who refuse to play any hands when a certain dealer is at the table. I once told one of these players that there are only three possibilities: 1) the dealer has no control over the random distribution of cards; 2) the dealer has rigged the deck so that you lose; or 3) there is a god dedicated to screwing you over.
In general, the feeling that one is just unlucky often relies on the superstition that there is a secret power in the world that is centered on victimizing people. When people say that they never win flips or the worst card always comes out on the river, they are usually engaging in magical thinking where they only remember the bad outcomes, and they seek to escape any sense of personal responsibility for their losses. By blaming some hidden power, they are able to feel sorry for themselves as they become an innocent victim tortured by fate. Instead of getting upset with themselves for making a bad decision, they blame some external forces. Of course, people cannot learn and improve unless they deal with the truth of their own thoughts and actions, and so superstitious beliefs prevent people from advancing.
Another reason why people may believe in superstitions at the poker table is because they do not want to accept the randomness of the game, and so they constantly have to imagine that there is some secret intention behind every event. Since we want to believe that we live in a just and fair world, we often project our sense of order onto a meaningless universe. Therefore, one thing that people can learn from poker is that there is no higher power controlling everything, and they we are mostly responsible for our fate. Yes, one can go through a long period of getting horrible cards or losing hands when one is ahead, but this does not mean that there is some magical power punishing you. What is often going on here is that people do not properly understand randomness and odds, and so they think that an event that should rarely happen should never happen. It is simply difficult for people to accept that one can flip a coin and get heads several times in a row.
When we do not understand something, we often create a magical connection in our heads so that we do not have to deal with the anxiety caused by missing information. Conspiracy theories and paranoid delusions work in the same way: people try to replace coincidences with causal relations so that they can gain a sense of control and meaning. Even when these people doubt their own beliefs, they tend to follow them anyway because they are afraid of being punished if something bad happens. For instance, a player will stand up after going all-in even if he does not think it really works. One reason why he may do this is that he thinks that if he loses, it is now his fault because he didn’t do everything he could have done. In this case, people take responsibility for something that they have no control over.
It turns out that it is very hard to be an atheist at the poker table because we want to believe that the world has an underlying order and meaning. Just as people have a difficult time understanding that evolution works without a design or a designer, people do not want to accept the randomness of card distribution so they imagine causes, which do not exist in reality. Freud believed that one reason for this investment in magical thinking is that we confuse our unconscious intuitions with external causes. Since over time, we learn to recognize patterns in an automatic and non-conscious way, we often project this pattern recognition process into external reality. So instead of acknowledging the true nature of randomness, we see patterns where they do not really exist. For instance, with the idea that a certain card is running hot, we simply insert a sense of causality and order into a random distribution.
While many players say that they just play by feel, what they really mean is that they are guided by their intuitions based on past experiences. The problem with this approach is that it does not allow for any conscious analysis of faulty actions and thoughts. By placing our mind on auto-pilot, we prevent ourselves from thinking in terms of an integrated theory based on long-term probabilities. Lacking theory and statistics, we then tend to rely on internalized patterns and magical thinking. Moreover, in the effort to escape the pain caused by variance, we fall back on irrational superstitions, which prevent us from dealing with reality. The best way then to protect against irrational thinking is to learn the correct statistical probability of certain events occurring.
By understanding how superstition works at the poker table, we can also gain greater insight to how we deal with things away from the game. Too many people allow their lives to be guided by magical thinking and conspiracy theories. Instead of addressing the reality of situations, we tend to indulge in imaginary explanations that prevent us from confronting the truth of our world and ourselves.
