Poker irony – calling when wanting to fold
If you’re a poker player, you’re probably more than familiar with the situation I’m about to bring up as an example in this piece. You’re sitting across the table from a solid TAG player and you miss your draw on the river completely. The guy fires a bet into you and you know that your hand is pretty much beat. The only thing you could beat at this stage is a bluff. You know all that, and every single skill that you’ve acquired at the poker tables screams at you: fold it! Yet, deep in the darkest corners of your brain, a thought begins to dim: what if he’s just bluffing? Who does he think he is to push me around like this? – and before you know it, as if in a dreamy state, your hand grabs your chips and throws them into the middle defiantly: let me see what you have. The guy shows down a decent hand of course and you lose. What makes you do such seemingly illogical moves? Why do you call when you’re 110% certain you should fold?
Apparently, there’s an actual scientific explanation to it. Whenever there’s something we set our mind on NOT doing, instead of banishing the thought from our brains, what we do is we etch it deeper into our subconscious. The thoughts do not go away, rather, they’re stored, locked away. It takes people energy to keep these thoughts blocked. Responsible adults at the peak of their mental power can usually keep such thoughts locked away easily, but it is easy to prove how the mechanisms of this psychological function work, even with them. Just tell someone not to think about going to the gym. The very next second you can pretty much bet your life on the fact that the gym is exactly where his mind wanders.
The fact that we work to isolate and to lock away such thoughts sometimes has the exact opposite effect: it brings these “forbidden thoughts” to the surface. Never tell a child who’s precariously perched in the tree “be careful, you’ll fall off”. That second, a mental image will form in his brain, one that shows him the consequences of his possible fall as well as the steps leading up to it. All that, makes him much more likely to fall off, as he’ll be urged to act out the mental image. The same thing works the other way around too, and some athletes can indeed put it to work in order to enhance physical performance.
Now then, when every pore of your body and mind tells you to muck those rags, there’s another factor at work when your hand seems to decide to act independently of the rest of your anatomy. As I pointed it out above, a responsible adult can block his negative thoughts easily under normal circumstances. The circumstances in effect at the poker table though, under which our guy is forced to make his decisions, are anything but ordinary.
Apparently, research shows that as stress levels elevate, suppressed thoughts become more and more likely to float to the surface. Is there a cure to poker irony? Stress management would be one, but that’s like telling you: you shouldn’t tilt because it’s bad for you…