Clipping up the interstate at a quick rate in his sports car, a client of mine was sipping his coffee on the way to work one early morning. Without warning a mini-van violently crashed into the side of his car while trying to merge into the heavy flow of traffic.

His memories after that moment are sketchy. He remembers the sound of sirens and being loaded into the ambulance. His car was a total loss, but his injuries were luckily not too serious. Now months later, his body is now fully healed from the various injuries that he sustained. Interestingly, he confided in me that an odd outcome came about from his accident: He is no longer able to drink coffee. Even the scent of coffee wafting past him causes his stomach to knot and a mild sense of panic to take hold. Since he was drinking coffee at the time of the traumatic accident, his mind has linked the coffee with the accident.

Our minds are not perfect machines. In fact, we are susceptible to many psychological hiccups that cause us all sorts of issues in our daily lives. One of these common mistakes occurs when we allow happenstance and correlations to mask actual cause-and-effect. This might happen when we link coffee and a traffic accident.

On a less dramatic scale, we also see this at the poker table. You raise with pocket aces before the flop, only to see them go down in flames to baby suited connectors. As you watch your chips sliding across the table, your mind is linking those pocket aces with a big loss of money.

This is the stuff superstition is made of. Wearing an ugly shirt the night you win big might produce a new "lucky shirt." Winning a big pot with J-7 off-suit starts a dangerous link. Losing with pocket queens starts to seep into your mind and change your perception of the hand. Rationally we know that the ugly shirt we wear likely has nothing to do with our wins and losses. Of course, poker players have never been argued to be the most rational bunch!

If you find yourself having an aversion to hands like pocket aces and pocket queens because they've burned you a few times, it is time to reevaluate your thinking. I bet you have thoughts running through your mind like, "I should only limp-in since I never win with pocket rockets." Perhaps after seeing a cheap flop with J-7 from a big blind and getting lucky, suddenly you find yourself attracted to this starting hand in future deals since "I always seem to win my biggest pots with garbage starting hands."

Mistaking correlations for cause-and-effect is sometimes a dangerous proposition in life and at the poker felt. The best way to combat correlations from masking reality is the use of meta-cognition. Put simply, meta-cognition means that we need to take a moment to think about our thinking. Coffee did not cause my client's car accident. If he works at erasing that link in his mind, he could be stopping at Starbucks in no time to gulp down a cup or two. Likewise, we know that playing starting hands like A-A and Q-Q is much more statistically wise than playing our "lucky" J-7. Profitable poker comes from playing the statistics, using position, and reading opponents. Lucky shirts, rabbit's feet, and lucky "junk" hands might have correlated with something good but that does not make them reliable.

Now go make it happen.

John Carlisle is a National Certified Counselor with a Master's degree in Counseling Psychology from West Virginia University. Contact John at pokercounselor@yahoo.com