Sub-Optimal Play

Last night I got PWND at the tables BIG TIME. The night was pretty much –EV all around, I played like ass – no excuses. Bad bluffs, missed value, and did a terrible job adjusting to my tables/villains. Could you put together any better recipe for disaster? I got stuck a few buyins (6 to be exact), and simply could not resist urge to play until I got recouped my losses. I started around midnight and didn’t finish up until SIX fawking AM. Oh and let’s not forget I have a normal 9-5 job that I had to be at…

Why shouldn’t I have been playing such a long marathon session?

a) I was too tired. Never play tired…this should be a pretty basic rule (one which I routinely violate.) Obviously as the night wore on and on, I grew more tired and played even worse (and of course, jumped up to a bigger game in an effort to recoup my losses.) Your brain simply does not process decisions with the speed and precision that it does when you are well rested….and this game is predicated primarily on what? Oh ya, decision making. Fawk me.
b) Tilt. Regardless of your ability to control tilt (I have decent tilt control, but I’m not immune to it) it is still difficult to completely isolate your emotions. We’re gambling here ladies and gentlemen, for real hard currency…the almighty devalued AMERICAN DOLLAR! When someone is continually 3-betting yer ass, you start taking that shit personally and make bad decisions, which can QUICKLY spiral out of control. One villain last night absolutely gang raped me for 2+ buyins. By the end of the night I honestly thought he could see my hole cards.
c) Finally – I had a guest staying at my apartment. More specifically, a rovery rady. Maybe I should have been working on my other “game.” ROR.

You might be wondering if I was able to make a comeback and breakeven (or then again maybe you don’t give a shite) – but it doesn’t matter…the lesson to be learned here is to be a fawking man, set a stop loss, and just QUIT. I’ve been telling myself this now for quite sometime, maybe now that I have it in writing I will have the control for future sessions!

BRACKCHIPS

Also, the fact that you're down is a signal (albeit a noisy one) that you're not playing well, or that you're playing at a tough table. On the other hand, if you're up, it's a signal that you're playing well or playing with donks. So why would you play longer when you're down? Seems to not make any sense. You should want to play more when you have an edge, and quit early when you don't.

The reason most people (including BrackChips and myself) play longer when behind than ahead is because they have what economists call "reference dependent utility".

As a poker player playing for relatively small stakes (relative to your lifetime income, for instance), you should be "risk-neutral", which means that your utility of money function, u(x), where x is some amount of money, is linear (i.e., u(x) = a*x+b for some constants a and b, with a>0). Then your EXPECTED utility is just P_1*u(x_1) + P_2*u(x_2) + ... + P_n*u(x_n), where {x_1,...,x_n} are all the possible payoffs and {P_1,...P_n} are their respective probabilities. You can see how, if you substitute in the utility function u(x)=a*x+b, you get a*(P_1*x_1 + ... + P_n*x_n) + b, or a*E[X] + b. In other words, your utility is an increasing function of expected value, so in order to maximize it, you just maximize expected value.

What happens if instead you weigh small gains and losses relative to a reference point very heavily, and larger gains and losses only slightly more heavily (e.g., losing $100 hurts bad, losing $200 hurts only a little worse, and winning $100 rocks, but winning $200 is only a little bit more awesome). In rough terms, you care more about whether you're a winner or a loser than how much you win or lose. Now think about being down $100. Say your utility at this point is -10. You're facing a $100 bet that you think you only have a 40% chance of winning. If you lose, you'll be down 200, but this isn't twice as bad as losing 100, so your utility at that point is -15. If you win the bet, you'll get back to even, where your utility is zero. The expected value of this bet is .4*(100) + .6*(-100) = -20. Obviously not good. But what's the expected utility of taking this bet? If you win, you gain 10 utils (the unit of measurement of utility in economist-jargon), whereas if you lose, you go down to -15 utils, a loss of 5 utils. So the expected utility gain from the bet is .4*(10) + .6*(-5) = 10. So it's positive expected utility.

This explains why BrackChips (and I, for that matter) keep playing when we're losing, but stop sooner when we're ahead. All that math I did just formalizes the intuition that it hurts to book a loss, whereas booking a bigger loss isn't that much more painful. So when losing we might be more inclined to gamble and, say, ship it all in with AQss pf.

The economist Richard Thaler has tested this hypothesis at the horse races (check out Chapter 10 of his book "The Winner's Curse"). Because of the rake that the track takes, by the end of the day, bettors are on average pretty good-sized losers. So in an effort to get even, they bet on longshots on the last race of the day. As a result, longshots in the last race of the day are systematically over-priced.

If you remember that it's all one long session, and booking a loss in a particular night is just an arbitrary way of grouping the hands you've played, you'll find it much easier to stop when you're behind and not playing werr.

Incidentarry, you should never stop when you're behind...Tiffany's mom. If you do, she gets rearry mad.

BRUECHIPS