This Fish Chums
Visionary
Silver Level
A lot of people, including myself, think we have bad luck because we experience way more bad beats then good beats. Good beats happen, but the fact is they don't happen as often as the bad beats do.
In response to this, everyone regurgitates the same old, "We remember the bad more than we remember the good." In actuality, psychology tells us that people, especially gamblers, tend to remember the good more than the bad because that is what tells us if we keep playing we will eventually win the way we did before. I first learned about it in my college class, but you can read a little about it in this article on gambling (quickest Google search article I could find): https://magazine.byu.edu/article/gambling-what-are-the-odds/
So, for years I've puzzled over this. Why do people believe they get bad beats so much more often than good beats when we are programmed to remember good and unusual events more than bad ones? And I finally figured it out.
We see 100% of our bad beats because we can see our cards. This means if we get a bad beat 5 out of 100 hands, we know for a fact we had 5 bad beats
. However, when it comes to a good beat we only see the ones which end in a showdown AND which the opponent shows their hand. If we get a good beat on the river and they muck, we never know it was a good beat. If we catch a good beat on the turn and they fold to our all-in, we never know it was a good beat. So even if we had the same 5 out of 100 good beats, we may only "know" about 1 or 2 of them . Thus making it much more likely for us to think we have such horrid luck, when the truth is, we're just blinded to most of our good luck.
In response to this, everyone regurgitates the same old, "We remember the bad more than we remember the good." In actuality, psychology tells us that people, especially gamblers, tend to remember the good more than the bad because that is what tells us if we keep playing we will eventually win the way we did before. I first learned about it in my college class, but you can read a little about it in this article on gambling (quickest Google search article I could find): https://magazine.byu.edu/article/gambling-what-are-the-odds/
So, for years I've puzzled over this. Why do people believe they get bad beats so much more often than good beats when we are programmed to remember good and unusual events more than bad ones? And I finally figured it out.
We see 100% of our bad beats because we can see our cards. This means if we get a bad beat 5 out of 100 hands, we know for a fact we had 5 bad beats
. However, when it comes to a good beat we only see the ones which end in a showdown AND which the opponent shows their hand. If we get a good beat on the river and they muck, we never know it was a good beat. If we catch a good beat on the turn and they fold to our all-in, we never know it was a good beat. So even if we had the same 5 out of 100 good beats, we may only "know" about 1 or 2 of them . Thus making it much more likely for us to think we have such horrid luck, when the truth is, we're just blinded to most of our good luck.