Slanted Science

Your mother always warned you about gambling, and now scientists have validated her opinion: a paper just published in The Journal Of Gambling Studies shows that even when you win, you still lose.

Oh, Life, is there no end to your cruelty?

The work was conducted by Kyle Siler, a sociology doctoral candidate at Cornell University, New York. He took advantage of the fact that the advent of online poker playing has meant that an incredible number of hands get played every day. In fact, his paper is based on studying twenty-seven million hands of poker.

Check out the sample sizes used in other scientific papers – those studying the effects of a gene within a population, for example – and you’ll see that this is approximately 1,000 times larger than the biggest of them.

So, he had plenty of data points. What did he find out? Well, that poker players – particularly the novices – become so empowered by the good feelings of winning many small hands they fail to recognize that their occasional large losses actually outweigh them. Kyle puts it this way:

The relationship between winning a large proportion of hands and profitability is negative, and is strongest in small-stakes games.

So, once again the little guy loses out.

He also found that holding a small pair (meaning twos through sevens) was more valuable for small-time players than was holding medium pairs (eights through Jacks).

To be honest, we have always been advocates of playing with a large pair. But whatever floats your boat. (That was #118 in the series ‘Breast Gags And Puns For Amateurs’. Thank you.)

Back to business: the reason small pairs are less dangerous? Because their intrinsic worth is more obvious to novice players. If the board begins showing paint, they can accept that their pair is at risk. If, however, the same thing occurs when they have pocket nines, for example, then their appraisal of their own hand’s situational strength is blurred by their feeling that it is inherently a strong hand.

We finish with a quote from Kyle’s paper. He’s a sociologist, so it’s all a bit waffly and long-winded, but we think he’s trying to say that newish poker players should put their efforts into rationally assessing their hand’s worth as the community cards are revealed, and not be immune to throwing away a medium pair:

Adopting risk-neutrality to maximize expected value, aggression and appropriate mental accounting, are cognitive burdens on players, and underpin the rationality work––reconfiguring of personal preferences and goals––players engage in to be competitive, and maximize their winning and profit chances

Don’t Hold Your Breath, But This May Lead To: a thousand new books full of poker advice on Amazon, no doubt. The best of which  we have collected for you below.