For this week’s critical play I chose to play Poker, which is said to have originated from a French game called poque. It is intended to be played among young adults and adults in groups preferably less than 10 people. I played this game in a controlled setting with a group of 5 people with a buy in of $20.
Playing poker puts people at risk for addiction because of how quickly the dynamics can shift within one game and its consequential cycle of loss chasing. As a chance game, its elements of luck and strategy complement each other to make players crave the chase of high highs and avoidance of low lows. For example, in a specific hand, there was $50 in the pot and most of my friends had bet to stay in. The final card was laid out on the table, and after my friend Isac and I revealed that our cards were the same pair, it turned out that my second card was the high kicker. This immediate shift in dynamics was a result of the visible amount of money that was at stake during this specific hand and the accumulation of deception that allowed us to be the last two players. However, after this big win, there was another large dynamic shift. I was dealt two spades, and there were three more dealt onto the table during the hand. It felt like a miniature high knowing that I had one of the highest hands in the game, a flush, so I decided to go all in after the last community card was flipped over. Two players decided to fold, but to my surprise, my friend Manan decided to call my bet. We flipped over our cards, and not only did he have the pocket-spade flush, but he also had the Ace, meaning that his flush beat mine. The feeling of coming so close but losing a big payday is heartbreak in the truest sense. I had felt so confident in my hand, and I got beat with the only card in the deck that could have beat me. And worst of all, I was out of money and out of the game.
This experience of unpredictability and thrill is a testament to Poker’s fast-changing dynamics feeding into the phenomenon of loss chasing. The common experience of “near misses” greatly influences players’ future betting to recoup prior losses. The visibility of the pot in the middle of table and each player’s stack throughout the whole game was the main contributor to my friends and I feeling the effect of near misses, which is the sensation of nearly winning produced by the sight of winning signals adjacent to the payline.
Unlike other chance games like Blackjack or slots, poker is not solely reliant on probability – it its heavily influenced by player psychology. Bluffing and the dynamic created by deceiving other players to make them believe you have a big hand is essential to the game’s allure and players would be less inclined to redeem their loss if it weren’t for the intrinsic incentive of improving one’s own bluffing skills and overall game strategy.
