dreaded delays

A couple of years ago I ran across the following article in a chance purchase of a scientific magazine:

Dread lights up like a pain in your brain

The first trial apparently is designed to verify the presence of dread and infer a relationship with time. Subjects are offered a choice between: a quantity of physical pain with a short delay; the same quantity of pain and longer delay.

p1 + d1 > p2 + d2 where p1=p2 and d1>d2


Nurturing a basic assumption on dread, it’s a no-brainer: the former dominates the latter. Except, for those, 16%, with unorthodox value systems. The second trial, more interestingly, sets out to determine if dread and pain are tradeable currencies. The subjects choose between:

p1 + d1 and p2 + d2, where p1>p2, a1 < a2.

Neither option dominates, so subjects are now forced, non-trivially, to consult their value systems [2] to trade-off the delay and shock differences expressed by the two options; less pleasantly, but comparable, as to how one might negotiate choosing between a car of superior drivability but inferior fuel efficiency, to another.

The second trial might elicit, or bias, perceived rational-choice, rather than value or preference: it appears irrational to opt for additional pain, at the expense of waiting. Dread is a state-of-mind – it’s going to happen, why worry about it: dread is internal. Whereas physical pain is real, validated, somewhat externally (by the electrodes!), thus a more plausible cost. So, perhaps, some of the subjects are predisposed to answer no to an increase in pain, rather, than attempt to trade-off, two very different and so difficult to trade, metrics. Though, arguably, such rationale might advance more readily on the philosophical thought-experiment plane, than, well, when wired up experiencing both forms of anxiety.

Asymmetry: if waiting for pain is painful, shouldn’t waiting for pleasure be comparably pleasurable? Nature is cruel; still what would our ancestors have got done?

Hyperbolic discounting is the term ascribed by economists to the preference for low-early rewards, over higher-late ones: conferred to psychologists, one assumes, to ascertain why. One might conjecture it is as a consequence of our, mostly, innate inability to delay gratification; or, an intrinsic (related) tendency to discount value to our future selves.

A friend winning £5000, one hopes, will evoke cheer in us; mirror neurons fire-up our, sharing, in part, the experience too, if not the cash. Of course our responses are seldom so clean; however, preference for the pal’s windfall, over a personal gain of, say, £50 should fail to surface in but a few. Exchange £50 for £1000, though, what then?

The altruistic gene, extent of friendship, of course, will influence the almost inevitably discounted value we store on someone else’s gain over an equivalent personal one. Arguably a similar sense of discounted empathy is present when contemplating rewarding our future selves. Confirmation, or knowledge, of future rewards doesn’t benefit the present, as it does the future-present. The nearer the reward, typically, the greater the anticipation, the better the ‘now-experience’ - the less we discount it. As with the linked-example a similar present-satisfaction level is predicted, now, at the prospect of the equivalent fixed-rewards in either 5 or 6 years’ time. Thus they’re comparably discounted, valued similarly. Inevitably, therefore, doubling the latter date’s reward, as in the linked example, trivialises the choice. So in other words, the sooner the reward, the more “me” is benefiting, the further away, the more it is someone else’s gain: the future-me. Somewhat off-track, and besides, there are other discounting drivers such as circumstance, risk.

Waiting for pain seems unequivocally bad; pleasure delays appear somewhat nebulous - particularly when pleasure banishes a negative state. However, it seems, in general, we choose instant gratification - which often won’t bind to value, or arguably preference. Rewarding or not, delaying pleasure, holds less impact than dread-induced pain-delay.

The poker tie-in is an obvious one. Players predisposed to inflict protracted delays on their adversaries before fixing on a decision often qualify their actions as ones geared to elicit information, or to guarantee a measured decision; often, though, it is designed solely to factor in dread into competitor’s future decision-making. However, waiting on an opponent’s play is in theory a mixture of both states: anticipatory pleasure, anticipatory pain. Uncertainty, though, a cost not mentioned so far, will typically mitigate pleasure and augment pain. For example, in the above shock experiment one could easily imagine a shock ‘sometime in the next minute’ to be less preferable than one at precisely 30 seconds. Indeed, one might expect uncertainty to be traded out for shock increases, as delays were.

The game or hand-specifics, of course will determine the mix of anticipatory emotions. Anticipatory pleasure appears drowned by anticipatory dread (& ~ regret) when enduring the uncertainty accompanying a big bluff. It makes sense: the bluff-state is, typically, emotionally, net-negative, since to not bluff is to suffer losing. As such the design of bluffing is often to gain a less (expected) net-negative state, rather than move to a positive one – so it should seldom feel great. In reality of course the effect of our bluffing on our emotions is not so calculated. We are often inclined to bluff for the wrong reasons, notably, loss aversion, which in fact would lead to a poorer (expected) state. Anticipatory-pleasure should perhaps surface, or even dominate, in free-roll situations or on occasion of a pot wrapped up. Unfortunately, it rarely feels so tangible: it seems we bank the gain, and unfulfilled gains result in disappointment. The lack of emotional-symmetry between gain/loss states (biasing anticipatory dread over pleasure), the discomfort of uncertainty, testify to a tough time waiting.

If one accepts a player is damaged though dread, damaged by more than just the fact, but of its anticipation then ethical questions of a sort are bound to arise. The claim that to bear, tolerate, endure, mask, even mutate such suffering, is a requisite part of players’ armour, (as to inflict is of the arsenal) is legitimate. However, it is trivial, and often, cost free to do so. In live play it is mostly unregulated; players are generally only restricted within the hand. While some target sufferance selectively, others initiate a catchall strategy: sweating a guy out at every opportunity, guarantees sufferance under any weak position. While admittedly, those allocating delays selectively will inflict more angst, since the threat is weightier, the distorted perceptions under such circumstances doubtlessly leads one to conclude, and experience, the catchall play to elicit the greater net anticipatory dread. Anticipatory dread, of course, is the design of this, at times, tedium.

In blackjack, circumstances frequently surface where emotions bait the knowledgeable player into falling out of line; however, the prevailing sense of ‘but I know this is the right decision’, will usually suffice for all but the most marginal of decisions. Hence placating emotions via a compromised strategy is seldom facilitated: the two remained partitioned. [1]. In poker, such defences are easily breached. Situations are unique, measurements subjective, hands can be played in a mixture of ways. Consequently, without a definite rebuttal to hand, emotions gain easy access to decision-making, and so in seeking out plausible strategies to reduce, or minimise, the emotional cost, they corrupt the decision-making process. Anticipatory dread is just one, rather powerful emotion, the mind is eager to dump anyway it can.

Once again, though it is rightly viewed as a specific instance, of the far greater challenge of managing our emotions in poker, the test while appropriate should be even-handed. For purposes of practicality, fairness and skill, the resource should be restricted over an interval, with individuals left to consider how best to allocate their resource (as it is on-line).

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On-line poker rooms should be fully tuned in to the cost, or value of inserting time delays.

Life for the multi-tabler can be exhaustive, keeping track of all stacks at any given time, is extremely tough: it is easy to be a pot or two out on an estimate on any one table. Years ago while playing regularly at both and party and stars, I observed a marked difference between the sites' respective feel-good factors. No, not the softness differential, but rather, the emotional reflex upon winning a pot. Glancing post-hand on party I’d be gratified by seeing the cash-total update, on stars it’d already updated. Naturally, I, the Pavlov dog, half-salivated when the bell rung: partly expecting the stack size to remain unchanged, partly to increment. Of course, I knew which site was which, but not in time to catch the reflex emotion. Needless to say, I’d experience a fleeting burst of pleasure/disappointment depending when the roll was updated. Significantly, no flipside or downside exists to the inserted delay – neither site deducted losses at the end of the hand, so no complementary, deflating, ‘delayed loss’ at party.

In the early years, PokerStars’ reputation for tournaments and big bet cash-games soared, as did their notoriety for killer rivers: the luckless rapidly coined the site, RiverStars.

Defeat snatched from the jaws of victory is the bitterest pill: virulent when administered by no-limit poker. Death in limit comes by a thousand cuts, a mere handful of meaty blows will suffice to slay the NL-victim; as such, those beats persist in the memory, not recollected as some hazy nightmare, as is often the case with disastrous limit sessions.

In a bid, it seems, to retain the authenticity and drama of live poker, stars, when no more action could take place in a hand, turn the cards on their backs. In addition, they injected a palpable, dramatic delay, between each chapter - every street. In limit-cash, at the time, the mainstay of other sites, this wouldn’t occur, players were seldom all-in, and when they were, (certainly now) hands were only revealed, or mucked, once the river was revealed, concluding the hand. These delays augment the torments of counterfactual regret and anticipatory dread: emotional investment implicit to waiting, knowing what needs to be avoided for just that card, is considerable, defeat, therefore, is all the more crushing. With cards face-down, the intensity, dread of the river is generally less – seldom are miracle rivers apparent in ignorance of an adversaries holding – your aces are vulnerable to every street.

When cards are dealt in one swoop, however, there is little time for anticipation, the beginning, middle and end are fuzzily defined; as such, an abrupt defeat engenders a less vivid counterfactual reality of winning - with all hurdles to be vaulted at once – in contrast, say, to one street and four outs standing before victory. In addition, of course, there is the aforementioned anticipatory dread: lengthier delays increase dread. The purported lack of symmetry between experiences in delays of favourable and unfavourable events, allied to general emotional-aversion to uncertainty, infers such injections unwise: unnecessary accretion of negative experiences hardly value-adds to the brand.

So in short, stars, it seemed, implicitly ensured PokerStars rivers scarred the most.

Next article

[1] Incidentally, delays from the croupier in blackjack frustrate the majority of punters, accompanied losses seem to torment the most.