Let’s pretend you’re a brand new poker player.  Maybe you’re in Las Vegas for a buddy’s bachelor party, you’ve seen some poker on TV, and although you’re saving a little for the strip clubs, you’ve still got an extra $500 for “discretionary expenses” in your pocket.  So, you sit down at the smallest game spread at the Venetian, fumble a big blind onto the felt, and play your very first hand of big-kid poker. In this scenario, what would you say might be the very worst thing that could possibly happen to you?  You get stacked?  You get cheated?  You get into a drunken brawl with a guy nicknamed “Fancy Fists”? What if I told you the very worst thing that could possibly happen to you that night is that you win?  And win big? It seems counterintuitive, but there’s a very good reason why it might be dangerous for a budding poker player to have a wildly successful first session: the Primacy Effect.  The Primacy Effect is a cognitive bias – a psychological tendency for us to draw incorrect conclusions based on the ways our brains are wired rather than on the objective evidence. This particular bias is the tendency for the first ...