There are several key cognitive biases that every poker player should be aware of. The first is the anchoring bias. This bias occurs when the mind is shown a stimulus, even in an irrelevant context, and subsequent cognition is “anchored” to that stimulus. The statement is very abstract, so it requires an example.
Let's say we test two groups and ask each of them to write down a number. Suppose it is the experiment ID number that each had to fill out on their sheet. The first group wrote 1000, the second 10. Then, we asked each of them to guess how much a guided tour of London would cost on average. The first group, which wrote a larger ID number, consistently guessed a higher number than the second, even though the initial larger number was written in a completely irrelevant context. In other words, cognition was anchored closer to the numbers the subjects encountered earlier. Recalling the structure of neural networks in the brain, such behavior is logical – when certain neurons are activated, the nearest neurons are also more likely to be activated, and neurons that correlate with larger numbers are more closely connected to each other than to those that correlate with smaller numbers. This bias shows that the order and manner in which neurons are activated greatly affect your mindset.
You might wonder, what does this have to do with poker? A lot, actually – the anchoring effect often manifests in poker language, gameplay, and review. For example, imagine you are playing against a tilted player making suicidal bluffs, wasting their stack in the most unconventional spots, and you easily call them down. You stack them, they leave, and an aggressive regular joins, and let's say the same situation repeats on the river, where the tilting player made an absurd bluff. Guess what the anchoring bias has set up for your mind?
Of course, you might rely on your intuition. But it is more likely that you will call, even though what happened with the previous opponent has nothing to do with how the current opponent plays. For some reason, it just becomes easier for you to imagine that they are bluffing. So, it becomes easier to call. This is cognitive anchoring bias.
Another very common example of anchoring bias is reviewing your latest poker session. When you review session losses immediately after playing them, it seems to you that you played the best you could in that situation and that all your assumptions were correct. Even though you lost, your choice seems like the best possible decision. But if you go back and review the same hands the next day, you realize how wrong your assumptions were and how unbalanced you were during the game. So, your perception was “anchored” to the previous one, making it harder to objectively evaluate the situation.
There are many ways to influence yourself in this way, such as hand analysis, talking about poker, imagining hands, reviewing old sessions, watching videos, or even engaging in some other activity that encourages thinking about aggression or passivity, all of which have the potential to affect subsequent decisions.
Of course, we can clear our minds of everything. But to achieve this, we first need to learn to live with these biases. They are inherent creations of our brains. By being aware of them, we can more consciously neutralize them.
