Loss aversion and other feedback imbalances (Part II)

Another well-known feedback error is hero calls. Think back to the last time you made such a call with ace high in a big pot. If you were right, you probably felt amazing, even heroic. Winning the pot gave you a huge amount of self-approval, which was magnified every time you showed the call to your friends. But what happens if you call with ace high and lose? Well... you feel really stupid for a while, especially if you are criticised. But most of the time you'll probably think: "I usually beat his bluff, this time he got lucky, he should have. And I still don't know if it was a good call". Or if he bluffed and beat you, you'll probably think: "Damn! I knew he was bluffing! Sick!"

What I am about to say may not be true, but it is true for many players. Hero calls carry a lot of psychological weight because we glorify them more than other poker hands. It's almost an exception to the normal poker rules. Therefore, when you lose with a hero call, you get very little negative feedback, and when you win, you get an incredible amount of positive feedback. In scientific terms, you can see how your brain initiates you to make cheeky hero calls. So, in the end, you don't feel so bad when you lose and you feel so great when you win. Hero calls introduce us to another feedback imbalance.

What can we do to redress this imbalance? The answer brings us back to self-talk, and here is where positive self-talk comes into its own. Positivity can lead to behaviour that poker can't do by itself.

For example, after checking in a big pot on the river and deciding not to fire the last barrel, if your opponent shows the nuts, instead of feeling bad or neutral about his win, you can say to yourself: "It's a good thing I didn't fire that river bluff. He would have called. I played well."

You can also do this and that with hero calls to even out the feedback a bit. First you can use negative self-talk (with the trainee) : " Damn! I shouldn't have made that call. I'll be more careful with hero calls."

Second, it can mitigate the positive incentive after a successful hero call. For example, you can make a rule that you can't show off your hero call to any of your friends. This would remove most of the psycho-social incentive to start with the hero call and help you to concentrate on the best possible game.

The feedback imbalance is also closely linked to the orientation advantage. The indicative advantage shows how much information a certain fact (e.g. the hand shown) reveals about the opponent's game. For simplicity, I will illustrate this example from a non-poker point of view.

Let's say you have a vase full of glass marbles. You know that there are 100 marbles in total. But there are two possible configurations: either 95 red and 5 blue marbles, or 65 red and 35 blue. You do not know which of these configurations is currently available, nor do you know any probabilities, but you are allowed to take one marble from the vase. Let's say you take out a marble and it is red - the predictive advantage is low. This event does not tell you whether the pot is filled with 95% red or 65%. It is free to be either way. However, if you pull out a blue ball, there is already a high predictive advantage, there is a high probability that the vessel is filled with 35% in blue.

In marbles, this concept may seem very clear, but in poker, the rush of emotions, the noise and the complexity of the circumstances distort the picture and make it harder to see the probabilities. For example, in a situation where you call with top pair because you think your opponent has a nut or a missed draw, and he shows a nut, you are usually under a very strong negative influence: "God, I'm such a fucker, I should have folded." Often enough, a nuts show down is an event of low predictable advantage. Your opponent will sometimes have nuts, whether you think he's bluffing with his draw or not, and you shouldn't take it too seriously. When your subconscious loses a big pot, it rarely explains it. It just sees that you lost the pot and presses the pain button. Our subconscious is very poor at processing data, especially about predictive advantage, so we have to use our conscious mind to calibrate our reactions, let alone our self-conditioning. So, once again, talking to ourselves turns out to be the perfect cure. Saying to yourself: "I knew he might have the nuts, and it tells me nothing about my play, whether I did well or badly here." In this way we mitigate the negativity that comes with a losing pot.

We must always be aware and alert, and organise dialogues in our minds. Eventually, with more practice, your subconscious will learn to interpret such events as a predictable advantage and then you will no longer need to consciously regulate them (in other words, you will have reached a level of subconscious competence in doing so). But until then, you must be rigorous in your mind's dialogue with itself and observe its self-conditioning. Talking to yourself is one of the several ways to have control in poker, so you have to master this tool as best you can.

Haseeb Qureshi

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