Positive reinforcement

Marcus Bateman / Marcus Bateman / 29 March 2009 / Leave a Comment

Positive reinforcement is one of the single greatest things about the game of poker. Often in poker, a player makes the wrong move at the wrong time and wins. Instead of making the player feel bad about their particular bad play, the positive effects of winning the pot cause their brain to think that they did well - despite the fact that they did not.

This is, in effect, a self hustle. If you compare this to a game with very little variance, such as pool, where a player has to intentionally play bad in order to hustle their opponent into playing for money, we can quickly see that poker has a built in hustling mechanism. Poker, through its very unpredictable nature, allows bad players to think they are good over and over again, simply because they keep winning pots of some description.

Through their behavior being positively reinforced, they come to believe that they are good even when they are not - as many of their mistakes not only go unpunished, but are in fact rewarded. Compare this to a game like snooker or chess, where even the smallest mistake can be quickly taken advantage of by the skilled player, with the end result that the player loses not only consistently over the long run, but also over the short run too.

Although winning a pot when behind often feels great (and in many situations is a completely legitimate part of an overall winning playing style), don't let the result of those chips sliding over to you change how you think about the game. Poker is a world where you are simply there to try to make positive bets on psychological situations and mathematical odds, and the end result of any one hand is largely irrelevant.

Do not let the self hustling mechanism of poker make you think you are good just because you won a session. If deep down you know that you were playing badly you should be analysing and thinking about that session just as closely as any losing session you played.

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