Lessons from poker party

In the past I’ve drawn lessons from contract bridge on this blog – notably, I’d described a strategy called “queen of hearts” in order to maximise chances of winning in a game that is terribly uncertain. Now it’s been years since I played bridge, or any card game for that matter. So when I got invited for a poker party over the weekend, I jumped at the invitation.

This was only the second time ever that I’d played poker in a room – I’ve mostly played online where there are no monetary stakes and you see people go all in on every hand with weak cards. And it was a large table, with at least 10 players being involved in each hand.

A couple of pertinent observations (reasonable return for the £10 I lost that night).

Firstly a windfall can make you complacent. I’m usually a conservative player, bidding aggressively only when I know that I have good chances of winning. I haven’t played enough to have mugged up all the probabilities – that probably offers an edge to my opponents. But I have a reasonable idea of what constitutes a good hand and bid accordingly.

My big drawdown happened in the hand immediately after I’d won big. After an hour or so of bleeding money, I’d suddenly more than broken even. That meant that in my next hand, I bid a bit more aggressively than I would have for what I had. For a while I managed to stay rational (after the flop I knew I had a 1/6 chance of winning big, and having mugged up the Kelly Criterion on my way to the party, bid accordingly).

And when the turn wasn’t to my liking I should’ve just gotten out – the (approx) percentages didn’t make sense any more. But I simply kept at it, falling for the sunk cost fallacy (what I’d put in thus far in the hand). I lost some 30 chips in that one hand, of which at least 21 came at the turn and the river. Without the high of having won the previous hand, I would’ve played more rationally and lost only 9. After all the lectures I’ve given on logic, correlation-causation and the sunk cost fallacy, I’m sad I lost so badly because of the last one.

The second big insight is that poverty leads to suboptimal decisions. Now, this is a well-studied topic in economics but I got to experience it first hand during the session. This was later on in the night, as I was bleeding money (and was down to about 20 chips).

I got pocket aces (a pair of aces in hand) – something I should’ve bid aggressively with. But with the first 3 open cards falling far away from the face cards and being uncorrelated, I wasn’t sure of the total strength of my hand (mugging up probabilities would’ve helped for sure!). So when I had to put in 10 chips to stay in the hand, I baulked, and folded.

Given the play on the table thus far, it was definitely a risk worth taking, and with more in the bank, I would have. But poverty and the Kelly Criterion meant that the number of chips that I was able to invest in the arguably strong hand was limited, and that limited my opportunity to profit from the game.

It is no surprise that the rest of the night petered out for me as my funds dwindled and my ability to play diminished. Maybe I should’ve bought in more when I was down to 20 chips – but then given my ability relative to the rest of the table, that would’ve been good money after bad.

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