You're in a tough $5/10 NLH game. You know the guy in the checkered shirt in seat 8. Solid, unimaginative, with little trick in his game.
He's just pushed a stack of greenies
at you on the river. You missed your draw; you've got middle pair and,
basically, can only beat a bluff.
So you sit there looking at your cards, at the board, at your opponent.
You've got a good read on the situation and know precisely what you
should do with your hand. In fact, this is exactly the situation you've
been warning yourself about over and over again in recent weeks.
Do NOT make marginal calls in situations like this one because they have long-term negative EV (indeed,
very negative).
Yet you feel an odd twinge deep below the surface of your mind. You know that you should fold. You plan to fold.
The cards are almost in the muck, you're going to
slip
quietly away when you see an ethereal hand, one that looks a lot like
yours, though acting like it belongs to someone else
marked cards, grab a bunch of
chips and you hear a voice that has a fretfully familiar tone to it and
seems to be coming from your mouth say, "I call."
And, of course, he wasn't bluffing and you've just shed another
buy-in on a truly idiotic move that felt like it was made by some demon
inside you, for
you would never have been so stupid.
From my psychologist/poker junkie perspective, the really interesting
part of this tale is not that you just did something moronic but that
you did exactly the thing you've been trying to banish from your game.
If the word "irony" comes to mind now, it should. If the name Daniel Wegner comes to mind, I'll be really surprised.
Dan is a psychologist at Harvard. He's an old friend and even though
he's not a poker player, I'd like to tell you a bit about how his research
applies to our game and how, if we can work this out carefully, his
insights can help reduce the number of silly and financially damaging
actions we take.
Wegner studies irony. He's been fascinated all his life with those
situations where we tell ourselves that we should do X and avoid Y like
the plague then, bingo, we end up Y'ing.
Dan's research is slowly yielding an understanding of why these situations arise and why we keep doing the very wrongest things.
Here's his analysis, in simplest terms:
When we consciously suppress the thoughts about the thing we do NOT want to do, we don't actually banish them from our minds.
They take on a life below the surface and sit there, unnoticed, in
what is technically known as "implicit memory" (if you want to call this
your "subconscious" that's okay).
It takes a certain measure of mental effort to keep these unwanted thoughts in their mental
jail.
If I ask you to NOT think about white bears or NOT to spill any red
wine as you carry your glass across the carpet or NOT to think about
calling a pot-sized bet from the tightest
cheat poker player at the table, two
things will happen.
First, you WILL think about those things. Second, you will manage,
most of the time, to suppress that thought ... for the moment.
But what Dan's research has shown is that this suppression doesn't always hold.
When it does, fine. You won't waste time imaging white bears on
(vanishing) ice floes, dumping a glass of Merlot on someone's beige
wall-to-wall or donating a stack of greenies to the rock in seat 8.
But what Dan has also found is that when stress levels go up, when
pressure is put on us, or we are distracted, these unwanted thoughts and
actions become surprisingly likely to occur.
Ask someone NOT to use a particular word in conversation and, if they
get distracted or stressed they are far more likely to blurt that word
out than if the initial request was never made.
If you sit there and think something like "calling pot-sized bets on
dangerous boards is something I will simply not do anymore" you run the
risk of making it
more likely that you will do the very thing you've counseled yourself against,
if you're under stress or distracted or are put under heavy mental load.
We're all familiar with settings that are likely to produce these unhappy ironic outcomes.
We're all familiar with settings that are likely to produce these
unhappy ironic outcomes. You've been losing. You're on tilt because
you've been bluffed twice and both times the bozos showed you.
You're in the cash game because you bubbled the MTT. An old
girlfriend just walked in the room hanging on the arm of some idiot with
a shaved head and his shirt unbuttoned down to his belly button.
You just realized you forgot to pick up your wife's prescription ... whatever. All invite bouts of terminal irony.
Is there a cure for this affliction? Not really. Just take your time when stressed. Think through the situation.
And, of course, practice helps. Experienced players usually handle
stress better and are able to suppress thoughts that might leap up and
take control of your hands or your vocal cords.
Poker isn't an easy game. But you can make it less painful if you
work on combating this ironic tendency - the one that
Edgar Allan Poe called the "imp of the perverse."
