Cognitive Biases in Poker

Stevepdx

Stevepdx

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I think it would benefit everyone to familiarize themselves with these common cognitive biases. A cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in judgment, whereby inferences about other people and situations may be drawn in an illogical fashion.


Negativity Bias
Negativity bias is the psychological phenomenon by which humans have a greater recall of unpleasant memories compared with positive memories. People are seen to be much more biased to the avoidance of negative experiences. They seem to behave in ways that will help them avoid these events. With this, humans are much more likely to recall and be influenced by the negative experiences of the past.


Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias (also called confirmatory bias or myside bias) is the tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way.


The Dunning-Kruger Effect
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude. Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding.



How might these biases show up in your poker game? In your opponents poker game? How can you avoid them? How can you exploit them?
 
Stevepdx

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Negativity bias: "my aces always get cracked!" "I get sucked out on every time!" "I folded AK pre from the unopened button because big blind always hits the flop."
 
rifflemao

rifflemao

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The Dunning-Kruger Effect
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude. Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding.

Reminds me of this quote by Chris Moneymaker:

"The beautiful thing about poker is that everyone thinks they can play."
 
Stevepdx

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Confirmation bias: You think your aces get cracked more often than they should. You disregard when they hold up as "just lucky"

Conversely let's say 67o is your favorite starting hand because you believe it hits the most for you. You'll count the hits and forget the misses.
 
Stevepdx

Stevepdx

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The Dunning-Kruger Effect: Often when you are incompetent, you are unconsciously incompetent. This is the case for the crowd that thinks the deck is somehow stacked against them. That they're good- but they get bad cards, something like that.

Because you're unconscious of your incompetence, you can rate yourself higher. You don't know what you don't know.

If you're conscious of your incompetence, you are going to lower your scores on self assessment because you have become aware of what you don't know.
 
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