Those who know me in real life are often surprised to learn that I love Las Vegas. The absolute, over-the-top, all-or-nothing atmosphere may be a blast, but the shiny patina of the city vanishes when you know how the odds actually work—as my father said, "The casinos and hotels are very fancy and elegant for a reason." The odds are stacked against anyone who can't put up more cash than the casinos, since, even in a fair game of flipping a coin, the player who starts with more money will eventually bankrupt his opponent.

This is one of the reasons I prefer poker, since that involves playing against a small group of other individuals who can't simply rely on a large bank. But as online poker sites have exploded in popularity, they've removed the human element and turned poker into a strict numbers game. But even though it's possible to calculate the odds of victory for a given hand, new research suggests that players have difficulty gauging how well they are doing in the long run.

It seems that strings of small victories inflate one's sense of skill to the point where the occasional big loss doesn't faze a player's psyche as much as it does their wallets. The work, carried out by a graduate student at Cornell University, examined the outcomes of 27 million hands of poker in a six-seat, no-limit Texas hold 'em game. Set to be published in an upcoming edition of the Journal of Gambling Studies, the work found that positive reinforcements from a streak of small wins led individuals to have difficulty comprehending how ruinous a large loss truly is, even though the sum total of the small winnings was more than wiped away by the big losses.

Interestingly enough, the work also found that, for small-stakes players, low-value pairs (twos through sevens) were actually more profitable than mid-number pairs (eights through jacks). "This is because small pairs have a less ambiguous value, and medium pairs are better hands, but have more ambiguous values that small-stakes players apparently have trouble understanding," said Siler, the study's lead author. With that in mind, I am going to take my bankroll and go do some online research.

Journal of Gambling Studies, 2010. DOI: 10.1007/s10899-009-9168-2