Beyond Being Beyond-Pain

I recently received an e-mail from a reader (let's call him Max) with whom my earlier piece "Beyond Pain" had resonated.
You can take a look at that article here if you like.
Back to Max - parts of Max's message felt familiar. Other parts did not feel quite right. There are lessons in both parts, so let's take a look.
"Hi," he began. "I saw your article. I am the dog of which you speak, the king of bad beats. I can go hours and not win a single hand. I can see 20-30 hands without more than a couple of face cards combined."
This is the part that felt familiar. Been there, done that.
I also suspected that Max might not do well on a pop quiz on probability theory. Running bad for an extended time doesn't feel good, but it happens. Such periods are well within the bounds of basic statistical principles. And sooner or later they are going to happen to us all, more than once.
But Max thought that his bad luck was a tad weird, and then he "discovered" another feature to his bad fortune. He seems to be able to exert some control over it - although, unfortunately, he can only seem to make his life worse, not better.
I know this sounds strange, so I'll let Max tell it.

You are not the king of bad beats.

"Somehow," he said, "I can affect things. If I am not thinking I can get 'normal' cards. But not when I concentrate. On hands where I had a pocket pair against overcards, I lost 70% of the time - and I was able to predict almost every hand because I was concentrating.
"I ran hundreds of hands online marked card tricks. I could turn it on, off, on and off again. The only problem is I can only make the cards go to normal percentages. I know this sounds ridiculous but is there anyone that studies this phenomenon?"
He suspects that something may be amiss with this part of the tale and he ends with, "Please do not file me under 'psycho.' Thanks."
This is great stuff for a psychologist. Not because I think Max is, as he put it, "psycho." He's not. He's just a victim of a failure to understand some essential features of the human psyche and the ways in which we in psychology have learned to study it.
He also fails to see how these factors are impacting his poker game - and in ways that are not helping his bottom line.
The relevant elements are ones we've touched on before but, obviously, they are worth revisiting: (a) the desire for control (b) our tendency to detect and perceive patterns, (c) the links between our emotional state and aggression and, of course, (d) the mathematical underpinnings of random processes.
So, here, in abbreviated form, is the reply I sent Max.
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Max,
Got your e-mail. As Bubba liked to say, "I feel your pain."

There's a bunch of reasons for doubting any relationship between your thinking about your cards and the cards you actually see.

As for your seemingly paranormal ability to think your way into wretched cards ... well, color me skeptical. There's a bunch of reasons for doubting any relationship between your thinking about your cards and the cards you actually see.
First, you really haven't done the kind of analysis we in psychology would like to see. Just running cards and making casual observations about them won't do - especially if you have hypotheses about what you expect to see happen.
When we do scientific studies on phenomena like this, we insist on "double blind" conditions. That is, you don't know what kinds of cards are being dealt (you are "blind" to them). Someone else looks at them.
This "someone else" also collects all the data and doesn't know whether you are thinking about the cards or not (that is, this individual is "blind" to your actions). Then all the data are analyzed by a third party.
I know, this is all so formal and tedious and I wouldn't bother to do it either. But without such an investigation, it's difficult in the extreme to believe that you consistently get cards far worse than "normal" when you think about them.
You would have to be like the mythical character in the old Li'l Abner cartoon strip, Joe Btfsplk, who was a spawn of bad fortune. Wherever he went a black cloud followed him, raining on infrared ink his head, and hideous misfortune tracked behind him like a faithful junkyard dog.
I also wonder if you truly appreciate the utterly screwy things that randomness can do. You can run insanely bad for periods of time so long that they seem to violate all the laws of nature.
They actually don't. They are merely episodes where you've been exceedingly unlucky and, yes, they aren't very probable.
But things that are "improbable" are just that - "improbable," not "impossible." They do happen. They must happen - only not very often. And when they happen they have to happen to someone. Guess it was you this time; next time it may be me.
But there's more to this. When you're running bad your game often goes into the toilet. You lose your aggressiveness; you let people hang around in pots, thereby increasing the likelihood they will suck out on you.

If Mike Matusow can stop feeling sorry for himself, you certainly can.

Then you start the "monsters under the bed" gambit. You assume that they're there and they're going to get you. And when they do, you're going to remember it and assume others are lurking in the closet.
But, you also have to recognize that when your opponent didn't suck out on you, you don't know it. He just mucks his hand. You don't remember it because it wasn't "memorable."
Hence, you tend to think that you're getting hosed much more often than you actually are.
My advice, and you may not like it: Stop feeling sorry for yourself. You've just run bad for a time. Get over it. Rebuild you bankroll. Reinstall your normal aggressiveness and forget about thinking about your cards or anticipating yet another bad beat.
I hope this helps. It helped me. I think I'll do a column on this issue - I won't use your real name but if you see it, you'll know who you are.
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I hope he sees this.