Many players let their superstitious thinking affect their play. Some superstitions are harmless, but most can hurt your long-term winnings if they are present in your game for too long. Poker is a game of mathematics and objective thinking about things and events that affect your hand. Bringing fairies and elves into your decisions will undoubtedly hurt the quality of your play. Yet almost everyone I play with regularly today, and have played with in the past, has, and continues to, be negatively influenced by superstitions to some degree. Even high-stakes players do crazy things based on faulty superstitions. However, they survive in the game because they do so on a minimal scale, leaving the rest of their play flawless.
Are you superstitious after all?
Let me tell you a little story to illustrate this. Many years ago, a good friend of Dan Harrington and I were playing high stakes limit hold'em every day at the Commerce Casino in Los Angeles, California. He is Asian. As far as we know, many Asian gamblers are quite superstitious, most winning players tend to have some harmless quirks. One day, he was winning quite a bit and had already caught too many premium hands for one day, good for him. So, in my manipulative joke, I told him that his hat must be bringing him good luck. Later, I tried to bet Dan that he would be wearing that same hat the next day as well, and I offered him good odds to take the bet. Dan didn't take it because he knew I was right. Sure enough, he wore the same hat the next day, but this time he lost a lot of hands and never wore it again. This was a case of silly superstition and basically harmless, unless he changed his play because of it. Yet, I see many players who believe in lucky clothes and wear them every time they play, just because they once won big pots with them. Do you do that?
There are many things that can cost a player dearly and eventually make him go broke. One of them is saying, in a game that depends so much on thinking, that it wasn't that player's lucky day. Good games don't come around that often, but a player should never base his decisions on results.
Another stupid reaction to past events is when a player plays more cards, i.e. plays looser, during a hand after having a good run, thinking that the previous round influences the cards that will come next. In reality, cards have no memory, and if shuffled correctly, everything becomes random, with random results, based on the percentages of events. Another type of this same thinking is a person who folds a hand with a draw just because in previous hands their draws did not hit, even when the pot odds are favorable for the play. They are practically throwing money away because of their belief in some luck that affects the order of the cards. The opposite is also true, chasing draws or trying to improve your hand without the correct pot odds can be very harmful.
Changing your deck is a common strategy to try to change someone's bad luck. But it only works in the mind, and ends up becoming a way of blaming something external for your mistakes, thinking that the dealer is influencing your results. The worst part is that it will draw attention to your desperation, giving the attentive players at the table a weapon to use against you. It is much easier to beat a player who has shown that his play is being affected, negatively or positively, by something other than the game itself.
Some people change their seats at the table when they lose, thinking that they are in an unlucky position. There are no unlucky positions at the table. However, this superstition can actually help them. You see, when we lose, one of the reasons could be the position of the other players at the table. Maybe a very aggressive player to your left is taking advantage of you. In instances like this, changing seats can actually be advantageous. This situation is one of those where the player with his silly superstition did something that actually helped his game, rather than hindered it. Maybe he was lucky to have this superstition.
Another situation where superstition works is when people think that certain casinos bring them luck. No casino brings you more luck than any other, but it can sometimes be advantageous to play at different casinos. A player may feel more comfortable at one or another. The players at each casino may be more receptive or easier to beat, for example. So, a player may have better results at one place than another, but often they cannot understand the reasons for these different results. In this regard, I think it is worth thinking a little about where you play. Definitely go to the place where you play best, even if you do not know how or why this happens. This applies to the games you play as well. Sometimes you win because of something that was beyond your control. Many times it was due to your attitude or a lower rake that affected your winnings. It is not the luck factor that matters, the skill factor fits better here.
Superstitions will always arise when playing poker. It is in our nature. With random things, it is very difficult to avoid thinking about external influences when events occur that seem very unlikely. We need to understand these events, and not let our ignorance become a disadvantage, leaving the disadvantages to our opponents.
Translated and adapted from the original (written by Ray Zee): Are You Superstitious in your Poker Playing?
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