Do you notice a lot of swings in your bankroll? I do. I’ll run hot for a while and post a solid ROI and then I’ll go on a bender and lose a good portion of it. At that point, I do what most of us do. I take a break from poker, relax and maybe read a few poker books. A month or so later I’m back in the mix and winning again.
At first I thought I was experiencing natural ups and downs. But then I realized what was really happening.
After carefully analyzing my last few boom-and-bust cycles I noticed that I slowly picked up bad habits and sprung poker leaks. I’d make increasingly loose calls and increasingly loose re-raises. Soon my usual winning play would go out the window and it would be replaced with some bastardized donkey-style poker. It’s happening to you too- slowly, but it’s happening. Unless you analyze your game constantly for these little leaks, your game will degrade until it breaks and you become a losing player.
Why The Hell Does This Happen?
My “ah ha” moment came when I remembered a classic study on superstition from my behavioral psychology class. For those of you who don’t know a lot about behavior psychology, it’s based on the premise that we will repeat behaviors that are rewarded and stop behaviors that are punished. In this study B.F. Skinner explored what would happen if he gave pigeons a reward at random intervals regardless of their behavior. The results were interesting.
Some birds would constantly bob their heads, some would lift their legs and others would spin in circles. When a bird was reinforced, they associated the reward with the behavior they were doing at the time and that caused them to perform that behavior more often. If the bird was rewarded while bobbing its head, it bobbed its head more often which increased the chance that the food would come while its head was bobbing. The head-bobbing behavior would be reinforced to the point where the bird constantly bobbed its head.
Soon Skinner had cages full of pigeons performing ridiculous antics believing that these behaviors would get them food.
What Does This Have To Do With Poker?
We all have friends that have favorite hands. A good friend of mine always plays 7-4 because he won the biggest pot of his life with that hand. I also played with a couple of guys who swore that J-9 always hit. Stories like Doyle Brunson’s legendary 10-2 only serve to reinforce these superstitions.
You Think This Doesn’t Apply To You?
Most solid players are good enough to know better than to play trash hands “just because,” but superstitious behavior can develop in other ways.
Let’s say you’re playing in a Sit ‘N Go and you’re having a hard time. All the hands you raise pre-flop miss on the flop and all your continuation bets get raised. It happens to all of us and it sucks. What do you do when it happens to you?
I’m willing to bet you stop raising so much. You start to limp with hands that you’d usually raise and you stop c-betting on flops you miss. You become a passive player because your correct plays are being punished.
On the other hand, let’s say you’ve won a couple of nice pots by re-raising outside of your usual range. You start to think you’ve found a cool tweak to your game and you start re-raising more often. Soon your opponents catch on and start playing back at you. All of the sudden, you’re hemorrhaging money. After a while, you’re beaten into submission and fall into a passive playing style causing you to continue your losing streak.
See what I’m saying?
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It’s in our nature to increase the frequency of behaviors that are rewarded and decrease the frequency of behaviors that are punished, but that tendency can hurt you in poker. Poker has an element of luck in it that occasionally rewards poor play and punishes good play. The luck factor throws us off and makes us pick up bad habits that, if left unchecked, will wreck your game and send you into a downswing. Take time out of your week to analyze your games, both winning and losing, to see if you’re picking up any bad habits. Fix your leaks before they become serious and you’ll save yourself a lot of headache and money.
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