Discover the antidote to cognitive biases and how you can use it to make more money
In the very first post of this newsletter, almost 2 months ago, I covered the reason why you should not play exploitative.
I touched on that reason again in last week’s newsletter about How To Stop Wasting Your Studying Hours. This will be a reccurring theme here at Poker Made Simple.
The thing is that…there is a problem – a big problem. This big problem, of psychological nature, prevents us (frequently) from making the best possible rational decisions at the poker tables. If we want to become better poker players – and my goal here is to make that process easier for you – then we need to talk about this problem.
This problem constitutes the unfortunate finding that we humans exhibit “systematic patterns of deviation from norm and/or rationality in judgment”.
The above statement is the Wikipedia definition for cognitive biases.
Have you ever gone through a substantial downswing? I’d imagine you have, as serious poker players will go through such stretches at least once a year (if playing meaningful volume). You sit to play, motivated to make good decisions, hopeful for the new opportunities that a new day brings, and then…5 minutes into your session you feel getting metaphorically slapped in the face by the deck, which seems to throw you coolers left and right, on purpose. Things can get so bad at some point, that after getting sucked out on multiple times in a row, after seeing your bluffs getting called repeatedly in a short time frame, you start to anticipate the next loss. You make a good hand postflop and you’re already expecting your opponent to have a better hand. You start to bluff on the flop but you feel like you can already anticipate how your triple barrel bluff will get called by 4th pair. The belief and anticipation that things will go wrong for you going forward is so strong at this point that you start changing how you play to avoid the pain. Most people become more passive and more risk averse in these phases.
The above illustration is an example of someone experiencing a heavy cognitive bias – the very popular Gambler’s Fallacy, which is the tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events. You’ve run so poorly in the last X days, weeks or months, that you start to believe that you will run badly the next hand, next day and next week. This is obviously false, as future hand probabilities have absolutely nothing to do with your recent losses. But knowing this doesn’t necessarily make us immune to this bias.
I’ve seen poker players exhibiting countless cognitive biases. In almost every coaching session I can witness a student exhibiting confirmation bias when explaining all the reasons why they played their hand in a given way – while ignoring all the other reasons that would make them choose a different option. In the same hand discussion, they may also exhibit Anchoring Bias, where they get attached to the high absolute value of their hand, established at an early point, and then convince themselves to completely ignore the signs that point to a low relative value. Then, just to add a little bit more spice in the mix, the student may also exhibit the mind projection fallacy – which is when “someone thinks that the way they see the world reflects the way the world really is”. Because they would have played certain hands in their opponent’s shoes in a given way, they unconsciously assume that that’s what the opponent is in fact doing.
Those are 3 very clear examples, but I could go on here – the list is huge.
Now, in this post I don’t want to focus on the problem. I want to bring you a solution. The problem has been established – we cannot trust ourselves completely with decision making at the tables. We’re prone to making an incredible amount of mistakes due to these pscyhological biases that aparently form in our heads
without our consent. What, then, is the solution?
The solution are the facts.
Facts don’t care about opinions. Facts don’t care about emotions. Facts don’t care about cognitive biases. Facts are the naked truth, stripped of any subjective experiences and qualitative conjectures.
Facts are the antidote to cognitive biases.
Facts are the antidote because through meticulous observation of the facts, we can then employ a quantitative analysis in the pursuit of the answers of what’s the best play in any given scenario. No subjective experience required, no qualitative conjectures needed – only numbers and equations. Just like 2+2=4 in any day of the week, regardless of how you’re feeling or your opinion about it, poker can also be that way.
The way to look at facts in poker is by studying population tendencies. Instead of relying on your memory to determine the average behavior of a certain profile in a given spot, you simply refer to the data and what the statistics say about that situation. In this context, the more data, the better, as your statistics will have a bigger sample size, making them more accurate and reliable.
In this post, I want to give you 2 Exploits grounded in facts that can help you overcome cognitive biases and make more money in poker. Let’s begin:
EXPLOIT #1 – Overbluff Against Recreational Players
This first exploit goes against common sense in poker. Most people believe that we shouldn’t bluff against recreational players because they call too much.
Is that true though? What does the data say about it? What are the facts?
It’s funny to me how conclusions that are pretty much quantitative – whether recs call too much or too little – can be formed in the community through subjective experiences. We can’t determine whether recreational players call too much or too little by recalling from memory what we think their behavior looks like. And even if we could do that, we can’t generalize the behavior of a player profile by using our own limited personal experience of dealing with such players. There is no way to find the truth without looking at the data.Every other process will be tainted, inconclusive or ineffective. Yet, almost all of the opinions of the community about how people behave at the tables are formed through subjective experience and anecdotal evidence – all of which are subjected to all of the biases we discussed earlier.
Let’s take a look at the facts then. Below is the screenshot for how often recreational players fold to a river 50% pot bet in a triple barrel line, BB vs BTN SRP (with 15 thousand trials):
Here is where some math is needed to make sense of this number. In order to know whether 42% is too much fold equity or too little, you first need to know how much they are supposed to fold to begin with.
The purpose of the bluffcatching strategy (from a theoretical standpoint) is to make the bettor’s bluffs indifferent between betting and checking. Assuming bluffs have 0% equity (thus, 0EV in the checking line), then calculating how much folding is necessary to make the bluffs 0 EV when betting is quite straightforward:
EV(bluffing) = Pot * Fold% – Bet * (1 – Fold%) => If pot is 1, and Bet = 0,5 (half pot), then EV(bluffing) = F – 0.5 + 0.5F. We need the EV of bluffing to be zero, so:
0 = 1.5F – 0.5 => F = 0.5/1.5 = 0.3333 or 33%
I used the full equation here so you can see how easy it is to make these calculations; however, the number above can be calculated using the formula alfa = s/(1 + s), where s is the bet size in pots. This is the formula for the famous alfa variable of optimal poker. Alfa represents not only the fold frequency of the optimal player facing a given bet size, but also the bluff to value ratio of the optimal bettor player. When betting half pot, an optimal player should have 0.333 bluff for every value bet. This ensures that the bettor has exactly the same percentage of bluffs in the betting range as the pot odds he is laying to the bluffcatcher (25% in this case) – which allows the bettor to make the bluffcatchers indifferent between calling and folding.
Upon our above calculation, we see that a bluffcatching player can only fold 1/3 of his range if he wants to make the bettor indifferent with his bluffs. Yet, recreational players in real games are folding 42%, a 9% overfold. Let’s calculate how much money we can make bluffing recreational players in this line:
Assuming the pot is around 22 big blinds by the river in the triple barrel line, the EV of bluffing a recreational player with the half pot sizing is:
EV(bluffing) = Pot * Fold % – Bet * (1 – Fold%) = 22 * 0.42 – 11 * 0.58 = 2.86.
We make 2.86 big blinds every time we bluff a recreational player in the triple barrel line, using the half pot sizing on the river. Using this number, we can even calculate how much equity we need to make checking back the best play:
EV(checking) = Pot * Equity => 2.86 = 22 * Equity => Equity = 0.13 or 13%. What this calculation means is that if we get to the river with a hand that has less than 13% equity against a recreational player, bluffing it makes more money than checking it.
The triple barrel line, despite being clearly profitable to bluff, is one of the least profitablelines to bluff recreational players. Pretty much any other line offers a higher return. What that means is that bluffing recreational players is profitable in virtually every single line of the game tree. The numbers don’t lie.
The next time you find yourself on the river against a rec with a bluffing hand, there is no need to be afraid, to anticipate getting called by 4th pair, to get discouraged because your blockers are not great. You have seen the numbers, and there is no arguing against them. You can bluff with no guilt or insecurity, because you know for a fact that your play is good in the long run.
Of course, even with such a data oriented approach there are still issues. The most important one being that the 42% fold equity we saw is just an average – different board textures will exhibit different behaviors. The most precise study would include the expected fold equities across different board textures, and most importantly would try to find outliers where it’s not profitable to bluff. That however is a more advanced approach, only necessary when you have covered all the basics first.
EXPLOIT #2 – Overcall Against Recreational Players
If you have watched my videos, this one is no surprise. I’ve been saying this since day 1 on YouTube with my videos.
Recreational players bluff more than regs. Much more than regs.
The reason for this is that they play super wide ranges preflop. For example, they cold call over 50% of hands against any position from the BB:
They also play very passively and scared with their value bets postflop. The combination of checking rivers with clear value bets and them having an absurd amount of weak hands in their range leads to massive overbluffs.
A few months ago, I asked people how often they thought a rec was bluffing in a very specific line postflop, on an A high board:
Only 20% of the people answered correctly – close to 50% bluffs. That’s right, when they go raise, bet, bet on an A high board BB vs SB, you can expect to see around 50% bluffs in their betting range.
Realize that even if someone overbets 2x pot into you, they can only bluff 40% of the time before overbluffing. 50% bluffs is a 10% overbluff relative to balanced for a 2x pot sizing; a 17% overbluff relative to pot sizing; and a 25% overbluff relative to half pot sizing.
That’s crazy when you consider how the community perceives recreational players. Almost half of the people in the quiz above thought they would have close to 0 bluffs!
Don’t let confirmation bias get the better of you. The numbers don’t lie. Recreational players massively overbluff rivers. So, if you want to make more money, start clicking the call button against them.
I For more exploits grounded in facts that you can apply against your opponents at the tables, check out the video below where I show them in real time by Playing & Explaining:
ALL EXPLOITS REVEALED | $500 Zone Play & Explain
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Thanks for reading . See you next week.
Until then – keep it simple.
Saulo