Hands Following a Mistake: The Real EV Sinks

How Your Brain Reacts to Mistakes

When you make a mistake, your brain responds in mere seconds with error-related negativity (ERN) — electrical reaction activating:

• Detection of the mistake
• Boost of self-control
• Behavioral adjustments

On the “technical” level your brain realizes that it made an error ( the “oh crap!” first reaction) then transfers resources to properly respond and alter your behavior for the post-mistake situation.

The stages here can vary in length and even manifests as a form of error-related positivity, depending on the individual features of the person. For instance, people with cognitive disorders, including attention deficit disorder (ADD, ADHD), obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), addictive behavior, have more variable response times to errors than the average person. They also tend to have different depths of emotional reaction to the mistake with more frequent extremes, like complete neglect or hyper-fixation.

At the same time, personal preferences and “weak spots” also affect ERN. This means that an individual’s response could differ depending on the origin of their mistake and its scale in their personal value system. These differences result in various emotional and cognitive reactions to mistakes.

Thus, people who perceive mistakes as indicators of intellectual limits, tend to avoid tasks in which they have previously made mistakes. And since the brain is quite a lazy organ, it doesn’t use its resources to change your mindset unless faced with a life and death situation, these types of people rarely learn from their mistakes, seeing them as boundaries they are pointlessly pushing against.

Mistakes equal disappointed but only because they remind them of their own limits. For the same reason, their emotional reaction to repeating mistakes remains virtually unchanged, because these mistakes simply continue to serve as a reminder of their personal limitations.

On the other side of the aisle are people who perceive their mistakes as learning material and tend to change their behavior so that they stop repeating the same mistakes. They often go back to difficult tasks in order to understand the reason for their mistakes. 

Mistakes make them frustrated, as signs of imperfection in the decision-making process but also increase sensitivity to negative reactions towards themselves if repeated.

Three Reasons Why Hands Following the Mistake Steal EV

A poker session is a sequence of hands, not a selection. In it, previous events inevitably influence subsequent ones. This is a fact players often forget, attributing all influence solely to tilt as something above and beyond all else. But tilt is actually just a component, one of many that can be started by different actions, including major mistakes and their consequences.

#1 The Focus Decreases After Mistakes

A costly mistake can completely occupy your mind, leaving little cognitive resources for other processes.

As a result, during the following hands, you can be less attentive, less focused, and less interested because you’re stuck on that one mistake, planning how to prevent it from happening again. By occupying your focus, this major mistake makes all further decisions more superficial and cognitively demanding because you don’t have enough free resources to think properly.

So, in subsequent hands, the risk of making new mistakes increases the more you continue to think about your first mistake, sucking away your EV in the long run.

#2 Emotions Influence Your Mental State

It’s no secret that experiencing a big failure is unpleasant and can shake you like no other.

When you make a mistake and notice it, the disappointment doesn’t easily go away. It continues to influence your decision-making process.

Self-doubt, anger, disgust, chagrin, these and other intense negative emotions can lead to tilt and poor play of the following hands. The more you play, the more non-positive outcomes you go through, the more fuel to the initial tilt from the major mistake you add, affecting the rest of the game.

The saddest part is that emotions also stay with you after the game is over, pushing you towards self-reflection and negative emotional pumping, which reinforces an acute reaction to subsequent failures and mistakes.

#3 Frequency Bias Enters The Stage

Are you familiar with the situation when you learn a new word and then, for a while, you start seeing it everywhere? This is how frequency bias works: when you gain new information, your brain focuses on it for some time that makes you more attentive to it around you.

The same thing happens when you make a mistake at the poker table. One error, and for the next few hands (or sometimes even until the end of the whole session) you can’t stop noticing spots where you now expect and are afraid of making the same mistake.

This bias forces you to change your strategy and focus much more on preventing the same mistake. However, the same bias also increase the probability of making even smaller and not so noticeable mistakes to lose EV here and there.

And while a major mistake can be very costly in the moment, subsequent smaller mistakes due to frequency bias can lead to much larger EV losses over time.

How to Change Yourself to Reduce Damage From Mistakes

Your actions after making mistakes directly depend on how you feel about them.

If they demotivate you: stop seeing mistakes as your enemies or signs of your limits. Mistakes in poker highlight areas of your potential growth and improvement. They happen not because you are stupid or unteachable but because you are human and your mind is complicated. Perfection in poker is unattainable, no matter what solvers and poker coaches tell you. So, your goal should be to surpass yourself, not some ephemeral ideal.

If you have an ability to learn from mistakes and focus on them too much: note mistakes during the game and move on right after that.

By focusing on mistakes at the moment, you steal your attention and sharpness from the following hands. As we mentioned earlier, our brain is lazy but it isn’t stupid. Evolution has made it efficient when it comes to cognitive expenditures, so it’s not in our best interest to resist a well-honed system at this point. However, letting your brain change focus to stay in shape doesn’t mean you should just let your mistake go completely and not learn from it.

When the game or session is over and you are ready to study — start each time with analyzing your mistakes and determine the right course of action.

Then, use a training app to drill the solution for the most expensive mistakes until you realize that lesson is learned. 

Remember also do not overwhelm your brain trying to fix all mistakes at once or you risk creating an informational mess in your head that will serve as fertile ground for even more mistakes.

If mistakes make you emotional, work with another person to designate why mistakes affect you and find a way to cope. It may seem excessive or a sign of mental weakness, but in reality people aren’t very good at self-reflection without external feedback and questions. If you want to understand yourself deeper and change your mindset, the other person — fellow poker player, trained therapist or mental coach — can give an outside perspective and advice or just listen to help you self-analyse.

If you do not want to talk with others, journaling can become a good tool because no one can look into yourself deeper than you.