Do You Change Your Strategy After a Big Win or Loss? Should You?

Suppose that you know the optimal poker strategy for every situation. C'mon, admit it — you pretty much think that you do, right?

Now suppose that you have just either won or lost a huge pot. It doesn't matter how it happened — bad luck, good luck, bad judgment, good judgment — it just happened. How will you play now? Will your decisions be different than they would have been prior to the big win or loss?

My last two columns were derived from my recent read of Gary Smith's book, What the Luck? Though the book is primarily about the mathematical phenomenon of "regression to the mean," in one chapter he takes a side trip to summarize an interesting piece of research he did on poker players.

I…