I played poker online, and it was a very interesting experience – different from in person poker in many ways. When playing poker, I try to use some form of logic to try to guide the decisions that I make, ie. deciding when to stay in a round versus stay out. However, this only works for a certain percentage of the hands. In many cases, there are hands that I see the end of and realize that I should’ve stayed in. Yet in these cases, the odds of my getting a good hand given the cards that I had were very low. In the opposite but parallel case, I’ve seen people lose with pocket aces which is the best hand that can be dealt. In this way, there is a lot of variability and unpredictability with poker.
It’s this unpredictability that makes the game so addicting. You feel like you don’t need to rely only on skill to win, but that as long as luck is on your side, you are bound to win. Furthermore, when you do win on hands where you bet big on, you double down on the feeling that luck is on your side. On the flip side, losses can be brushed off as being an unlucky hand meaning that a lucky hand is going to be on the way. The hot hand fallacy where you feel like you are on a streak as well as the gambler’s fallacy which is the misconception that if you’re doing poorly, then a good hand is overdue or vice versa are both thought processes that gamblers fall into which keep them addicted.
With poker, since you usually see the final cards laid out in the middle and you know what your hand was as well as the winning hand (sometimes), you are always able to feel the “near miss” feeling. When you know you could’ve won so long as you had decided to stay in, you feel that you can win the next time by just staying in. This mechanism keeps gamblers coming back to the table time and time again.
All in all, gamblers are brought back to their game of choice by the illusion of an easy win so long as luck is on your side. This plays out in feelings of having a win being overdue as well as valuing the expected value of the potential win above the real value that it is. With poker, this feeling is especially intense since people are betting money, sometimes beyond their true means, on the game. There is an intense desire to win and get that feeling of winning big. This want to feel the win often leads people to keep playing beyond their means and even after a big win since they feel like they just want to win more. Games of chance prey upon this illusion of an easy win and can create many addicted people.
