Moving Up Is Hard To Do

[DavidC]

[ QUOTE ]
1. you literally let the curent money you are putting into the pot affect your play. In other words, you won't make a slightly +EV move because you don't want to see your money going into the pot.


[/ QUOTE ]

According to general gaming theory, depending on your utility of money, it may be worth giving up some portion of EV in an effort to reduce variance. Therefore it may be rational to do this. It's also rational to take -EV gambles, like getting fire insurance for your house and stuff like that. What players should avoid, though, is making a slightly less EV play than they know is possible, without understanding their utility of money correctly and without understanding the difference in variance between the two plays.

It's also possible that depending on someone's ROR threshold, they may choose to play with a given bankroll but will be forced to avoid certain plays that have too high of a VAR/EV. I.E. when you're under-rolled, you have to avoid certain +EV plays. If this still leaves you +EV overall, it may be rational to play while underrolled, as long as you play correctly given your bankroll.

This is really advanced gambling theory stuff, and I'm not sure of the math of it: plus you'd have to make a simulator to judge the std dev of various situations... anyways, it's not as bad as you think it is, probably, maybe. [img]/images/graemlins/cool.gif[/img]

(Sorry, had to defend my title.)

[Black Peter]

[ QUOTE ]
It's also rational to take -EV gambles, like getting fire insurance for your house and stuff like that.

[/ QUOTE ]
What you're describing is part of Prospect Theory, which is what won Daniel Kahneman the Nobel Prize in Economics. And while he described this phenonenom, he didn't advocate it, and in fact described it as a human ERROR (i.e. irrational) in judgement*... unless the consequences of NOT taking that risk were unacceptable (e.g. your house burns down and you have nothing or you die and your family is bankrupted). The only time i see this being relevant in poker is in a tournament where you have a limited amount of time/hands to win the big prize. In day-to-day poker, taking -EV risks will lose you money in the long run.


* Tversky & Kahneman. (1974). Judgments under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185, 1124-1130.

Tversky & Kahneman. (1981). The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. Science, 211, 453-458.

Kahneman & Tversky. (1984). Choices Values and Frames, American Psychologist, 39, 341-50.

Kahneman, D. (1991). Judgment and decision making: A personal view. Psychological Science, 2(3), 142-145.

Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky, "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk", Econometrica, XVLII (1979), 263-291.


I recommend all these papers to anyone learning poker.