Breaking Out of Your Comfort Zone

You can’t fully develop your game without breaking out of your comfort zone. The term “comfort zone” usually applies to the stakes that you play, and many authorities recommend remaining in it. If the stakes are too small, you will be bored and careless. If they are too high, you will be scared and indecisive.

You also have comfort zones for limit/no-limit/pot-limit, stud/Omaha/hold’em, the number of opponents and their playing styles, tournaments versus cash games, specific plays, and your general playing style.

I’ll focus on your stylistic comfort zone because it is extremely hard to change, and it affects virtually everything. For example, if you’re conservative, you will be more comfortable and get better results in low-limit, full-table cash games. You can wait for good cards and play them straightforwardly, which gives you an edge over loose and careless players.

If you move up to higher limits, switch to no-limit, or play in shorthanded games or tournaments, you should play more aggressively and deceptively. Otherwise, the tougher players will run over you, or the blinds will eat you up.

You may know what you should do, but be unable to handle the discomfort of changing yourself. To overcome the powerful forces that keep you locked into your old habits, I will discuss three questions:

1. What is your comfort zone?
2. How does it affect your play and results?
3. How can you break out of it?

Definition
Your comfort zone is the situations and actions that seem natural and make you feel comfortable. The further you get from it, the more discomfort you will feel. It’s quite individualistic, because your feelings are different from other people’s. You may feel comfortable doing things that would make me extremely uncomfortable, and vice versa.

If we define “rational” as “striving to maximize long-term profits,” your desire for comfort is essentially irrational. You often pay a high long-term price to avoid short-term discomfort.

The Comfort Zone Quandary
You will usually get the best short-term results by staying in your comfort zone, but if you never venture outside it, you won’t develop the qualities that you need to:

• Increase your profits in your current game(s)
• Move up and make even bigger profits
• Beat other types of games
• Adjust to changing circumstances

For example, if you never play for stakes above your comfort zone, you obviously can’t develop the abilities needed to beat bigger games. If you never play in shorthanded games, you can’t succeed in tournaments, nor can you exploit soft shorthanded games. If you don’t experiment with uncomfortable moves, you will encounter situations that require plays that you are unwilling or unable to make.

The optimal balance between maximizing current profits and developing yourself depends upon your motives. If you are satisfied with your results and don’t want to sacrifice much to improve them, spend nearly all of your time in your comfort zone.

The more value you place on developing your game, the more often and the further you should break out of your comfort zone, but you must understand and accept the price: Your short-term profits will probably decline, and you will certainly become uncomfortable, perhaps extremely so.

Resistance to Change
Millions of years of evolution and your own genes and experiences have programmed your body and mind to resist change. Your body has mechanisms to resist changes in temperature, blood pressure, chemical balances, and many other factors. In fact, your body codes most changes as “threats,” and automatically resists them.

Behavioral and psychological defenses are not as clearly defined and automatic, but they are extremely powerful. Dr. Daniel Kessler, a clinical psychologist, sent me an e-mail: We feel “safe in our routines … Our way is believed to be inherently ‘right,’ even when we know it is not.”

We poker writers generally assume (often without thinking about it) that our readers’ primary or only motive is to maximize their long-term profits. We tell them what to do and assume that they will follow our advice. But players’ profits are reduced by making comfortable but negative EV [expected value] plays. Thousands of psychological studies prove why we do it. Short-term rewards and punishments — even trivial ones — have much greater impact on us than larger, but delayed, rewards and punishments.

For example, despite enormous information and social pressure, most American adults are overweight. The immediate pleasure and pain of eating and exercising have much greater effects than heart attacks, high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity’s other life-threatening, long-term effects.

Millions of people smoke, including many doctors, despite knowing that they are killing themselves. Since so many people shorten their lives and damage their health for extremely small, short-term pleasures, don’t assume that you are more rational about your poker chips.

Short-term rewards and punishments in poker are even more powerful than in most other activities, because luck obscures the cause-and-effect relationship between actions and long-term consequences.

In most situations, “people learn best through practice and feedback … Unfortunately, it does not work at all for poker. The immediate results in poker are often divorced from your actions … You acted correctly, but your result was terrible … Other times… you acted incorrectly, but your result was terrific.” (Small Stakes Hold’em, Page 17)

The relationship between your actions and their long-term consequences is even harder to see in tough games. You can beat weak players just by playing ABC poker. But in tough games, you must make deceptive plays to confuse your opponents, and most deceptive plays are theoretical mistakes.

You often sacrifice some expected value by making a theoretical mistake, and you can’t be sure that the confusion you create will regain that lost expected value. You may never know whether a deliberate mistake that you made today caused an opponent to make a bigger mistake later in the session, or even the next week.

Most other cause-and-effect relationships are much clearer. If you eat too much, you know that you will put on weight. Since you can’t directly relate many poker actions to long-term consequences, the incentive to change is lessened, and the perceived value of breaking out of your comfort zone may be unclear.

Resistance to change also depends on the perceived risks of changing. There are two types of risks, financial and psychological. Acting differently from usual can cost you money or make you feel foolish or embarrassed. The lower that both types of risks are, the more willing you will be to take them.

Reducing risk is an essential element of many forms of psychotherapy, especially group therapy. You can experiment with different types of thinking and acting without being embarrassed or “punished.” You may dislike applying a group therapy concept to poker, but a therapist’s job is to change clients’ behavior. A mountain of evidence proves that you will be more willing to take small risks than large ones.

The risks of experimenting, the costs of making theoretical mistakes, the greater impact of short-term consequences, and the obscure cause-and-effect relationships are the primary forces that prevent you from breaking out of your comfort zone. Future columns will suggest ways to overcome these forces.

To learn more about yourself and other players, you can buy Dr. Schoonmaker’s books, Your Worst Poker Enemy and Your Best Poker Friend, at CardPlayer.com.