You pay off too much. You have trouble letting go of big hands. Bad calls on early streets get you into trouble later. You call when you know you’re beat, saying things like, “I had to,” or “I was priced in.”
Does this sound like you? I’ve got good news. You’re not alone. Most poker players have an innate desire to call and see the showdown. You can’t win if you don’t play, after all, and besides you’re curious about what your opponent has under there. The desire is that much harder to resist when you have a big hand, because they come along so rarely, and in your head you have probably already imagined yourself winning the pot.
I think of this urge like a little demon who is always looking for new ways to trick me into calling when I ought to fold. The demon never goes away, but with practice, you can get wise to his tricks and learn to keep him at bay.
That’s the introduction to my article, “The Calling Demon”, now appearing in Cardplayer. If you struggle with your own calling demon, and I don’t know any poker player who doesn’t, then you should check it out. For further advice on cultivating the discipline to fold, I also recommend Tommy Angelo’s “The Worst Play Ever“, which introduces a rather innovative exercise for exercising your folding muscle.
The concept of demon is useful concept I suspect you derived from your own introspection.
After reading your article I am not sure what did you mean by demon?
In my past I derive similar concept from my own poker experience.
My concept of demon was closer to Descartes definition:
An entity who is capable of deceiving us to such a degree that we have reason to doubt the totality of what our senses tell us.
After some time replaced this concept with new concept: I am no doer.
The concept is believe that I am habitual involuntary mechanism similar to rest of poker players.
The concept is about repetition of memories, thoughts, felling, routines,mistakes,etc.
Basically I do not think in category of my actions or my opponent actions but rather pre-determined reactions.
This model gives more access points that demon concept.
Your advice and access point is basically “correction” of thought process.
The processing center is able to modify content of the thought.
It is just good and useful advice. Good Luck!.
The big limitation of your model are missing preconditions for your thought process.
There are plenty experiments showing that, prior to the moment of conscious choice, there are correlated brain events that allow scientists to predict, with 60 to 80 percent probability, what the choice will be.OK.
Example
Emotion seems to be a possible precondition for thought and perception even — in cases when we ordinarily think that no emotion is involved.
In cases of decisions the relation is much more stronger.
Emotions are mandatory precondition for ANY decision.
There are some loop mechanism of course where thoughts could generate emotion too.
Emotion are implemented as chemical messages-rather uncontrolled injections of mixture drugs.
This is the key insight for my model is to realize that, moment by moment, we are being driven by a drug.
There are another preconditions too.
Anyway- it is so liberating for ego to say:
No, I am not going to respond to this particular ‘cocaine-driven’ fantasy.
It SO is liberating for ego to have the free will to choose how to respond in a situation, rather than to act mechanically from mindless, primitive conditioned patterns in our brain.LOL.
Sry.Again plenty errors.
Nice post as usual, Andy. I hadn’t explicitly thought about it, but I’m sure you’re right that my demon metaphor is heavily Cartesian. I’m aware of the problems you cite – in fact I’m embarrassed to be caught in such blatant Cartesianism – and yet it still feels like it works to me. Like I really can play with awareness of my weaknesses/shortcomings and subvert them through rational consideration. Thought-provoking stuff as always, though, as I don’t really know how to refute it other than to say that it feels like I really do have more control than that.
I believe that your model is working for you.
Because your ‘bio-robot’ did implemented the correct boot routine(considerations, pause, take a deep breath, thinking to be more nuanced and situational,etc.)
His CPU does not have wide spread defects in bio-robots -elevated ego identity for example.
I think an alternative title to this article could have been “Taking range seriously,” for two reasons:
1. If you are thinking in terms of ranges and you are playing live poker (as in your example), you will often be able to put people on extremely precise hands, with the possibility of a bluff %. The excitement of your own hand’s absolute strength is irrelevant at this point. So to the extent that you take ranges seriously, you listen less to the calling demon.
2. If you are thinking in terms of ranges, you are less interested in calling for the sake of finding out “what he had,” because you are far less interested in the results of this one particular hand, and you recognize that the correctness of your decision can only be judged with the information you had PRIOR to seeing his hand, as all poker decisions are made with this incomplete information.