Last time, the discussed experiments showed that there are certain patterns of risk-seeking. When people perceive that they have equal opportunities or are starting from scratch, they are more likely to avoid risk. But when people already have some money and are threatened with losing it, they try to take risks—they would rather try to protect their winnings and risk everything than accept a certain loss.
Of course, in practice, the relationship between risk aversion and risk-seeking tendencies greatly depends on the player. It also depends on how much the player is on tilt, whether they risk completely wasting their money or losing only part of it, and so on. However, incentives have a very significant impact on taking risks.
Now let's turn to ourselves. When are you inclined to avoid risk? When do you choose to take risks? Everyone has their own triggers that lead to one choice or another. Explore what situations encourage you to act one way or another.
Finally, in a complicated game like poker, taking risks is not as simple as in the mentioned experiments. In fact, most of the time, when you have lost a lot, you will be more inclined to take risks, and when you are up, you will avoid risks. This is due to attachment to certain incentives, such as “breaking even” or “5 buy-ins up.”
For example, let's say you are up two buy-ins and find yourself in a situation where you need to make a big bluff worth three buy-ins. If you get +EV odds for bluffing but have to waste all your previous winnings by calling, you will most likely try to avoid this bluff. The player becomes cautious, unwilling to take risks, as they can effectively protect their winnings by simply folding. Now let's consider the opposite scenario: you are up two buy-ins but are deeply invested, there is a big pot over 400bb on the table, and folding would leave you particularly dissatisfied with the session's result. In this case, most people would be inclined to take risks and try to protect their winnings (just like in the discussed experiments). However, such a situation in poker is quite rare; the first scenario, where risk is avoided, is much more common.
So, when faced with a situation where they risk their winnings, most players will easily fold, trying to avoid +EV risk. The paradox is that if they waited 6 hours and started a new session, they would easily take such a risk. Players would become more inclined to take risks simply by taking a 6-hour break between two hands.
Such situations show how someone's “all-in” functions as an implicit incentive. However, we already know that this is very subjective. Some players use certain incentives for one session, others for all sessions of the day (e.g., trying to protect previous session winnings). The time unit over which new incentives are chosen is called a period. Different length periods create different risk-taking behaviors. How could we use this information?
There is no secret reason why we should choose one period over another; periods are entirely arbitrary. But usually, we do not choose a specific period; it simply arises from our current state of mind. Programs like PokerTracker or HoldemManager, daily graphs, or Excel sheets, a simple ritual of telling someone how your day went—all of this helps conclude that a day is the most natural period and suggests applying daily incentives. But will this benefit us?
Theoretically, we should be at the optimal level of risk-taking, depending on our bankroll, emotional stability, and the type of game we are playing. We do not want our behavior to deviate from the optimal level. Daily incentives will cause frequent fluctuations in your tendency to take risks (as they will continuously change) and create deviations from the optimal level of risk-taking, just as emotional fluctuations do.
Instead, you should try to separate self-awareness narratives from daily winnings. Stop thinking about what you should do on that particular day or what you have to go through. Try setting PokerTracker or HoldemManager to show your weekly or monthly results. With more practice, it is possible to break the paradigm that daily results are your poker experience.
Of course, a new narrative can only be placed on the old one by constantly repeating it to yourself. So, tell yourself the new story again and again: “How I performed today is completely irrelevant. This day is nothing special. Everything is one long session.”
