Our brains are not wired for poker

This is a whole post devoted to telling you of a roughly three-second mental malfunction that I had the other night.

It was the unplanned mini-bloggerpalooza at Imperial Palace. I was in the big blind with some sort of king/baby offsuit hand, but nobody raised, so the flop came for free. It was king-high with two spades. I decided to take a stab at it and see what happened. Player A called. Player B called. OK--probably at least one of them has a flush draw, so if another spade were to hit, I was going to shut down. (Note that this isn't always so by any means. But the combination of being out of position and having an unraised pot pre-flop, so that opponents could have anything at all, meant that it was not a situation in which I was going to press hard with top pair/crappy kicker.) Turn was, indeed, another spade. I checked, Player A bet, Player B called, I folded. I don't recall the river action, but B won it with a small flush.

Next hand, I had some jack/baby garbage in the small blind. Again an unraised pot. Again the flop came to give me top pair, and again with two spades. I took the same tack. (I don't always do this, but the players left in were pretty passive, and a bet could often take down a pot uncontested, so I thought it worthwhile.) Same two players called me as in the previous hand. Again the turn was a third spade. I felt like I was Bill Murray in "Groundhog Day."

I checked, Player A checked, and B led out. My first reaction--which is, finally, getting to the point of this post--was approximately this: "There's no way that two hands in a row this guy can have been dealt two spades, flop a flush draw, and then hit it on the turn." I even went so far as to recall explicitly that if you start with two suited cards the probability of making a flush by the river is only about 6%, so must obviously be somewhat lower than that to hit it by the turn. Surely, I thought, he can't have had a less-than-6% event happen twice in a row--especially not in the same suit.*

The thing is, I know better than to think like this. I have had it drummed into me very thoroughly that things like hands of poker are independent events. The cards have no memory. What happened on the previous hand has zero bearing on the current hand. Hell, I even did well in a post-graduate statistics course back in the day. I know this stuff backward and forward.

What's more, I have an archive of posts making fun of players who don't grasp this simple fact. Here's one typical example. I'll even throw in a story I haven't told here before. In Minnesota, no-limit cash games are illegal, so the card clubs spread only limit. One time I watched a guy with pocket fours hit a set on the river, having called bets and raises from two opponents all the way, with every card on the board larger than his fours. His explanation? "I only called because fours have been hitting so often tonight." Brilliant, eh? In his mind, apparently, the cards had had a meeting at the beginning of the shift, and decided to have the fours be the stars of the show. He believed that enough to bet a substantial amount of money on the theory. (And, wonderfully, he was rewarded for it, thus perversely reinforcing his views.)

All of that history of me both feeling and actually being superior to many typical opponents in the degree to which I have internalized this simple concept is precisely the reason that I think it's so interesting that it would all abandon me, even if only briefly. I actually considered calling Player B in this spot. I might even have done it, if not for fear that Player A was setting a trap for a check-raise with the nut flush. And the only reason I contemplated the call was that kooky notion that he couldn't have made a spade flush on the turn twice in a row.

Fortunately, that thought lasted only about three seconds before rationality grabbed the steering wheel back from the stupid driver who was about to send it careening off the road.

Thinking about this mental lapse afterwards made me realize, for about the millionth time, how fragile our rational understanding of the world can be, and how easily it is penetrated, suppressed, and overwhelmed by erroneous, distorted, biased guesses about what is happening around us.

No matter how much I make fun of players who ask for a new deck of cards or a seat change** in order to change their luck, who play a junk hand on the basis of how lucky it has been for them (obviously the Deuce-Four is not included in the phrase "junk hand"), perform some weird ritual before each hand is dealt, won't touch $50 bills, believe in various good luck/bad luck totems, and so forth, I guess I have to admit that at some scary brain level I am only one odd coincidence away from potentially reverting to a caveman's grasp of the universe. We are deeply hard-wired to see patterns and infer cause-and-effect relationships even where they do not, in reality, exist. It requires constant vigilence to keep that tendency on a very tight leash.

Oh, and yes--Player B did have his second consecutive spade flush. Go figure.



*If it had been crubs, then sure. Because, as I have recently learned, crubs always get there. But we're talking spades here.

**Oooo, here's another story I haven't written about before. I'm pretty sure I told it in one of my early contributions to the Hard-Boiled Poker Radio Show, but I can't find it in any blog post. This was at the Canterbury Card Club in Minnesota. When one player left, the guy in seat 10 claimed dibs on a seat change because, he said, he was card-dead where he was (i.e., his request was not for tactical or comfort reasons, both of which can be perfectly legitimate). But he wanted to wait until he had played his button so that he wouldn't have to post the big blind again. On the next hand, when he was on the button, he ended up hitting quads and won a large pot. The dealer then started to help the guy move his chip stacks to the empty seat. The player practically shouted at the dealer, "What are you doing?" The dealer said, "You said you wanted a seat change." Seat 10, sounding as if the dealer were the world's biggest idiot, said, "You think I still want to change seats after I hit quads???"


Addendum, February 10, 2009

Just found the following story here:

Once football season ended, we put in a Splash the Pot promotion. That is
working out great and actually bringing in some people. It has also caused a few
comical events to occur.

A couple weeks ago, we had three tables going when it was time to splash
the pot. We drew the first table - table 7. Two hours later, we drew the second
table - table 7. At the time of the last drawing, one of the players sitting at
table 7 asked if he could move to table 2. His reasoning for wanting to move was
that table 7 had been drawn two times already and there was no way that it would
get drawn a third time; he felt he improved his chances of contesting for the
extra money on a different table.

I allowed him to move...and then I had him reach into the bag and draw for
the lucky table - table 7. After the pot with the extra money was completed, he
moved back to his original seat.