I played in a no-money online poker tournament this week for the critical play on PokerNow, a platform acquired by Rio Gaming in 2022. This platform is built for casual, quick competitions with real players, professional tournaments, alongside semi-casual poker enjoyers.
I think Poker is addictive not because it makes players feel like chance is something they can outplay – just bad luck that leads to minor losses – whereas skill can win them the game. This keeps players emotionally and psychologically invested in waiting through or playing those losses or bad hands in order to win big later on.
While roulette is addictive, experts agree that poker is more addictive. And that is because poker players feel like they’re in control. They call poker a skill game, memorize stat tables, and play often to practice. And while that skill definitely influences and increases a player’s odds on the table overtime, there is still a significant amount of randomness in each hand and players, including myself, can overestimate the effect of chance on individual hands. A pocket pair of aces can still always lose to three fours or a straight on the table. A seven-two hand can win if 2 – 2 – 7 ends up on the table. (below pictures are good hands losing plays because of the community cards) Because of this, when players lose, they tend to blame luck as opposed to skill, making the game seem not inherently addictive or probability-based. When I lose a hand, I say “I’ll get better cards next time,” and I continue playing, feeling like I can win the next round, regardless of the outcome of this round.
And sometimes you get lucky, and that win keeps you going, just like in slots where small wins keep you hooked expecting larger ones.
One of the other most addictive things about poker is the uncertainty. You don’t know what the flop or the river is going to be. You don’t know if your hand is going to be the best or the worst. Any hand in the game can win or lose against any other hand in the game given a certain set of cards that are opened. But in poker, you don’t get to figure out what those cards are unless you gamble and stay in the game. In the same way, if you are in the hand, and you are deciding whether to stay in the hand, you don’t get to look at your opponents cards unless you gamble. There is no option to fold and know if you would have won or lost, but rather you have to sit with the uncertainty of not knowing whether you could have won or not. This is an example of the ‘slow-drip’ anticipation that keeps us hooked. Both of these create a sense of chance about winning or losing that feels personal and pulls at our psychology, making us want to play hands that we might not consider worth playing in a world without these rules.
One more thing that feeds into the addictiveness as well as the effects of poker are the way the betting works. When players lose hands, they can only lose the money they put in. But when players win hands, they can win big. I find that in a game like blackjack, when I notice myself consistently losing more than winning, I stop playing – if I can only win my bet, and am losing more than 50% of the bets, I don’t find it worth playing as much. In poker, I can lose five hands in a row and still feel like if I win the next one, I’ll be back to where I was. This keeps people playing, even when they’re losing. The other side of the betting are the blinds. This causes people to drain money even when they don’t even feel like they’re playing. It also requires people to gamble to play – it is impossible to see the flop without gambling money, even if all the players don’t want to put money in. These blinds also increase throughout the game, adding pressure to play bad hands and increasing the money people lose when playing conservatively. (picture below shows blinds at 50/100 up from 10/20) This simulates something like scarcity. You can’t bet with smaller amounts of money for a long time the same way you can with a game like blackjack.
The last piece of this is loss aversion. Many times, I’ve gone in with a bad hand in the final rounds because it’s better to risk a small chance of winning than losing the 200 chips I’ve already put in. Humans tend to feel losses more intensely than gains, and folding after you’ve put in money is hard psychologically. (I should not have stayed in the hand below, but I did)
Overall, the combination of the mechanics of randomized card draws, escalating blinds, rounds of betting, and ability to win large amounts of money creates the addictive feel of poker. These create situations of social comparison, emotional volatility, loss aversion, and strategic bluffing, all blurring the line between skill and chance. This results in a feeling of suspense and tension, always on the edge of something you want to know the outcome of – and that you have to pay to know the outcome of.
So when is using chance in a game morally permissible? I don’t think randomness itself is inherently unethical. Randomness is what makes poker exciting. It’s also what makes so many other games exciting – if the Catan board was the same every time, it would be boring. But it becomes an ethical problem when the design uses that randomness to create false feedback loops that exploit the psychology of players and use it against them to make money. There has to be some balance between keeping the game interesting and fun and not exploiting psychology in a bad way. I think things like eliminating blinds, always showing everyones’ hands and finishing the river would decrease some of that addictiveness and help players take a more objective perspective. I also think instituting a max bet would help limit the amount people gamble on any individual hand.
Overall, I find poker a lot of fun. But I can also feel how when I play, I can play for hours. And the design of the game creates that feeling. With games like this, we can see how simple rules create dangerous outcomes, and that the most dangerous games are the ones that make you feel like they’re not.
