I am a big fan of Tommy Angelo.
Of all the efforts one should put in studying the game of poker, I believe most of it should be in creating and honing the proper mindset. Once you've read the basics of strategy (hand charts, concepts like pot odds, SPR, etc) I believe in skipping the more advanced technical material (potential game destroyers like "Exploiting Regulars" and "Let There Be Range") and just focusing on the management aspects of the game - Mental, and Business.
So yes, I am also a fan of Dusty Schmidt.
If I could only offer two things to a poker student (for whatever reason) it would be "The Eightfold Path to Poker Enlightenment" and "Treat Your Poker Like A Business."
To illustrate a bit more: Once you know how to be at least a break-even player, the learning curve steepens A LOT. You can exert a huge amount of study effort to get that one extra bb/100. But without a strong mental game, you can easily tilt off everything.
So which aspect matters more, if you think long-term? A skill that gains you more money when you are focused, or a mindset that gains little but keeps you focused?
First things first, in my honest opinion. Put that huge amount of study effort in your mental game!
To further represent this idea and revisit the value of "targets versus goals", here is an excerpt from a thread on the Asia Poker Academy Forums where a new player has set for himself a goal of having $1k after a month:
"I am planning to make a deposit of $100 and make 1k in 1month, starting
from Nov 1st. The goal might be far fetched, but I want to make sure I
take the right path, which obviously sooner or later will take me there."
My immediate thought was this: the "right path" is to NOT set such a goal.
But I of course could not just reply so succinctly.
"i wish you luck, but i also wish to offer perspective:
i've seen players race to $1k as a goal and hit it (and subsequently
lose it). but to do it in a month? might be too much pressure on
yourself? if you play really well but only have $600 with a few days to
go, would you be happy or would you double your efforts to reach your
goal? what is more important to you - the medal after one month, or
honing skills that you can use for the long-term?
i know goals are a motivator, but i advocate setting smaller measurable
targets. (a Tommy Angelo nugget i'll never forget). a result-based
goal might set you up to feel like a failure, even when you do very
well.
how about a discipline-based target? like,
"i will only play NL4 for one month solid" or "i will play at least
twenty $1 SNG's a day for one month." or "i will learn and strictly
follow a BR management strategy."
so why not define an aspect of your game that you feel is "not your best" and work on that instead?
i know that stuff is boring and not something you can post a brag about,
but at least that is something that is directly under your control.
having $1k at the end is a bonus, but it is not really something you
have direct power over. all you can do is play your best, budget your
time well, and play a lot.
if my goal was to have 1k in my BR at month-end, i can just keep
loading $50 and joining big MTT's till i bink one...or i can save myself
the trouble and just deposit 1k.
imagine if a new basketball player sets a goal to "make 10 three-point
shots" in one game, it will be an awful sight to watch him try. the
fundamental issue is that he is craving the result, and not the skill.
but he can set a target to shoot 500 threes (not make, just shoot) every
day at practice. and one day, he may or may not make ten threes in one
game, but he probably can make a few consistently, and do it every
game.
i hope this is not a downer. i mean it as a motivational redirect.
when we have the passion and the energy to want to be better, it is our
duty to ourselves to use that passion and energy where it is most
efficient and rewarding."
Friday, October 19, 2012
Sunday, October 7, 2012
Digging In Deep
There is a reason APA VIP TRAINING is a program that lasts 10-16 weeks. There is a reason it often takes a bit longer than that. Let me shoot off the cliche and get it out of the way:
Poker takes a minute to learn and a lifetime to master. From game theory and techniques alone - the basics of how to play, the intermediary modules on Cbetting, to more advanced concepts like 4betting light - the amount of time necessary to take it all in as your own personal knowledge is easily never going to fit into the 16-weeks.
But there is a more important reason we designed the intensity of the training the way we did. To break a student down mentally.
Anyone can play great poker for short spurts of time - a three-day tourney here, a few cash games there. But to be a true pro and grind it out consistently and constantly? To sit there as the game itself tries to grind you out? It takes a while for that ugliness to manifest.
That time, I've discovered, happens between weeks 6-9. Roughly halfway thru the training program. It is at this point that the student has that feeling that he has "learned a lot" and "should be sailing smoothly"
It is also at this point that - variance delivering - a student will smack into a wall and slowly slide downwards like a wet wad of tissue.
Elsie and I are at this point.
Surprisingly though, it is not Elsie that has hit the wall hard, but another student we are training parallel to him.
This one is not a bad student by any means - he listens to all our input, he has a great natural knack for the game, and his starting hand ranges are impeccable.
So, in a world where a lot of poker authors devote massive amounts of energy to teach the preflop game (starting hand range), how can someone with the optimal range still be losing?
This is a good place for the cliche "You can lead a horse to water, but can you make him drink?"
If you can get him to float on his back, you really got something.
The sheer volume of hands that go to showdown betray the leak. Our student loses focus post-flop. And I wrote him thus:
"...BRING THE FOLD BACK! your WTSD is ridiculously high. even with a decent starting range (you have that) if you can't let go post-flop, you are an even bigger fish. because by then you have put in more money to lose. remember this: SMALL HAND = SMALL POT. when you have one pair (HUGE losses with one pair hands) and the pot is being bet twice or thrice... always always always consider letting your one pair go..."
"...bad preflop plays. again, your starting hand selection is GREAT. it is your decision to continue after heavy action that is costing you. it looks like you have no respect for their bets and raises. you play your mid pocket pairs like a person in a tournament. DON'T!"
This next part, I find amusing, given recent revelations in my own game.
"...also, please try this: NEVER FLAT a 3bet preflop. NEVER flat a 4bet preflop. ever."
The clarion call here is for FOCUS. We have set our student up with sandbags, guns, and ammunition. Now that the battle is truly joined - with bad beats and suckouts and coolers on a daily basis - it is the time to really feel what this stupid game we love so much can do to our psyche.
It can make them forget the very basic questions we train them to ask:
do i have a reason to bet?
do i have a reason to call?
I write our student further:
"...now i know you may be feeling crushed right now. but losing $200 is the reason we gave you a 300 EURO bankroll. we saw this coming - and we prepared for this ;-)
it is demoralizing, but it is an important experience! you have to:
1) find the strength to pick yourself up and stay focused - keep moving forward
2) trust us when we say this is just a part of the bumpy ride - especially during the learning stages. the key is to learn from it. losing this much helps you to never forget some of the things you did wrong.
3) trust yourself the way we trust you... and more! as i show you some of your hands, you already know what was wrong and right. you just have to practice and get used to the idea of doing the right thing all the time.
do this, and this will be your lowest point. we go up from here!"
Time to dig in and clear our heads boys. The enemy is going to come rushing over that yonder hill. There will be many of them, but they are going to come at us one at a time. We won't need a machine gun. A simple bolt-action rifle will do. You have the weapons, the ammunition, the protection, the element of surprise. PICK THEM OFF! Load, Aim, Fire, Kill. Rinse and repeat.
One hand at a time.
When you look at things that way, it really is just like shooting fish in a barrel.
Poker takes a minute to learn and a lifetime to master. From game theory and techniques alone - the basics of how to play, the intermediary modules on Cbetting, to more advanced concepts like 4betting light - the amount of time necessary to take it all in as your own personal knowledge is easily never going to fit into the 16-weeks.
But there is a more important reason we designed the intensity of the training the way we did. To break a student down mentally.
Anyone can play great poker for short spurts of time - a three-day tourney here, a few cash games there. But to be a true pro and grind it out consistently and constantly? To sit there as the game itself tries to grind you out? It takes a while for that ugliness to manifest.
That time, I've discovered, happens between weeks 6-9. Roughly halfway thru the training program. It is at this point that the student has that feeling that he has "learned a lot" and "should be sailing smoothly"
It is also at this point that - variance delivering - a student will smack into a wall and slowly slide downwards like a wet wad of tissue.
Elsie and I are at this point.
Surprisingly though, it is not Elsie that has hit the wall hard, but another student we are training parallel to him.
So, in a world where a lot of poker authors devote massive amounts of energy to teach the preflop game (starting hand range), how can someone with the optimal range still be losing?
This is a good place for the cliche "You can lead a horse to water, but can you make him drink?"
If you can get him to float on his back, you really got something.
The sheer volume of hands that go to showdown betray the leak. Our student loses focus post-flop. And I wrote him thus:
"...BRING THE FOLD BACK! your WTSD is ridiculously high. even with a decent starting range (you have that) if you can't let go post-flop, you are an even bigger fish. because by then you have put in more money to lose. remember this: SMALL HAND = SMALL POT. when you have one pair (HUGE losses with one pair hands) and the pot is being bet twice or thrice... always always always consider letting your one pair go..."
"...bad preflop plays. again, your starting hand selection is GREAT. it is your decision to continue after heavy action that is costing you. it looks like you have no respect for their bets and raises. you play your mid pocket pairs like a person in a tournament. DON'T!"
This next part, I find amusing, given recent revelations in my own game.
"...also, please try this: NEVER FLAT a 3bet preflop. NEVER flat a 4bet preflop. ever."
The clarion call here is for FOCUS. We have set our student up with sandbags, guns, and ammunition. Now that the battle is truly joined - with bad beats and suckouts and coolers on a daily basis - it is the time to really feel what this stupid game we love so much can do to our psyche.
It can make them forget the very basic questions we train them to ask:
do i have a reason to bet?
do i have a reason to call?
I write our student further:
"...now i know you may be feeling crushed right now. but losing $200 is the reason we gave you a 300 EURO bankroll. we saw this coming - and we prepared for this ;-)
it is demoralizing, but it is an important experience! you have to:
1) find the strength to pick yourself up and stay focused - keep moving forward
2) trust us when we say this is just a part of the bumpy ride - especially during the learning stages. the key is to learn from it. losing this much helps you to never forget some of the things you did wrong.
3) trust yourself the way we trust you... and more! as i show you some of your hands, you already know what was wrong and right. you just have to practice and get used to the idea of doing the right thing all the time.
do this, and this will be your lowest point. we go up from here!"
Time to dig in and clear our heads boys. The enemy is going to come rushing over that yonder hill. There will be many of them, but they are going to come at us one at a time. We won't need a machine gun. A simple bolt-action rifle will do. You have the weapons, the ammunition, the protection, the element of surprise. PICK THEM OFF! Load, Aim, Fire, Kill. Rinse and repeat.
One hand at a time.
When you look at things that way, it really is just like shooting fish in a barrel.
Reverend Dave
It has been a few weeks since the last update. Me and Lightbulb have been busy training and learning. Remember I promised a story of how my own training sessions were going?
This one is a story about a leak. And a plumber-reverend.
In my apartment, I had an old gooseneck faucet in my sink that refuses to completely shut anymore. Getting it fixed would have involved the simple task of buying a new gooseneck, and the not-so-simple task of ripping out the old one to put in the new one without flooding my apartment in the process.
Not really knowing how to do the second part of that task, I let it slide for a while.
Now I am not the kind of person who can sleep at night knowing i am losing a drop of water every five seconds - water that I will be paying for but never actually use. So I placed a small pail under the leaky gooseneck to collect the water, which I then used for whatever reason when it filled up.
Stopgap solution. I had a leak, but nothing was going to waste. Except the time I took to attend to it every time the pail filled up. Sometimes I had water that I had no use for yet, so I would pour it into a bigger bucket that I could bathe with later. Okay, so let's call it a break-even proposition at best.
I knew I had a leak, and I KIND OF dealt with it. But something else kept me up at night. It was a sound that was magnified with every new drop - the more water in the pail, the louder the reverberation of the additional plops.
Also, it was getting steadily worse - it came to a point where water was dripping every second. The pail was filling up five times faster. I was getting up to have to attend to it more and more. It was time to get this thing fixed once and for all. I bought the gooseneck.
Then I stared stupidly at it. And I stared stupidly at my empty hands. No tools, no knowledge. I was not about to do this with my bare hands. And I was not about to do this on my own.
I called for help. Not the neighbor, but a plumber. Professional help.
This is a poker blog, by the way. So while that story was entirely true, it is also a fitting metaphor for my poker game - leaking since 2010.
And the worst part of it? While I knew exactly where my apartment leak was, I did not know where my poker leak was. It kept me up at night - I could hear the BB's dripping as I lay in bed. I did not know where it was dripping from. There was no place to put a proverbial pail under it.
It took Poker Drill Sergeant Dave Tam to shove it under my nose - where the leak was all this time: "Oh my God, are you fucking kidding me? You have no 4bet range!"
It was a leak I had pointed out to many students before. I even wrote a bit about it with regards to my own self-studies. But I strangely blindsided myself and ignored it.
I had no 4bet range.
I looked at my data and old screenshots of my stats. Years of flatting 3bets with Aces, Kings, Ace-King. Years of folding to 3bet resteals. It's not that I never 4bet - because I did about 5% of the time. But if I had a PFR of 18, that accounted for a 4bet range of (18% x 5%) not even 1%!
I reviewed hands where I actually 4bet - yes, there were a few Aces and Kings and AK's in there, but hardly enough!. What made it worse was that I was more often 4betting as a re-resteal with hands like A5s and other garbage! I wasn't even polarized - my 1% 4bet range was GARBAGE.
It was not uncommon to hear Poker Coach Dave come down on us for weak play, and follow it up with a great (and super simple) suggestion. He would close the pitch with "My word is Gospel. GOSPEL."
His Gospel for me on that session was a two-part setup. First, he asked me to run a filter on my hands - taking all my instances of AA/KK and AK and comparing overall profitability when I flat preflop 3bets with those, versus when I just 4bet them.
I had a smug notion in my head that the results would be too close to call. I had it in my head that SURELY it could not be that big of a difference! There were too many articles and books where authors advocated "keeping the garbage part of his range in the hand by flatting" - and the value I was missing by 4betting was supposed to be more than made up for when I flatted a 3bet and collected his FCbet.
"I'll show him," I thought as I ran the filter. I would show Dave why I was not a Catholic. That his Gospel could not apply to a decorated veteran like me!
Boom. My brain exploded.
Even thru skype chat, I could hear the smirk on Coach Dave's face: "I bet as you were running that filter, you were excited to show me I was wrong, eh?"
I typed a meek "hehe" as a reply.
Gospel.
"Who told you that flatting 3bets with your best hands was a great idea?"
I could not name names.
"Whoever he is, delete him off all your friend lists!"
A bit excessive, but point taken. And taken hard.
Those numbers were shocking enough, but if I was to take into context that I was hardly even 4betting to begin with, could I even imagine how much VALUE and DEAD MONEY I had been missing out on? The illusion that flatting 3bets to "keep their garbage in" was going to make up for that missing value was completely and utterly shattered. Not only was it not making up for it, I was losing money from fit-folding (or spewing) Ace-King!
The second part of Coach Dave's Gospel was a simple 4bet-sizing fix, and with that I was off to the races with one less leaky faucet.
One of the truly telling marks of a great man, in my humble opinion, is when he says something and you think two things - in this exact order:
"Pssh, well that's obvious."
"Damn, why didn't I think of that?"
and then weeks later, you find yourself thinking:
"Seriously, how did I not think of that...?!?"
Thanks, Reverend Dave!
This one is a story about a leak. And a plumber-reverend.
In my apartment, I had an old gooseneck faucet in my sink that refuses to completely shut anymore. Getting it fixed would have involved the simple task of buying a new gooseneck, and the not-so-simple task of ripping out the old one to put in the new one without flooding my apartment in the process.
Not really knowing how to do the second part of that task, I let it slide for a while.
Stopgap solution. I had a leak, but nothing was going to waste. Except the time I took to attend to it every time the pail filled up. Sometimes I had water that I had no use for yet, so I would pour it into a bigger bucket that I could bathe with later. Okay, so let's call it a break-even proposition at best.
I knew I had a leak, and I KIND OF dealt with it. But something else kept me up at night. It was a sound that was magnified with every new drop - the more water in the pail, the louder the reverberation of the additional plops.
Also, it was getting steadily worse - it came to a point where water was dripping every second. The pail was filling up five times faster. I was getting up to have to attend to it more and more. It was time to get this thing fixed once and for all. I bought the gooseneck.
Then I stared stupidly at it. And I stared stupidly at my empty hands. No tools, no knowledge. I was not about to do this with my bare hands. And I was not about to do this on my own.
I called for help. Not the neighbor, but a plumber. Professional help.
This is a poker blog, by the way. So while that story was entirely true, it is also a fitting metaphor for my poker game - leaking since 2010.
And the worst part of it? While I knew exactly where my apartment leak was, I did not know where my poker leak was. It kept me up at night - I could hear the BB's dripping as I lay in bed. I did not know where it was dripping from. There was no place to put a proverbial pail under it.
It took Poker Drill Sergeant Dave Tam to shove it under my nose - where the leak was all this time: "Oh my God, are you fucking kidding me? You have no 4bet range!"
It was a leak I had pointed out to many students before. I even wrote a bit about it with regards to my own self-studies. But I strangely blindsided myself and ignored it.
I had no 4bet range.
I looked at my data and old screenshots of my stats. Years of flatting 3bets with Aces, Kings, Ace-King. Years of folding to 3bet resteals. It's not that I never 4bet - because I did about 5% of the time. But if I had a PFR of 18, that accounted for a 4bet range of (18% x 5%) not even 1%!
I reviewed hands where I actually 4bet - yes, there were a few Aces and Kings and AK's in there, but hardly enough!. What made it worse was that I was more often 4betting as a re-resteal with hands like A5s and other garbage! I wasn't even polarized - my 1% 4bet range was GARBAGE.
It was not uncommon to hear Poker Coach Dave come down on us for weak play, and follow it up with a great (and super simple) suggestion. He would close the pitch with "My word is Gospel. GOSPEL."
His Gospel for me on that session was a two-part setup. First, he asked me to run a filter on my hands - taking all my instances of AA/KK and AK and comparing overall profitability when I flat preflop 3bets with those, versus when I just 4bet them.
I had a smug notion in my head that the results would be too close to call. I had it in my head that SURELY it could not be that big of a difference! There were too many articles and books where authors advocated "keeping the garbage part of his range in the hand by flatting" - and the value I was missing by 4betting was supposed to be more than made up for when I flatted a 3bet and collected his FCbet.
"I'll show him," I thought as I ran the filter. I would show Dave why I was not a Catholic. That his Gospel could not apply to a decorated veteran like me!
Even thru skype chat, I could hear the smirk on Coach Dave's face: "I bet as you were running that filter, you were excited to show me I was wrong, eh?"
I typed a meek "hehe" as a reply.
Gospel.
"Who told you that flatting 3bets with your best hands was a great idea?"
I could not name names.
"Whoever he is, delete him off all your friend lists!"
A bit excessive, but point taken. And taken hard.
Those numbers were shocking enough, but if I was to take into context that I was hardly even 4betting to begin with, could I even imagine how much VALUE and DEAD MONEY I had been missing out on? The illusion that flatting 3bets to "keep their garbage in" was going to make up for that missing value was completely and utterly shattered. Not only was it not making up for it, I was losing money from fit-folding (or spewing) Ace-King!
The second part of Coach Dave's Gospel was a simple 4bet-sizing fix, and with that I was off to the races with one less leaky faucet.
One of the truly telling marks of a great man, in my humble opinion, is when he says something and you think two things - in this exact order:
"Pssh, well that's obvious."
"Damn, why didn't I think of that?"
and then weeks later, you find yourself thinking:
"Seriously, how did I not think of that...?!?"
Thanks, Reverend Dave!
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