In this article we will look at ways to improve our decision making and apply these improved ways of thinking to casino games. Of course everything we do in life involves making one decision or another. Making the correct decision involves keeping many balls up in the air simultaneously. And we need to consider both reason and feelings. Only by balancing emotions with rational thought can we come to decisions that will satisfy us.

The various prongs of making good decisions are considering what will happen in the future, understanding the realities of the present, assessing what is going on in other people’s minds and dealing with uncertainty. Here we will consider an important aspect of decision making; this is being worried about the consequences of our decisions.

Whatever decision we make involves imagining what our future feelings regarding this decision will be. We tend to make a decision based on what we think will improve our overall happiness. The problem with this is that we are quite poor at doing it. We tend to overestimate how good a positive result will feel, such as winning a million pounds on the slots, and equally overestimate how bad a negative result will be, such as losing all our winnings.

This results in what is known as loss aversion. We think that the down side will hurt more than the upside will please. It is surprising how many people will only accept at least 2 to 1 odds on a 50% bet. In other words, they would only stake £1.00 on the flip of a coin if they won £2 if they guessed the result correctly.

However, when they were persuaded to do so they pound that losing was not as painful as they had anticipated. In fact they were easily able to rationalise the loss and see that it had been a fair bet after all.

Rather than asking yourself how you would feel if you lost it is better to talk to someone who has lost and ask them how they felt. The advice given by psychologists is to not always playing it safe. The worst might never happen and even if it did it would not be as bad as you might imagine. Taking risks is an important aspect of our lives; they would be dull without it.