The gamma defines influence. Low values meaning ‘far’ and high values meaning ‘close’. If gamma is too large, the radius of the area of influence of the support vectors only includes the support vector itself and no amount of regularization with C will be able to prevent overfitting. If gamma is very small, the model is too constrained and cannot capture the complexity of the data.

The regularization parameter (lambda) serves as a degree of importance that is given to miss-classifications. This can be used to draw the tradeoff with OverFitting.