Cognitive Biases Influence Our Perception of Luck in Poker

Moral Luck: We Tend to Judge Decisions Depending on Luck

In the late 1900s, English moral philosopher Sir Bernard Arthur Owen Williams created the term “moral luck” to describe how differently people judge decisions, actions and outcomes depending on their subjective moral evaluation of the level of luckiness. We try to explain it better with a poker example.

Imagine you standing on the fork of the road, where the left road is a professional poker career but demanding to live in solitude while the right road is a happy family life but without any sign of poker. Let’s say you choose to go left.

If you have success in poker on this road — you will have a decent argument in favor of your choice and something to perceive your loneliness just as payment for your achievement.

But if your decision doesn’t turn out successfully, you will end up feeling unlucky and reproaching yourself harshly not only because you spent time without desired outcome but in the process you also became totally alone without knowing what to do next.

Now replace “you” in this example with “person” and ask yourself: which of these scenarios motivate you to feel empathetic and positive towards the hero and why?

According to moral bias, there is when people start to apply their perception of luck and distort objective reality to evaluate situations fitting to their worldview.

It is more likely that you evaluate a decision to become a poker pro in the first scenario as a positive one because it ends up bringing luck and success. You can even ignore that person paid for this success to become a hermit because it doesn’t matter as long as success is there.

At the same time the second scenario is more grim, so the initial decision seems to be bad because it ended not only without success but also in loneliness. It is fascinating how significant a person’s solitude becomes here because of their unluckiness.

Moral luck is so interesting as a bias because the nature of decision itself never objectively  changes, but people just can’t stand the temptation to retrospectively evaluate it depending on the outcome.

The outcome is not even solely based on luck or actor’s choices because a lot of uncontrollable external things — such as variance, regulators and governments, other players’ decisions, poker operators, etc — are standing in the way of a professional poker career. But we judge subjectively anyway because of our nature.

Self-serving Bias: We Own Our Successes But Not Failures

Another amazing bias was extensively described in the late 1900s by Austrian psychologist Fritz Heider when he tried to comprehend how and why people tend to make attributions based on their own needs and views first.

He found out that this behavior is based on the internal human need to maintain and enhance their self-esteem by distorting perception in a self-serving favorable manner. As a result of this Self-serving Bias, a person always sees their success is an outcome of their own actions and inevitable consequence of their skills and abilities but overlooks failures and shifts blame and responsibility from themself to bad luck, the fault of others, or circumstances.

For example, a Self-serving Biased poker player records every victory, good decision, nice bluff and similar successes to their own account. But if they lose — they perceive their actions as an insignificant factor in comparison to how lucky their opponent was, how bad the dealer dealt, how cruel RNG is, etc.

At the end of the day, this bias prevents people from applying critical thinking to themselves and others because shifting blame and owning successes are too tempting and easy in comparison to owning your mistakes and understanding when you were lucky beyond the quality of your decisions.

Attentional Bias: We Notice One Type of Luck but Not Another

Selective Memory Bias, describing people’s tendency to remember specifically bad or good moments but forget or ignore others, is one of the most frequently studied in relation to poker.

Its popularity obscures the similar but actually more interesting Attentional Bias that is more correlated to addictive behavior such as gambling (gaming addiction). This bias describes the phenomenon of perception distortion under the influence of selective factors in someone’s attention.

For example, if a poker player regularly asks Poker Gods to give them some outs and thinks about these prayers a lot — they will be noticing all situations where their prayers were answered and ignoring all unanswered.

Another manifestation of Attentional Bias is a selective focus on the information that is somehow important for a person at the moment. This one is ambivalent because it can be perceived both as bad and good depending on what exactly is in the person’s focus.

Imagine a player experiencing a downswing: they are busted, badbeated, nullified at the table. In these circumstances they just can’t think about anything but their bad luck. So, their mentality is adjusting to the flow of thoughts and becoming more and more focused on every negative thing around them and less and less capable to notice positive things at the same time.

And this works the other way around. If a player is on the upswing: their bluffs are profitable, they get into ITM again and again, winning pot after pot — their thinking affects all mentality and shifts it towards noticing positive outcomes and ignoring neutral or negative ones.

When in the negative-oriented case the players will clearly be struggling from stacking bad on the worse and sprinkling on them the worst, in the positive-oriented case things can turn even grimmer because of the loss of the ability to notice your faults. This is the moment where Attentional Bias can manifest into Self-serving Bias or even merge with this into one Megazord — Self-serving Attentional Bias.

Can I Stop Being Biased?

The only decent tool to stop yourself from following biases is using critical thinking and analysis to dissect your thought process, track your biases and cut them off:

1. Question your decisions and conclusions. Check them for realism, adequacy and fairness with “Why?”, “For what?”, “Says who?”, etc.
2. Test your knowledge. Do not trust your sense of knowing things: the most powerful biases literally make us adamant in our incompetence. If you feel 100% sure in some situation — check information again.
3. Ask people instead of thinking for them. A lot of cognitive biases are conclusions of the human tendency to internally invent motivation for others, thinking about their thought-processes and judging attitudes depending on subjective perception and incomplete information. To decrease your biasness you should ask people to explain themselves more often — and listen carefully without imposing your understanding as better one or more real than their words. 

Be ready to feel internal pressure, resistance and even physical discomfort while battling your biases: our brain doesn’t like to be challenged by its owner and rebuilt, so it can be very stubborn at defending its flaws.