Poker, pigeons and superstition

No Limit Holdem / Marcus Bateman / 11 January 2010 / Leave a Comment

In 1948, the psychologist B.F. Skinner published an article in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, outlining the interesting results of an experiment he conducted on pigeons. He set up a system where if a pigeon pressed a button, they were rewarded with some food. Obviously the pigeons soon realised this and kept clicking the button. Skinner then changed the system, rewarding the pigeons randomly when they pressed the button, and the resulting behaviours from the pigeons tell us a huge amount about how animals behave when confronted with randomness.

All of the pigeons developed their own personal quirks that they carried out before the clicked the button. If they had been rewarded the time where they had twisted their neck left before going for the button, they soon started constantly moving their head left before clicking the button - regardless of how many times they failed to be rewarded in the future.

This effect is basically what makes poker such a strange and complex game. No matter how hard we fight it, in all animals brains we seem to be hard wired into developing superstitions about random events, and this constantly comes up in poker. Players are rewarded for doing something wrong by the luck of the game, and start to believe that it is the right move, no matter how much new evidence is presented to them; or they do something right and lose, with the result that they stop making the right move in the future.

From having a specific lucky hand to having to have a certain chip protector or faith in a certain type of draw, every poker player in the world has some kind of superstition about the game as far as I have ever seen (feel free to leave a comment if you believe your game is superstition free), and understanding and dealing with superstition is extremely important to long term success.

Although some superstitions are pretty harmless (a lucky object will not affect your game too much), some are quite dangerous. Overplaying certain hands because you believe you always win with them can be a very expensive hobby in the long run, as can going with certain draws constantly regardless of circumstance. Always remember that poker is simply a random game, and no matter how much you want to believe certain superstitions help your game, really faith in anything more than probability will do little more than for your game than twisting its neck did for the pigeon and its pursuit of food.

More Marcus Bateman

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The fog of war and luck
Reducing the variance in poker