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Superstition & Poker

When you believe in things that you don't understand, you suffer... says Dave Woods singing the blues...

I never used to be a superstitious person. If I walked under a ladder I didn't believe I'd violated the Holy Trinity. If I broke a mirror I wouldn't bury the pieces in the moonlight. And, if a dog barked in the house of a sick person, I'd be more inclined to think the paperboy was approaching than the grim reaper.

Obviously when I took up playing poker that all changed. It started when I ran cold for the first time last year. And I'm not just talking having a poor patch; I'm talking three or four months of absolute misery. During this period I was counting the hands I was winning rather than the games.

I tried everything to break the hex. Firstly I racked my brains to try and find out what I'd done to deserve it. Had I been particularly grumpy in the mornings? Was I being unreasonable at work? Maybe I wasn't giving enough to charity? Or was it that time I slow-rolled Aces? The trouble is, going down this route didn't offer a solution to my problem. So I stopped playing for a week, thinking a break would fool whoever or whatever was responsible into forgetting about me. Nothing. And then, in desperation, I started picking out lucky clothes, experimenting with different card protectors and adopted other assorted and downright weird practices like only touching the cards with my right hand. Thankfully none of these worked either.

In the end I admitted defeat. And after what seemed like an eternity the cards decided to come back to me. Which makes it all sound so simple - cold runs come and cold runs go, que sera sera Only when I looked back at my play I realised I'd partly been the victim of my own downfall. I'd been so consumed by the unalterable fact that the cards were against me, I'd tried to force things. I started to think that if I was going to lose with good hands, that I should start getting creative and playing cards people couldn't put me on. I called a hand in Omaha when I had Kings and I knew 100% the other player had Aces. I tried playing by turn ultra-aggressively and utterly passive. But there was one common theme to my game - I played like I'd lost before the cards were in the air.

I'm talking about this now because it happened again. It was only a couple of weeks ago but it brought on poker's equivalent of SAD almost immediately.

Have I learnt from experience? Well, last Friday, in a particularly drunken (and what was turning rapidly into an expensive and depressing night) I decided I was better off playing blind and won my only big hand of the night when I flipped 10-10 on a 9-3-5 flop. Thankfully when I sobered up the next day I realised this wasn't a long-term +EV strategy. And besides, I think I've cracked it. I shaved my head last night and today I flopped quad Aces on an A-K-A flop and ran them into someone with Kings. As soon as my girlfriend gets used to the convict look we'll both be winners.

12 November 2007 / About Dave Woods

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Comments (1)

Great post, i like to read about things like this.

I suffered from a VERY similar problem this time last year when playing poker. For 3 months SOLID i was running so bad that i went into serious losses. I've been playing poker for 4 years now (i'm 19) and I've never had that sort of run.

Literally every 80,20 every 70,30 every 60,40 I just couldn't win a single hand when i was ahead. It got to the point where I'd just know i was going to lose the hand the moment i got my money in ahead.

Luckily that period of my poker career is over now and I've made back the terrible losses i had from that period and back into profit. I was starting to become supersticious but now I'm back to my old self again and realise it's a load of irrational, illogical bull crap!

But great read, good post.

Nick | 26 March 2008