Quote:
Originally Posted by Arouet
Glad that you're doing well SCJ!
Maybe post a little more detail for the riggies. If I recall, you were a soft riggie at one time yourself. Maybe describe for them what you used to believe, why you used to believe it, and how your perception is different now (I know you have a bit: but do you notice the same things that you did before, what else do you notice now in addition to that? etc.)
First, a correction on my previous post. I said "highly equitable" when I clearly meant "high equity". Anyway...
I believe that most of my misbeliefs centered around one thing: Action Cards (Preflop/Flop/etc. to spur opponents into betting).
I have come up with every theory in the book on these things and tested out a multitude of them to see if any of them had any credence. Most of them I was able to throw out very quickly while others took a longer period of time.
When we have 44, the villain has QQ and the flop comes AQ4 we may tend to think that this was "on purpose" to generate action between ourselves and the villain and is a hand we tend to remember for quite awhile (especially if it had a large cash game pot or was a tournament knockout). But how many flops have we seen with 44, missed, and folded away without a second thought? Or how many times have we hit on an AQ4 board and stacked someone holding AK? How many times did they quickly fold their JJ to our aggression?
This leads us to my main misconception. We rarely remember our small pot victories or losses beyond a week or even a day. But the big pots are much more clearly available to our memory. The bigger pots tend to be situations where both players had a very strong hand/draw. So obviously in these situations the board fits both players very well so may seem as if it were designed to. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe this bias is the survivorship bias. We remember the big pots; big pots tend to have big hands on coordinated flops; thus we remember big hands on coordinated flops more often than others.
The mind is a wonderful invention, but it's own failures are precisely what cause us to see things that simply don't exist. Just as optical illusions, such as this one
http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/geom_Ki...lge/index.html , fool our mind into seeing things not as they truly are, our strong tendency to fit the random world into our "cause and effect" view of the world twists us into making connections between events that have nothing to do with each other.
Losing a tournament on the bubble sucks. But it MUST happen to someone. Likely that person had a good hand or they wouldn't be putting themselves at risk. So it stands to reason that they will likely bust out with either the best of it or a cooler. By playing good poker we create the very bias on the situation that we claim is working against us. Why would we risk a bad situation on the bubble? We wouldn't. So therefore, all of our painful bubbles will likely be suckouts or coolers by our own doing. Of course, doubling on the bubble is harder to recall later on despite it occuring fairly often.
Bottom line is this: Every false impression my mind perceived was disproven through my own database of hands. Does this mean I'm an idiot? Of course not. It means I am human. And anyone else that falls into the "online poker is rigged" category is likely in the same boat. Your mind is doing its job and telling you something is wrong. In the optical illusion you can pull out a ruler and verify the lines are in fact straight and not bulging. In online poker, you can use your database to find the gaps in your biased memory.
If you do not use a database, it will be like looking at the illusion without a ruler or straight edge. You will never be able to verify reality. Some people need no verification and accept that randomness is something that our minds cannot fully measure on their own. While others, like us, tend to question things when we see something that seems to be "not right".
I don't blame anyone for thinking online poker is rigged, because it shows that their mind is doing its job in seeking patterns. However, finding patterns where none exist and then purporting that they do exist is, in my opinion, the pathway to madness.
If we accept our own fallacies, we can view poker and the world in a clearer light.
Luck be with you