How poker players keep New Year’s resolutions

Gamblers understand the power of a bet.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

My latest for the Washington Post. Gift link below…

More than one-third of Americans made a New Year’s resolution ahead of 2024, according to polling firm YouGov. Of those who did, 87 percent believed they would keep them all year. That belief is wildly off-base. Researchers in one of the few significant studies on New Year’s resolutions found that only about 1 in 5 people followed through after two years.

When it comes to keeping resolutions, the odds are stacked against us. But if we look closely at the debris of all those aborted plans and abandoned dreams, we can see what went wrong and come up with strategies and tactics to help us tilt the odds more in our favor.

One of the most powerful tools you can employ to increase the chances you stick to your goals is the “precommitment contract” — a formal or informal agreement you make before facing the real-time choices required to keep a resolution.

The beauty of a precommitment contract is that it leverages cognitive dissonance for the good. Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort we feel when our past beliefs and new information come into conflict, or when our actions conflict with our beliefs. Often, cognitive dissonance prevents us from updating our beliefs in the face of facts that tell us we ought to, resulting in the tendency to rationalize away the facts to resolve the discomfort quickly. A precommitment contract turns this downside of cognitive dissonance on its head. When we commit to something in advance, particularly publicly, the motivation to be consistent with what we believed at the time of the commitment increases the chances we’ll follow through.

Back when I played poker professionally in Las Vegas, many gamblers used proposition bets as precommitment devices. If someone wanted to set and pursue a goal (such as losing weight, quitting smoking, exercising on a schedule or lowering their golf handicap), they would just canvass the regulars in the poker room for someone to bet them they couldn’t do it. Such bets have become the basis for legendary gambling stories and act as excellent precommitment devices.

One of the most memorable of these proposition bets was placed by Doyle Brunson, a legendary player and Poker Hall of Famer.

Read the rest here.