jjd323's blog

I read an article at youarenotsosmart.com, which outlines a behavioural pattern known as as the Extinction Burst. The ideas hail from the 1960s and ’70s and are attributed to Burrhus Frederic Skinner. Below are a few quotations from the article, and below that a very brief commentary of my own. Bear with me, this is relevant to poker. Here are a the quotations:

If you get rewarded by your actions, you are more likely to continue them. If punished, you are more likely to stop. Over time, you begin to predict reward and punishment by linking longer and longer series of events to their eventual outcomes.

Following Skinner's classification, there are two kinds of conditioning: classical, and operant.

In classical conditioning, something which normally doesn't have any influence becomes a trigger for a response.  ...  If you have ever been sick after eating or drinking something you love, you will avoid it in the future. The smell of it, or even the thought of it, can make you ill. Classical conditioning keeps you alive. You learn quickly to avoid that which may harm you and seek out that which makes you happy 

Operant conditioning changes your desires. Your inclinations becomes greater through reinforcement, or diminish through punishment

Importantly, and ultimately the reason this post has anything to do with poker, the behavioural description includes a third factor: extinction.

When you expect a reward or a punishment and nothing happens, your conditioned response starts to fade away. ... Just before you give up on a long-practiced routine, you freak out. It’s a final desperate attempt by the oldest parts of your brain to keep getting rewarded. 

Oh hello there, tilt-monster. One of the cited examples is particularly germane:

If you use the same elevator every day, and one day you press the button and nothing happens, you start jamming the button over and over again instead of just giving up. 

fnar. fnar.

I'm not going to attempt any in-depth analysis of psychology; it isn't my thing. I intend to quickly outline how I feel this is relevant to poker; a single simple example should suffice.

There are times when you feel an ABC opponent is becoming frustrated that his raise/c-bet strategy isn't rewarding him in the way that he is accustomed. Maybe you are check-raising a ton, or simply making hands and winning at showdown a lot. This often results in a blow-up from your opponent. Perhaps you are also liable to blow-up in similar situations. Perhaps this is the extinction behaviour that Skinner documents. By simply being aware of this idea, perhaps we can identify the onset of this behaviour and lop off some C-game. Perhaps.