In my last “Casino Poker for Beginners” article, “You Can Say These Words at the Table, But Be Careful When You Do,” I told you about how using certain words — “call,” “raise,” “all in,” and so forth — can commit you to actions that you neither intended nor wanted to make. But this is just one specific type of a common phenomenon, which is player errors.
The fact is, all humans make mistakes in everything they do, and poker is no exception.
Heck, even androids make mistakes at poker.
Commander Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation somehow managed to learn the rules of the game without grasping that players might bluff when holding nothing:
The closest thing our era has to a poker-playing android is Phil Ivey, and even he once famously misread his hand on the biggest stage poker has — a televised feature table at the World Series of Poker Main Event — back in 2009:
See.