Incentives to support decision-making (Part II)

The experiments discussed last time show that there are certain patterns of risk seeking. When people perceive that they have equal opportunities, or that they are starting from scratch, they are more likely to avoid risk. But when people already have some money and are threatened that they will lose it, they try to take risks - they would rather try to protect their winnings and risk it all than accept certain defeat.

Of course, in practice, the relationship between risk aversion and risk appetite is highly player-dependent. It also depends on how heavily the player has gambled, whether he risks squandering his money completely or losing only part of it, etc. However, whatever the case, incentives have a very strong lemial effect on risk taking.

Now let's turn to ourselves. When do you tend to be risk averse? When do you choose to take risks? Everyone has their own triggers that will lead to one choice or another. Explore the situations that trigger you to do one thing or another.

Finally, in a game as complex as poker, risk-taking is not as simple as in the above experiments. In fact, most of the time, when you lose a lot, you will tend to take more risks, and when you are ahead, you will be more risk averse. This is due to the attachment to certain incentives, such as "draws" or "5 buy ins up".

For example, let's say you're up two buyins and you find yourself in a situation where you have to make a big three-buyin veto bluff. If you get +EV odds by bluffing, but have to squander all your winnings from the previous call, you will usually try to avoid the bluff. The player becomes cautious and risk-averse because he can effectively protect his winnings by just folding. Now let's look at the reverse scenario: you are up two buys, but you are deep, there is a big pot on the table of over 400bb, and if you folded, you would be extremely unhappy with the result of the session. In this case, most people would be willing to take the risk and try to protect their winnings (just like in the experiments discussed above). However, this situation is quite rare in poker, and the first risk-averse scenario is much more common.

So, when faced with a situation where they are risking their winnings, many players will fold easily to avoid the +EV risk. And the paradox is that if they waited 6 hours and started a new session, they would take that risk easily. Players would become more willing to take the risk simply by making a 6-hour gap between two hands.

Such situations show how someone's "everything" functions as an implicit incentive. But we already know that this is highly subjective. Some players use certain incentives for one session, others for all sessions of the day (e.g. trying to protect winnings from previous sessions). The unit of time during which new incentives are chosen is called a period. Different lengths of periods produce different risk-taking behaviour. How could we use this information?

There is no secret reason why we should choose one period over another, the periods are of a completely arbitrary length. But most of the time we don't choose a particular period, it simply comes from our state of mind at the time. Programmes such as PokerTracker or HoldemManager, daily graphs or Excel sheets, the simple ritual of telling someone how today went - all of these help us to come to the conclusion that the day is the most natural period and offer us the opportunity to adapt our daily incentives. But will it do us any good?

Theoretically, we should be at an optimal level of risk-taking, depending on our bankroll, our emotional stability, the type of game we play. We don't want our behaviour to take us away from the optimal level Everyday incentives will cause frequent fluctuations in your risk appetite (they will change continuously over time) and will create deviations from the optimal level of risk-taking, just like emotional fluctuations.

Instead, you should try to separate self-awareness narratives from daily achievements. Stop thinking about what you have to do that day or what you have to go through. Try setting PokerTracker or HoldemManager to show your weekly results, or monthly. With more practice, it is possible to break through this paradigm that daily results are your poker experience.

Of course, the new story can only be superimposed on the old one by repeating it to yourself over and over again, so tell yourself the new story over and over again: 'How I turned out today is completely irrelevant. This day is nothing special. It is all one long session."

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