Sunk costs epiphany

Last night, I played two MTT 8-games, and managed to make the money in the second one by the slimmest of margins. I came in 18th, the final paid place. I was flirting with oblivion from hand 75 on. I made a costly mistake on hand 106 which made me realize I need to be much more systematic about calculating pot odds and using them to help me make good poker decisions. In other words, I need to start doing a little bit more math at the table, and a little bit less flying by the seat of my pants :-)

One of the positive outcomes of this realization is that I've finally taken the time to get to the bottom of a poker question which has been bothering me off and on for at least the last two years. Simply stated, it's this: does the amount of money one has put into the pot already have any bearing on a pot odds decision? Intuitively, it seems like it should, but it actually has no bearing at all. I had to go through the exercise of comparing and contrasting several poker scenarios to prove this to myself. I got corroboration of this by reading several pertinent articles I found on the topic of sunk costs, which I include here for reference:

http://www.pokerology.com/articles/the-sunk-cost-effect/
http://www.zeninvestor.org/behavioral-finance-2/the-sunk-cost-fallacy-what-it-is-and-how-to-avoid-it/
http://www.nj.com/onlinegamblingnj/index.ssf/2013/12/how_the_sunk_cost_fallacy_can.html

It's actually great news that each poker decision can be made on its own merits, without reference to what has happened before; it makes the math much simpler :-)

buy_in entry_fee num_players num_hands place winnings

  4500       500           6        12    46        0
  4500       500           6       108    18     5200

delta: $-4,800
MTT 8-game balance: $45,340
balance: $9,540,370