Two Key Ways We Learn to Play Poker

Two primary ways in which we learn how to play poker, just as how we learn to do many other things in life, were coined by the famous psychologist B.F. Skinner, and they are positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement. Before I go any further, you might be wondering why these concepts matter to you as a poker player. Let me assure you that they matter a great deal, as these concepts influence your play on many levels, in both potentially good and bad ways, whether you realize it or not.



Positive reinforcement is fairly easy to explain; it involves being rewarded as a result of your behavior. An example of this would be overplaying a small pocket pair in limit hold'em, calling many bets and raises and catching one of your two outs on the river (assuming that you had outs), and winning a gigantic pot that you had no business winning. This example reinforces bad play (overplaying small pairs), and often affects not only the player who won, but other novice players at the table. A novice player who watches this unfold a few times may start to get the idea that this is the proper way to play such holdings, and may start playing much worse as a result. What that player is not seeing, of course, is all the times that these chasers go to the end and come up short. Another example of this is one of which I am guilty. I have an extreme fondness for playing pocket tens as a result of winning my first World Series of Poker bracelet with them. I have noticed that I tend to play them as a stronger hand than they really are, and I need to be very careful not to let the positive reinforcement of winning a bracelet with them delude my thinking when I am dealt them.



Negative reinforcement is a much more confusing concept, and one that people often mistake for punishment. Negative reinforcement is really quite similar to positive reinforcement, except that negative reinforcement encourages a specific behavior by ceasing or avoiding a negative condition. A lot of people confuse negative reinforcement with punishment, when they are in fact very different, as punishment is a way of discouraging a behavior by applying negative consequences to that behavior. Both positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement encourage specific types of behavior, but in different ways. Here is an excellent example of negative reinforcement, which I experience at some point in most sessions that I play.



I will put this as bluntly as possible: I hate to be stuck during a session, even if it's just a relatively small amount. Not surprisingly, if you were to look at my win-loss records, you would see mostly wins with some big losses and virtually no small losses. This is negative reinforcement at work; being stuck is a negative condition that I will do most anything to rectify. This is not just a bad mentality for a professional poker player to have, but an awful one.



This mentality has cost me thousands of dollars in silly, negative expectation sports bets and pit gambling, in attempts to quickly make back what I had just lost playing poker. Furthermore, this mentality can lead to an increased chance of going on tilt, poor game selection, and playing longer sessions than one should. If I could simply play in games that I thought were good until I felt tired, felt like I was not playing well, or felt they were no longer worth playing, I'm very confident that my overall records would be better than they are now. Unfortunately, even to this day, I cannot quit playing when stuck, at least not without putting up a good fight. This learned behavior ravaged me early in my career, as I played much longer than my stamina would allow me to play properly, just to try to get even. And I often played in a very aggressive way to increase my fluctuations, hoping to get even faster, even though I knew I was making bad-expectation plays. I often made awful game-selection choices, playing in games with the highest variance rather than in smaller, easier games with better expectation.



Fortunately, these days I rarely go on tilt like I used to, and I have greatly built up my poker stamina to the point where I can play well over 20 hours at times and still feel like I am playing a decent game. However, even until very recently, this learned behavior continued to be a big problem for me, as I tortured myself by making huge sports bets to cover losing sessions. I vowed to quit sports betting and have kept that promise for many months now, so hopefully that aspect of this learned behavior will no longer be a problem.



As you can likely see by now, I could come up with countless examples of how positive and negative reinforcement affect how we play, but I don't think that would be extremely helpful. Instead, I would like to strongly encourage you to realistically examine your own play. If you find that you are making some plays for illogical reasons – because of positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, or something else entirely – do your best to correct the problem. You will likely struggle with some of these problems your entire poker career, as I fear I will with quitting when stuck. Just do your best to try, and at least be aware of your problems so that you can focus on doing things to make them less harmful to your bankroll.

Thomas "Thunder" Keller is a 25-year-old professional poker player and one of poker's young and rising stars. He can often be found playing at UltimateBet.com under the name thunderkeller. To learn more about him and to enlist in his new squadron, go to his website at http://www.thunderkeller.com/. Also, feel free to contact him at [email protected].