Applications To Poker

Poker offers several opportunities to illustrate cognitive dissonance.

Tight As a Mule

Beginners generally play too many hands, as explained in this article. As they improve their game, they learn that they have to refrain from getting involved as much as they would like, and be very selective about their starting hands. This is a boring experience, but a necessary one.

After many hours of play, they eventually got into the habit of playing tight, like the well-known experts say in the books. One’s got to do what one’s got to do. Then, one day, they find a “loose goose” at their table, playing a lot of hands. They already played against loose players before, but this one seems quite lucky. He just racked again a big pot with 52s. “Well, maybe he’s lucky for now, but he has it coming!” they think.

So they fold, fold and fold again, until they find two beautiful aces when they look at their cards. They raise, four times the big blind, and the loose player calls. The flop is mildly connected, though not extremely menacing. All hell breaks loose, and when the smoke clears, the aces haven’t improved, while the loose players flips over two pairs with T8. Yuck!

Now the tight player is extremely frustrated. He played tight as one should. He raised preflop. He raised afterwards. He played tight and aggressive. And he lost to a clueless player! The tight player cannot resist making a comment: “How can you call a four BB raise with that junk?”. His opponent replies that he won 90BB at the end of the hand, so it seems like a good investment to him. The nerves!

Maybe you already took part or witnessed such a dialogue. Pretty often, the loose player outplayed the tight one. The fact is that No Limit Hold’em ring games give many opportunities for the loose player, especially when the game is somewhat short-handed and the stacks are deep.

There is a clear dissonance between the values of the tight player (tight is right) and the way he lost his stack. As we saw, he is going to try to alleviate the tension - but since learning to play tight has been so long and difficult, he is prone to fail to recognize that his opponent made a correct play, and conversely he may put down his loss to bad luck against a foolish opponent. Insults are partly a way to add extra consonant cognitions: “I insult you, because you are outrageously lucky; you suck, and my insults show I mean it”.

He may even post his “mishap” on some forum, looking for support - and extra consonant cognitions. That’s partly why people tell or post their bad beats.

A Nice Room

There are now many available online poker rooms on the market, a few big ones, with lots of players (and more chances to find a juicy table), and many smaller ones, trying to get their share.

The small rooms often offer bonuses, that is, they credit your account with free cash once you have completed the required conditions (playing a given number of hands). They also offer other features, like a “customized service” for the local country of the player (translated software, right to chat in the local language…).

There may be some advantages, but it is generally more important to find good tables, use reliable software, have an efficient support service, and deposit his money on a serious company account. The major rooms are generally better in these areas.

A player who deliberately decides to play most of the time on a smaller room sometimes experiences cognitive dissonance, especially if this room is far from perfect. He knows that there are presumably better services out there, but he plays here anyway.

Consequently, he is sometimes going to praise the small room, so as to increase consonant cognitions. He can also minimize the quality of the other rooms, to reduce dissonant cognitions. He may even start to proselytize. If you know other operating systems than Windows, you probably know what we are talking about.

Note that these examples do not imply that the major rooms are better than the small ones in every respect (or that the mentionned OS is the best!); they just need to be better in some areas so that cognitive dissonance be experienced.

It’s All Instinct

The good ol’ debate over poker education. Some claim that books, strategies and maths are useless for poker, since it all about psychology and situation. Others argue that it is vital to study them. Some people also believe there is a “killer instinct” that cannot be taught: you have it or you don’t. Nature vs nurture, remember?

Quite often, their position justifies their respective attitudes: they don’t read books, don’t know odds, or on the contrary spend an inordinate amount of time accumulating technical information, to the detriment of solid practical experience.

Their failure to do things that seem beneficial to their game creates a dissonance, and they reduce it by minimizing the importance of these things, the same way the smoker minimizes the risks of cancer in his arguments. Being assertive both serves the purpose of strengthening one’s position and seeking support for additional cognitions.

Again, this is the case for some people, not everybody. You’ll have to use good judgement to figure out if cognitive dissonance plays any role in someone’s beliefs or attitude. It’s all too easy to resort to psycho-mumbo-jumbo for dialectic purposes. Remember that you may well be the one under influence!

Unbeatable Thursday Night Game

Many players already had the occasion to play against complete beginners in a friendly home game. Pretty often, several players need to be reminded the rules before starting. This looks like a perfect line up for the more experienced player to steal all the show.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t always end up favorably for him, in spite of his undisputed superior knowledge of the game. How can it be?

Generally, such a player expects to crush the game: the situation is so perfect. However, he often doesn’t realize that he will have to face unusual difficulties: his friends are going to play extremely unconventionally, make bold bluffs, big overcalls, undetectable slowplays, and baffling all-ins. It is going to be hard to put these guys on some hand! This is often not the kind of problems our player is used to facing, especially if he is not playing for a very long time himself. Technically, there is room for a lot of mistakes.

Psychologically, this is quite frustrating for the more experienced player. There is a clear dissonance between his hard learned knowledge and the current result. As we saw, it would be much more costly to acknowledge that his knowledge is not that useful, than finding other ways to reduce the dissonance. Adding extra consonant cognitions is generally the most direct way; and what is more consonant than taking their money right here and right now?

As a consequence, our player is going to be too eager to run over his opponents. This means he will tend to abuse bluffs, make dubious calls, or push his hands too far. Since the game is generally already fairly wild, huge variance is to be expected, and on a short period almost anything can happen. That’s how a supposedly better player doesn’t fare well against total beginners.

Wrench In The Works

It is also possible to stimulate your opponent’s dissonant cognitions, in order to entice him take actions reducing the dissonance - but actually against his best interest. This is what we call pushing someone’s buttons.

We all have our bag of tricks, so let’s just discuss one example. An opponnent just made a tough laydown; he agonized for a long time before throwing his hand away. For all you know, he was not acting. Now, he is going to be assailed by many opposing thoughts and feelings: some comforting him in his decision (I could not call), other suggesting that he chickened out. A savvy opponent is never going to show his cards here, so our player will be left with his doubts.

Now, he is going to want to reduce the tension. Since he hesitated so long, he probably had a relatively close call, in his opinion at least; thus, the “I could not call” argument is probably not that strong. He can increase its importance, but not to a great extent. The “chicken feeling”, however, is certainly stronger and more nagging - but it can be conveniently minimized with subsequent actions. Each future significant call will be an extra cognition “proving” that he is no chicken. And since he currently wants them badly, you can probably expect more calls on his part in the next few hands.

This example is not complicated because the involved cognitions are pretty obvious, but you can come up with more intricate cases. The idea is to identify your opponent’s conflicting cognitions, figure out how he is likely to reduce the dissonance, and find out ways to exploit it.

Be Tuned In

Knowing what happens in your opponents’ head and how they are likely to react gives a tremendous edge for a poker player. The best players can play on this and manipulate their opponents as they try to reduce cognitive dissonance. But remember that we all can fall for the same traps, and that knowing what the flu looks like in a microscope doesn’t prevent anybody from catching it.

(1) comments

Related Items:

• The Wrong Paradigm
• Transactional Analysis
• Why Do You Play?