I think in order to play great poker it's necessary to make decisions at an instinctive level. I'm not sure if instinctive is the right word, so I'll offer a couple of other descriptions to make myself clearer. Psychologists (at least in the popular Kahneman book which I've read recently
Sometimes split up our cognitive skills into System 1 and System 2, with System 1 being the characteristically automatic and effortless System that we use to read, see, recognize faces, etc. Athletes might say you have to "do it unconsciously" or "know it in your bones" or something. Programmers sometimes call fine grained instinctive decision making "expert knowledge" and they have trouble recreating it. I've sometimes said I try to think about the hand geometrically or spatially, by which I mean my mental representation is more like a picture than like a math problem. I'm sure there's loads of other ways to get at the same point. autopilot, unconscious competence, muscle memory, lots of terms for this all meaning roughly the same thing
My experience has been that what makes a great poker player is an instinct for making good poker decisions. In my own case I've found that directed study can do wonders for clarifying my thoughts about poker, which leads to training better instincts at the table.
It's definitely true though that most pros (even high stakes pros) do very little study, and just playing tons of hands while thinking really hard about decisions trains them to play at a very high level.
On the other hand, there's a lot of people who have played a lot of poker, and most of them haven't succeeded in becoming great players; I guess beyond a certain level some amount of talent is required. My view though is that dedicated study can go a long way, and it's a lot less of a gamble then playing tons of hands and hoping to be talented.
One training idea I've been working with lately is breaking up clusters of skills required at the poker table into categories which I label 'mechanics'.
The idea is that by focusing on the conscious practice and refinement to instinct of one mechanic at a time I'll be able to build up a hierarchy of increasingly complicated skills. So, to take a non poker example for clarification, take driving a car. Driving is a fairly complicated skill, but one basically everybody can get good enough at. When we first drive, we have to attend to everything: the position of the pedals under us, the place the key goes in the ignition, all the various buttons, where the gas tank is, and then all of the driving decisions as well. But after a little bit, the basic mechanic I just described becomes automatic, and it's easier to focus on driving decisions; eventually driving is automatic (in most situations) and we can chat and think of other things while we drive. Sports analogies are good here too.
I think there's a useful analogy with poker, and the mechanics can be broken down as:
1) Basic mechanics
are things like knowing the rules, knowing whose turn it is to act, knowing who is in what position, and knowing how much is being bet and what's in the pot.
2)Intermediate mechanics are things like knowing what pot odds we're getting and giving, and roughly how good our hand is, and making some guesses about what our opponent is holding.
Cariadon pops into mind as a great example of someone who stopped here
3) Advanced mechanics might include things we're talking about here-
-instinctually balancing betting and bluffing ratios for various sizings
-keeping track of our entire distribution at a given decision point
-thinking one or more streets ahead in the game tree
-and gathering probabilistic reads on our opponent to make exploitative responses to their set of strategies.
I find I learn efficiently when I get regular feedback on one or more mechanics I'm working on. So, you might go about translating your conscious, analytic, effortful work on poker theory into an instinctual mechanic by taking five or so hands a day and first writing down in a stream of consciousness your best guess at your range in a given spot. Then you might solve the spots to near equilibrium and see how close or far away you are. I find when I do this repeatedly my instincts improve.
This is all very sketchy advice, and I absolutely don't consider myself an expert (I'm barely a dilettante) in psychology or education or any of the relevant disciplines pertaining to this discussion. I have however spent a ton of time trying to teach myself poker, and hopefully some of the insights I've come to in my own study translate, or are at least food for thought, in helping you to turn theory into practice.
Old hard drive went out so got a new one, everything works fine til I try to install my video card drivers, at which point the screen becomes all pixelated and off colored, as soon as you uninstall the video card driver it goes back to normal. I remember this happening a year ago when I first built this computer but I forgot how I fixed it oddly enough. I've tried every stable and beta driver listed on http://www.sapphiretech.com/presenta...=&lid=1&leg=0# no difference between them.
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Case- Antec Three Hundred Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
Thanks everyone who helped me get through thisby gitpush, June 07
This is the sickest downswing I have ever had so far. 20BI downswing, and it seems neverending still..
Thanks Devon and Lemon and everyone else who cheered me on and gave me help. All of the advice were great! I started to play less speculative hands and fold more on weird spots. Tilt still gets me sometimes so it wasn't all just bad luck during the downswing. And I need to find a way to focus on just the decision making rather than the money.. I started off with $130 ish (thanks to the $77 milestone hand bonus that I randomly hit the 2nd day I opened the account for $45+20) but cash game had been pretty brutal.. Had some decent success at the 50cent 9max SnG's but it is not the same..
I got very nervous about my bankroll know, even though I still have about 35 BIs for 2NL. Money is not an issue for me, it is just that it is almost impossible for me to deposit right now. So if someone could help me do some transfers via paypal that would be great. I would feel a lot less stressed.
I really want to get good at poker, and people here are great. I am glad that I am on LP and hope my poker improves as time goes on.
I think I have this right but I'd like some confirmation:
Say there's $1 in the pot. Someone goes allin for $1, and we have him covered. We'd need 33% equity to make it a break-even call, right? Since we gain $2 when we win, and lose $1 when we lose, we need to win a third of the time to break even.
Kay now I'm pretty sure this is correct. Guess I'll post it for giggles.
I've spent the last like few months getting my mind back together, which was much tougher than I anticipated.
(totally lost my mind the last 2 months in Canada and boy it was hard to find back home)
I was workin low stakes for a while when I got back, my addictions and my mental stability was giving me a lot of problems.
More and more hours were put in on strengthening the mind, getting my patience back, and executing correctly.
I was playing like a system for a while and some of the reasons I'm strong (hand reading etc) weren't there for a while, thats all from the highstakes fail in Canada like 5 months ago.
I played pretty poorly for a couple months, winnin a couple hundred a week or w/e, it was really bad.
I finally said screw it, talked to a couple backers and now have more people behind me. After doing that, I decided to mix it up with some days MTTs and some days cash.
Using the same 2 backers I have used for the previous summer and Canada, they are two of my best friends, they both tell me they learn from me every session, but obv I know I have a long way to go, and a leak or two I'm plugging.
I have to say this has been a great decision, keeps me from getting burnt out on MTT's like in years past, and cash games are fun in there own right, more of a job, but printing is printing, no matter what limit your playing. (just doing nl25/nl50 on ACR atm)
ah won a seat into the 520 last week, got set over set for like 35k or something, top 15 paid, that woulda been nice 800, 1st was sick too.
won a seat into the 215 too, stream rolled the shit out of that tournament, ended up like 46th (top 63 itm) though after one very weird hand played out.
Had a fun lil casino trip last weekend, things didn't go so hot though. Lost a few hundred. Was my first weekend playin live in a long long time, meh, couple cards go dif and I finish up big so w/e. I played online most the time anyways.
Yeah, hit a $55 for 1500 last week, with some 6rs and some other stuff, this months been pretty good to me. Had a few bad beats cost me a thousand here and there in very key spots, was a lil agitating, but its what we sign up for. Take em in stride.
I won like 60bi at nl25/nl50 (bout 40 at 25, 20 at 50)
I also lost like 1.2k at nl100. I never set a stop loss, honestly was being out played on a couple tables, but I did run way below ev as well. That was the suicide run of last month.
So now I am gearing up for Vegas, I'm flying out either 6/19 or right before July 4th, but most likely 6/19. Theres a $1500 superstack thats kinda stupid to ever miss. Gotta go and play that. Need to.
Gonna set up shop back out in LV I imagine, traveling to Canada and Costa Rica all the time is just getting boring and old. Also live is pretty fun and so easy, atleast at 1/2 1/3 2/5 and some 5/10 are really easy most the time.
Lifes been tough for a few months this year, I was going through a lot of mental stuff, my ego kinda bested me for a while, I now accept responsibility for my downswing as being just bad play (at least compared to up to the 162s)
Blaming it on luck is dumb, I woulda b/e or maybe had 1 big win if a hand went dif, I needed to be more consistant and I wasn't 5betting wide enough or snap jamming vs light 3betters in the higher games. I wasn't playing my game, I was kinda playing there game. Live and learn. Fun game.
Feeling healthier than I have in maybe 5 years.
Been off any hard drugs for a long time, never realized how much my mind was messed up on that stuff, til I got off it and see things from a much more stable point of view.
Ok,
felt like bloggin
LP respect guys, esp u bosses.
love that this forum is still goin pretty much everyday.
I think you guys should have me be a news writer, i'd do that for free most likely, I follow just about every single news thread in poker, from legality in all Countries, to final tables, players to watch etc, think about adding a column once a week for me, it'd be cool. obv not want feature blog, lmk naz or whoever does that stuff.
if not, a fun neilly rant on something every once and a while could def be good front page material. I always have em, just usually don't write em
We've trained for this for some 9 weeks with a pal, It was a 7km run in heavy terrain and mud (at some points waste high) with around ~15 obstacles.
Here's a vid from last event
First training was some 1600m, 4x3 these steps, 3 different variations: + Show Spoiler +
and 24 burpees, with adding difficulty each week.
We ended running 7.2km, 12x3 steps, 120 burpees on last training and one mock 6.4km run with 30 burpees after every 800m (240 burpees in the end). So yeah we didn't train for any obstacles instead opted to wing it with heavy burpee training
I failed 4 oobstacles AKA 120 penalty burpees: Fell off 3 climbing obstacles and missed with Javelin.
I touched the bottom of my powers when I had to do 3xburpees inbetween crawling in mud under barbed wire uphill in a short time but it was nothing the training didn't prepare us for. Also no injury besides some scratches yay! (And there was a lot of injuries, paramedics on site are always busy)
Last week I've also traveled to meet my pals I used to play floorball with when I was in in the highest Czech league, some 8 years ago.
It was a fun 3+1 (a lot faster than normal floorball I must say) tourney and some top and current national team levels players were there, and I realized how much I suck compared to them. My team mates just couldn't grasp that I'm not gonna be the same before a 7year break as after it and I got chastised quite a bit https://scontent-a-fra.xx.fbcdn.net/h...67151354670_7870243334071210190_n.jpg
I've got a tournament this week in my town again, and after that I plan on taking on summer fitness goalkeeper oriented training.
It won't be as clear cut motivating as the Spartan Race though so I'm trying to find people to work out with. I want to be below 80kg by the end of the summer (87ish now - I've hit a plateau lasting some 3 months now - diet change's needed especially).
Besides my weekly tennis with Grandma Of course :D https://scontent-a-fra.xx.fbcdn.net/h...00495797434_3658074848314875517_n.jpg
Cheers for reading.
P.S. I'm playing poker too btw guys don't think I just run around having fun
I played some 110hrs studied tons last month. I also meditated quite a bit I always do 15-20ish minutes sitting meditation where I just concentrate on concentrating, and if my head's clear enough and I can still concentrate I do another 15-20ish minutes walking meditation where I attack topics from all angles, often poker ones too and came to some cool realizations, but really there's never enough of this so I'll try to put in some hefty meditation volumes next month too.
I have the pokerstrategy vip event at the end of the month - I'll defo post how it went
how do you copy/paste hand histories from pokerstars? Ive got the instant hand history window open but when I drag over the text theres no c/p option lol, help
On May 29 2014 13:14 Daut wrote:
careface, a while back i wrote down the names of 164 good and very good pros who have played the main event. i then added up then # of times they played the main event and their total cashes. i purposefully left off some players like duhamel and joseph cheong because i felt like they would have never reached an ok level had they not done well in the main event. also left off greg merson. and left off all years before 2005. just a different tournament in a different time. took the hachem series to 2012, 8 years of WSOP main events. i actually had 0 WSOP main event winners on the list. i didnt want people screwing up the numbers. i basically only included final table players like matusow, ivey, cunningham, ben lamb, the grinder. i didnt even include michael binger in this list.
results?
955 main events, 170 cashes, ROI 196%
sure this includes guys like ivey and negreanu who likely have 500% ROIs over many of those years, but very good players do have big ROIs in the main event. the tournament is too slow, too deep and too many fish not to.
now, suppose we have a very good player in an online tournament. ill take myself cause i dont want to talk about anyone else. lets say i am selling action to the sunday 100 rebuy on stars. it gets about 900 people, has a bunch of good players and a bunch of terrible fish. i would guess that my ROI in this tournament is about 30%. just based on the feel of how soft it is. since its an online tournament and it costs me virtually nothing to enter it, i think a fair selling price to it would be 1.1:1.
in the main event, with many more players and a much better structure, i think my ROI is likely in the 75-100% range. some would say higher, but i think they are a bit delusional. but if i were to play the main event id have to drive to vegas, stay in a hotel, not play online those long hours....the cost is rather high. so while the profits of an online tournament should be split much more fairly, and maybe even a little in the favor of the backer, the profits of a live tournament should mostly go to the horse. i think 1.5:1 is a completely fair markup to sell at for someone with a 75-100% ROI in the main event.
there is A LOT that factors into this markup. more than you would consider for a 1500 prelim or an online tournament. for a 1500 prelim id sell at 1.3:1. but the main event...i mean fuck, if i make day 3 and dont cash i HAVE TO BE IN VEGAS FOR AT LEAST 6 DAYS. its really absurd the cost of playing it.
For fun I put in the payout structure from 2011 wsop into excel so I could see how ROI works out with different probabilities of finishing in spots.
- A perfectly average player returns (-6%) roi with an itm of 10%
- A player who gets itm 18% (like in Daut's sample) but has an even probability distribution of finishing in any itm spot returns 68% roi
- A player who gets itm 18% and is three times as likely to reach any final table spot as the person in point above who got 18% itm (with the extra probability of final table being taken out of the probability of mincash - a simplifying assumption), returns 214% roi
Now here's the problem, roi is ridiculously sensitive to minute differences in probability of finishing in the top spots. When we talk about a 5.3x increase in probability of final tabling between a theoretically perfectly average player (as in point 1) and a player with 18% itm who returns 214% roi (as in point 3), we're talking about an increase from 0.13% to 0.70% probability. In absolute terms it's a tiny difference yet leads to a huge change in roi.
Quick example, for Daut's sample size of 955 WSOPMEs played by a basket of good players, total buyins are $9.55mm. with 196% roi, total returns are $28.268mm. If we just remove one tournament result from this sample - Ben Lamb's final table finish for $4m, this reduces sample roi to 154%. The number of FT finishes in Daut's sample of 955 MEs is going to be in the low single figures. You can see where I'm going with this - this sample doesn't give us close to a clear idea of realistic ME rois. If we tried to get a 95% confidence interval around that 196% point estimate, it would be very wide indeed (an exercise i'll leave to those of you who are so motivated)
Payout data from 2011 wsop ME (i think it was 2011 but not sure + Show Spoiler +
This is intended to kick off discussion of the difficulty of ROI estimation in tournaments like the ME where we need a much bigger sample than we actually have before we can get narrow confidence intervals - and the implications for backing and staking "fair" markup. Can there even be such a thing as a normative idea of "fair"? Or is fair just what the market decides and what people are willing to pay / sell for?
>be me
>raise kq pre
>tell myself im going to flop a straight, but there's going to be a pair on the flop, and my villian won't let his trips go no matter what i do, and that he's going to boat the river
>exactly that happens
>tell myself i should become cleo's assistant considering how often this happens
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