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Does Being Tired Really Change People’s Gaming Behavior?
It’s truly amazing how often we discover things that we had no idea existed while we were looking up something else. A famous Chicago pundit from the 1950’s and for a couple of decades after that, Sydney J. Harris, actually wrote columns entitled “Things I Learned While Looking up Other Things”.
If You Get Tired, Stop Betting
The idea we had and that we started to do some research on was how much does being tired affect blackjack players? We at Everygame Casino have long told our gamers to set time limits on their gaming. One of the reasons we encourage shorter gaming sessions is that getting tired affects people’s decision making ability and causes players unnecessary losses.
Another Big Advantage of Gaming at an Online Casino
Gaming with a specific time limit on sessions is a lot more possible when gamers play at an online casino. That’s because land-based casinos trick players into losing track of the time. The most effective trick is to have no windows in the casino. In that way, players lose track of day or night. In addition, land-based casinos have very bright lights which give players the feeling that it is still daytime even though it may be well past midnight!
Decision Fatigue
Imagine our surprise to find out that the term “decision fatigue” talks about exactly this problem of peoples’ decisions being affected by being too tired to think through an issue. Decision fatigue, naturally, refers mostly to business, governmental, and military decisions but it also relates to the much more mundane bane of blackjack, video poker, and Caribbean poker players and, surprisingly, also to gamers who prefer the games of chance.
There are four main symptoms that tell us if we have decision fatigue.
- An accumulation of clutter and the inability to remove the clutter.
- Putting off big decisions.
- Impulsiveness
- Complaining about your own decisions
Decision fatigue in the broader outside world can cause a business to go under, can result in major military failures, can immobilize as government in a crisis (sound familiar?), and can have very deep and reverberating consequences.
For most people in their everyday lives, decision fatigue is more like not being able to decide what to order in a restaurant or making the wrong decisions at the casino.
So, let’s see what the concept of decision fatigue can tell us about ordering at a restaurant and about casino gaming.
What to Order in a Restaurant
The larger a restaurant menu is the harder it is for some people to decide what to order. At the most extreme example of this syndrome, are the people who regret their decision no matter what it was. One of the most useful techniques for making decisions in any context and in restaurants is simply to allow yourself to go through the options only once.
Eliminate anything that doesn’t make your short list on the first go through of the list of options. Then you choose from the short list. In restaurants, there is always someone in the group who makes her or his decision well before everyone else, to the point that someone will inevitably ask, “did you decide already?”
For those people, the decision is not worth the mental mind wringing: look for something that you don’t make at home, or something you never ate before, or something that sounds interesting and move on with your life!
Clutter Confuses Decision Making
Clutter is just as much mental as it is physical. We all know someone who is an inveterate hoarder. You go into their house and the overwhelming urge to straighten things up comes over you. These are the people who never let a flat surface go uncovered!
But clutter can also invade the mind and cause so much interference in decision making that it becomes next to impossible for some people to make even the simplest restaurant ordering decision.
Mental clutter can affect our gaming decisions as well. Especially in the games of skill, where you have to be on your toes at all times, even a small degree of over-tiredness can affect choices to the extent that the gamer can no longer come out ahead.
There are two perfect solutions for when being tired affects your gaming decisions: stop playing or play in free play mode.
Impulsiveness in the Casino
Here, once again, we need to contrast land-based casinos and online casinos. Players at a land-based casino get very tired but continue playing. The idea of getting one’s money’s worth is quite prominent in the minds of land-based casino gamblers.
Why spend so much money getting to the casino and staying in the hotel if you’re going to stop playing after a half an hour? Online gaming lends itself to shorter and more frequent gaming sessions. The shorter sessions mean, among other advantages, that players will be as fresh mentally as possible when they play.
After all, if you’re too tired to play tonight, you can always play tomorrow night!
The Great Importance of Sleep
Any major decision you make has to be well thought out. However, if you feel that thinking through an issue should take a long time, you are mistaken. Thinking through even the most major decisions requires deep concentration over a relatively short period of time.
Being tired reduces in almost exponential degrees peoples’ ability to think deeply about an issue. People then tend to either delay a decision ad infinitum or rush into a decision long before they have finished thinking about it.
Casino gaming is so minor compared to governmental, military, or business decisions that we might feel that it is irrelevant to the discussion. But money is still money. What may be pocket change to one gamer may be a full month’s gaming budget to another.
In any case, even high rollers, unless they are truly among the world’s wealthiest people, try to look after their money. For example, that’s why high rollers like to get gifts from the casino. They like these gifts even though they can afford to buy the items on their own!
How to Stop Gaming when You’re Tired
We understand that some gamers have a very hard time getting away from the casino even when they are tired and even when they know fully well that it is time to stop. Land-based casino gamblers have this problem far more than do online casino gamers.
This points to one of the common themes in our blogging: we strive to turn gambling into gaming!
So, the first way to avoid casino gaming decision fatigue is to play online here at Everygame Casino Red.
The next step in learning how to get up from the casino when you get tired is simply to set a reasonable time limit on your gaming. This is a highly subjective decision so you may need to play at Everygame Casino for a few sessions before you can say with confidence what your optimum gaming session is like.
This last thought is a lot more important than it appears to be at first glance. Try playing for an hour and see how you do in the first half hour and in the second half hour. Make sure that your bets are reasonable at all times. Immediately shorten your gaming sessions if you sense that you became too tired to make sound decisions at, say, the 40 minute mark.
Health and Happiness Go Together
In the best of times, health and happiness is a cliché. But in the Era of the Corona Virus, health and happiness are two sides of the same very, very important coin. Please, stay healthy in these trying times. Your continued good health will bring you great happiness.
