A good poker player will include several key poker skills such as efficient bankroll management, good game selection and a very good strategic knowledge of the game. These are some of pokers quantifiable skills and it is very easy to evaluate any player based on these skills. However, there is a psychological side involved in every poker game. Many professionals may even speak of several different theories they may have developed on their own about how to make better decisions. In reality this can be a completely different to apply altogether.
However, some of the latest psychology experiments conducted under controlled environments have provided fresh insight into the art and psychology behind the process of decision making in poker. Here are some ways you can try to fix your mental strategies and make good decisions based on psychology instead of a standard set of rules.
Effect of choice blindness
Choice blindness is a psychological condition where you tend to overestimate your knowledge and this affects the decisions that you make. This condition can be explained through an experiment that was conducted where participants were handed photographs of two people at a time and asked to rate them based on physical attractiveness. Once they had made their choices, they would be provided with the photographs once again and asked why they made their choice. The scientists would provide some photographs that were rated low and the participants would fail to recognize the picture and still continue to explain why they found the person attractive. So what you can learn from this experiment is the fact that the reasons you may give for your decisions after making them need not be highly accurate and as a result are not worthy of relying upon. If you are a habitual note maker, then you may not be making notes properly or feeding erroneous tips to yourself.
Effect of cognitive load
While the choice blindness may not exactly provide an enlightening insight on your poker game, cognitive load can have a huge impact on crippling your decision making ability. You can use the same to put your opponent under pressure and tip them towards making a bad move. Cognitive load is based on the fact that the short term memory can hold only as much as 7 difference pieces of information in the memory. So whenever your short term memory is exhausted, the instinctive system takes over compared to the cognitive part of the brain. This is because the cognitive brain can either hold the memory or make a decision.
In instances when it is fully occupied, remembering some detail in the cognitive part of the brain which is primarily involved in decision making is the instinctive part of the brain that would instead make a bad decision. This was demonstrated in an experiment with people who were asked to remember 7 digits and then asked to choose between a chocolate cake or a fruit salad. The result was that a large number of people chose chocolate cake compared to those who had given less than 7 numbers to remember. You can take advantage of this situation whenever you have reason to believe your opponent is occupied with a number of different trade-offs. This is when their rational decision making ability is crippled. In fact, studies have revealed that at this moment a drop by about 13 IQ points is achieved.
How to benefit from these studies?
It can be very difficult to draw accurate conclusions from these studies. But what you can prevent using these studies is poor decision making. You should take care not to get yourself into any of these scenarios. There could also be several other factors that could affect your performance such as these disturbances which should be identified and avoided at all cost. You won’t be able to notice these minute lapses in decision making at first but if you continue to concentrate on these issues, over time, you will be able to recognize when you are about to make a bad decision . You should also play close attention to physical signals such as fatigue that could cause a lapse in decision and implement ways to avoid such situations.