The Winning Bet: Large Losses, Big Wins

Reported May 2011

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Ivanhoe Newswire) --With just an Internet connection, online poker players can play whenever they want. The Internet is partly responsible for a huge increase in the number of poker players worldwide. But not everyone is winning, and most players are losing. Here are a few secrets behind online poker.

In poker, there can be big winners, and big losers. You don’t have to travel to Vegas to find a poker table. Thanks to the Internet, online poker is more popular than ever. Erik Bjarnar plays online every day.

“I’m trying to improve, not always having the best success at that,” Erik Bjarnar, Online poker player, told Ivanhoe.

Being successful at poker is rare. And novice players beware. Sociologist, Kyle Siler at Cornell University says beginner’s luck may not be lucky at all.

“People often don’t make the best decisions for a variety of psychological and social reasons, which hurts their poker game,” Kyle Siler, Sociologist, Graduate Student, Cornell University in Ithaca, NY told Ivanhoe.

Kyle studied over 27 million online poker hands, and found that the more hands players win, the less money they’re likely to collect.

“Small frequent wins which build them up and kind of mask the fact that that strategy makes them very vulnerable to a huge loss,” Siler explained. Winning a few small hands entices individuals to keep playing. The more people play the more likely players will get hit by occasionally big, but significant losses. Players feel good about a winning streak, but don’t seem to fully understand how their large losses are offsetting their small wins.

“Humans inherently don’t always necessarily scale very well, they might view the difference between winning $20.00 and losing $20.00 as a big deal you know, you get to leave the table as a winner,” Siler added.

If you want to win more in poker, experts say play fewer, stronger hands, more aggressively.

“When I win I feel very ebullient, I feel very kind of triumphant,” Bjarnar concluded.

The most important thing to keep in mind? Know when to hold ‘em and know when to fold ‘em. The top online poker winner in the last year has won more than 1.6 million dollars.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Kyle Siler
Sociologist
Department of Sociology
Cornell University
ksiler@gmail.com

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