Regret: Part Two

Part One said that feeling or anticipating regret causes many costly mistakes. To avoid or reduce it, you may:

• Play too long when you’re losing.
• Chase without pot odds.
• Play too passively.
• Ignore evidence about an opponent’s cards, skill, or style.
• Avoid developing your skills.

The stronger your feelings are, the more likely you are to make certain mistakes. If you’re losing heavily, it’s harder to quit. If you’ve invested a lot in this hand, you’re less likely to fold. If you feel that changing your reads or playing style would make you feel foolish, you won’t do it. If you have a strong fear that you’ll regret the inevitable mistakes, you won’t experiment with new strategies.

Part one also said that you can’t eliminate regret. You’re hard-wired to feel it when you make a mistake and to anticipate it when you’re thinking about doing something that may become a mistake.

That column ended with: “You can’t play error-free poker, nor can you stop regretting your mistakes, but you can learn how to react better to your feelings.” This column will tell you how to reduce regret’s pain and negative effects.

Pain Is Indispensable

Without pain you couldn’t survive. If it didn’t hurt to touch a hot stove, you’d destroy your fingers. If wounds and diseases didn’t hurt, you wouldn’t treat them. If regret wasn’t painful, you wouldn’t correct your mistakes or learn much about poker or anything else.

You can’t learn how to play poker unless you play for money or anything that’s painful to lose. If you doubt me, just go to a play money poker website. Nobody plays well.
Self-examination Is The Essential First Step.

Professor Reber emailed me that you can reduce the effects of regret and other negative feelings by becoming more “aware of yourself, your emotions and what provoked them.”

Until you understand how and why you feel and react in certain ways, you‘ll keep making the same regret-based mistakes. Unfortunately, most people – especially poker players – dislike self-examination. We’re much better at analyzing others than ourselves. To reduce regret’s negative effects:

• Be honest about how you feel. Don’t pretend that you never feel regret because every normal person feels it.
• Look hard at why you feel that way. Which situations and mistakes cause the most intense feelings? Why do they cause those feelings?
• Analyze the effects of your feelings, including positive effects such as learning and becoming motivated to change.
• Carefully plan ways to improve your reactions.
• Execute your plans.
• Monitor how well you executed them.
• If necessary, revise your plans.

Understand, Accept, And Play Within Your Limits

Three kinds of limits affect you, me, and every poker player: financial, skill, and psychological. If you don’t understand, accept, and play within all of them, you’re on your way to trouble.

Countless people have gone broke by playing above their financial bankrolls or by playing against better players. These two mistakes are closely linked because larger games have tougher players.

You should also play within your psychological bankroll. I coined that term many years ago. It’s the amount you can lose without getting so upset that you make emotionally-based mistakes. It’s much smaller than your financial bankroll. If you have a $10,000 financial bankroll, a $1,000 loss can put you on tilt.

You also have other psychological limits, including stress tolerance. If certain stakes, games, or players create more stress than you can handle, you’ll make emotionally-based mistakes, even if you’re winning.

Be honest about your financial, skill, psychological limits. If you can honestly say that you rarely feel regret about poker, you’re probably playing in the right games, the ones that fit all your limits. If you played for much higher stakes or against much tougher or the wrong types of players, you would almost certainly feel regret, perhaps even go on tilt

Everybody has limits, but many people won’t admit it. They believe they can ignore the financial bankroll guidelines because they overestimate their skills. They pretend that they can handle much more stress than they can really tolerate. You probably know people who:

• Play in games that are too big, too tough, or the wrong style for them.
• Or claim to be winners, but barely break even.
• Or are consistent losers, but insist they’d win if they weren’t so terribly unlucky.

If any of those descriptions fit you, stop kidding yourself. You’re much more likely to deceive yourself about your psychological limits than your bankroll or skill limits. You can easily get excellent advice about the bankroll you need for various games. If you keep good records, you know how well you do in those games.

But there are no clear guidelines for most psychological limits. You have to assess your own pain and stress tolerance subjectively, and most people can’t or won’t do it realistically.

Can You Change Your Mindset?

Preston Oade emailed me: “You can change regret’s negative effects into positive ones by changing your mindset.” I agree. If regret motivates you to change the way you think and play, it’s worth the pain. It’s helped you to convert a mistake into a learning opportunity.

A few people have the discipline to change their mindsets, but many people can’t do it, and hardly anyone can change it quickly and easily. Changing mindsets is one of psychotherapy’s most important goals, and every honest therapist will admit that it’s a slow, uncertain process. After a few hours the therapist can tell a patient what’s wrong with his mindset, but just telling him won’t accomplish much.

Changing any important mindset element usually takes a great deal of time and work, and nobody can completely change his mindset. You can’t just decide, “I’ll create a new mindset,” and immediately or easily get it. Accept that reality when making your self-development plans.

Don’t Beat Yourself Up

Although pain is indispensable, excessive pain is destructive. When it becomes too intense, you may ignore the long-term consequences of your actions and care only about escaping from it. For example, pathological gamblers and other addicts feel such intense pain that they take extremely destructive actions to escape it. If you hurt too much, you will certainly make serious mistakes.

You need moderate pain, high enough to motivate you to change, not so high that you act foolishly. Since you have little control over your emotional reactions, avoid situations that cause more regret or other pain than you can handle. Then look for ways to gain from the moderate pain you will occasionally feel.

Preston also emailed: “Beating yourself up with regret is unproductive and doesn’t make any sense. It’s much better to ask, ‘How does this benefit me?’”

Preston’s point brings us back to the need to analyze yourself honestly. Accept and work within your limits. Don’t deny that you feel regrets, but don’t wallow in them. Accept that they cause mistakes, but they can also motivate you and provide information that helps you to become a better player and a better person. ♠

“Dr. Al” ([email protected]) coaches only on psychology issues. For information about seminars and webinars, go to propokerseminars.com. He is David Sklansky’s co-author of DUCY? and the sole author of four poker psychology books.