Being Beyond Pain

Some years back, Mike Caro wrote about a particularly unhappy state that many poker players have found themselves in, one in which they are "beyond pain." When you get there, nothing matters anymore. You've given up, are utterly helpless, and have been beaten and beaten for so long and so hard that you no longer feel the blows. When poker players reach this state, there's only one goal left: to lose every last cent in their pockets so that they can go home, curl up in a corner, and whimper pathetically.

Sound a tad familiar? We've all been there, or been close. Perhaps Mike discovered the true nature of this state of pathos through his own personal experience. Like many other states of mind that have pathological features, this one has been well studied. In fact, it is a well-known psychological condition called learned helplessness . We're going to take a look at it here because what psychologists have learned about this condition can inform us and help us to avoid it.

Since Arthur Reber just happens to be a professor of psychology, we're going back to the classroom for a bit. Don't worry, there won't be any "short quizzes" at the end.

The original research on learned helplessness was carried out back in the 1960s by Dr. Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania . Seligman discovered that learned helplessness occurs when inescapable punishment is administered. The original work was done with dogs. The experiments went like this: A dog was put in a 12 foot-by-2 foot box with an electrifiable grid floor and a barrier separating the two sides. The barrier could be raised to allow access to both sides or lowered so that the dog was stuck on whichever side it currently was on.

Without warning, the barrier was lowered, the lights dimmed slightly, and the electric grid on the dog's side turned on. The dog howled, leaped in the air, and fought like hell to try to get past the barrier. But all was for naught. The dogs often continued their aggressive assaults for many minutes. (These were brutal experiments that would never be done today; this was before ethics committees.) But in the end, they just gave up, lay down, and continued whimpering. Learned helplessness had set in. When future shocks occurred, they didn't resist. They just lay there and took it.

When the barrier was raised, they did not crawl to the safe side. They were beaten animals. Canine "therapy" consisted of dragging them over to the safe side tim e after tim e, and even this was often insufficient to restore their initiative.

Sounds kind of familiar, doesn't it? Substitute a bunch of bad beats in a row and you might just feel like one of Seligman's dogs. When this happens, you are beyond pain. And like those helpless, hapless dogs, when you are in this state, even winning a pot or two doesn't help. It's like being dragged over to the other side of the box. You still sit there and wait, because you know they're going to start hammering on you again. You don't shift back to your normal, aggressive game. You are in a state of learned helplessness, waiting for that other shoe to drop.

But here's the very interesting part of Seligman's research. If you allow the animals just a couple of opportunities to escape by leaving the barrier up before administering those shocks, you psychologically immunize them from that pathological state of learned helplessness. Now, they will take the shock when the barrier is lowered, but they won't become the pathetic beasts seen earlier, and when the barrier is removed, they immediately show that they remember their first experiences and jump over to the safe side.

While this example is an extreme case, learned helplessness is fairly common in everyday life. For example, ask people to solve some relatively straightforward arithmetic problems. Have some of them work in a room in which there is a loud and annoying noise in the background, and others work in a quiet room. If you tell the first group that there isn't anything anyone can do about the noise, their performance will be dramatically lower than those who worked in quiet.

OK, you think the sound is causing the poor performance. Nope, it's the element of inescapability. If you give them a button and say, "Look, we know the sound is annoying. If you really need to turn it off, just press the button," it's remarkable, but virtually no one uses the button. What's more, their performance will be the same as those who worked in silence.

We hope you see the point. It isn't the negative aspects of the environment that cause the problems; it is whether or not the individuals (dogs as well as people) believe that they have the capacity to assert themselves. If they do, they look a lot like solid poker players. They survive all of the shock assaults – the river two-outers, runs of spirit-crushing drawouts, and days and weeks of nothing but bad cards. Like the folks who knew they could turn off the pain if they absolutely had to, they understand that they are merely temporary vic tim s of random processes. They know the barrier will eventually be lifted and there is money on the other side.

So, how can poker players immunize themselves from learned helplessness, from falling into that terrible state in which they are beyond pain? Unfortunately, there's no simple answer. But if you understand the game well, you can psychologically protect yourself from becoming "helpless." You need to catch yourself whenever you feel a sense of despair coming on and think of the good tim es, when the deck hit you in the head, when the barrier was up and a simple jump to the other side provided safety and shelter. While you may feel as though you will never win another hand no matter how long you live, it isn't true and it won't happen. But if you think yourself into a helpless state, you might become like one of Seligman's dogs, curled up helplessly and wallowing in self-pity.

One of our favorite movies is Papillion . We admire the astonishing psychological resilience of Steve McQueen's title character, which, like the most resistant of Seligman's critters, cannot be beaten. He has survived decades on Devil's Island , the most horrific of prisons, living through beatings, torture, and extended terms in solitary as punishment for failed escape attempts. He never submits. He knows that eventually he will find a crack in the barrier. Indeed, at the end, as he floats out to sea on his raft of coconuts lashed together, he shakes his fist at the sky and yells, "I'm still here, you bastards." Papillion would have made a hell of a poker player.

Raise your game with Lou Krieger at www.loukrieger.com. His newest book, Winning Omaha/8 Poker, is available at www.Cardplayer.com. Arthur Reber is Broeklundian Professor of Psychology at Brooklyn College of CUNY. He is the author of The New Gambler's Bible and the co-author of Gambling for Dummies. He can be reached at [email protected].