Elite professional online poker players: factors underlying success in a gambling game usually associated with financial loss and harm

Abstract

Most gamblers lose money, and this means that a behavioral dependence to gambling can cause harm. However, some professional gamblers win consistently, and there is little academic literature on their psychology and how they differ from disordered gamblers. To contribute to this understudied area, we qualitatively analyzed interviews with 19 elite online professional poker players, by examining factors from the disordered gambling and decision-making literatures. Like disordered gamblers, participants displayed aspects of a behavioral dependence to gambling, but contrastingly did not generally experience harm. Other contrasts included their rational approach to statistical thinking, a general self-reported tendency to not be impulsive, and their social connections with other experts. One factor that did not yield clear contrasting results was whether or not they experienced early big wins. Parallels with the decision-making literature included their assessment of decision quality based on expected value rather than realized outcomes, their reluctance to take risks outside of their ‘circle of competence,’ and their ‘active open-minded’ thinking style. This study contributes to gambling psychology via an in-depth exploration of an understudied group.

Keywords:

• Gambling
• gamblers
• online betting
• psychology
• poker professionals
• professional gambling

Ethical approval

Ethical approval for this study was obtained from CQUniversity in Australia and KORUS Øst and Sykehuset Innlandet HF in Norway.

Disclosure statement

Philip Newall wrote two poker strategy books for Two Plus Two Publishing in 2011 and 2013. Philip Newall is a member of the Advisory Board for Safer Gambling – an advisory group of the Gambling Commission in Great Britain, and in 2020 was a special advisor to the House of Lords Select Committee Enquiry on the Social and Economic Impact of the Gambling Industry. In the last three years Philip Newall has contributed to research projects funded by the Academic Forum for the Study of Gambling, Clean Up Gambling, Gambling Research Australia, NSW Responsible Gambling Fund, and the Victorian Responsible Gambling Foundation. Philip Newall has received open access grant funding from Gambling Research Exchange Ontario. Niri Talberg declares no conflicts.

Notes

1 The poker community refers to losing all of one's bankroll as "going busto." This term applies equally to cash game and tournament players.

2 “Variance” is the term used by poker players to describe how short-term results can deviate from a player’s long-term expected value, and can be used in a more colloquial sense than this term’s formal statistical definition (Chen and Ankenman 2006).

3 “Comps” are complimentary items and services given out by casinos to encourage players to gamble, such as free meals, tickets to shows, or even free accommodation to stay at the casino’s hotel.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.