[januarymute]

Good call. Here's a good analogy... you have probably heard that many cyclists won't screw the night before a stage of the Tour de France or other big races. Well, it's been shown that screwing the night before has basically no impact on the next day's results, from a purely statistical, scientific standpoint. However, if a given rider believes strongly in not screwing the night before, and gets a psychological edge from not screwing, EVEN despite the fact that he is aware that the effect is entirely psychosomatic, then he is better off not screwing.

If he is able to look at the statistical evidence and truly believe it, then he should be able to screw some hot sloot if he so chooses and not have it affect his race. But, if he only *thinks* he believes the statistics, screws the sloot, and then feels a little fatigued the next day due to random chance (bad meal or something), and then starts to let doubt creep into his mind, giving rise to psychological hindrance, then he has made a big mistake by screwing the sloot.

What all this means is that if you have a psychological weakness or superstition or whatever, you might frequently (depending on how bizarre it is) be better off acknowledging it and working around it than battling it head on and suffering as a result.

Also, we are lucky that sloot-screwing would never be psychologically linked with bad poker results.