We Need a Little Help!

Le Monsieur and I are making good progress with the training material. In fact, we're closing in on completing the last few of the so-called "level-1" lessons, and now we're exploring how best to implement this powerful thing we've created. And part of that implementation is the selection of a product/domain name...

...which brings us to you, dear trusted reader. We're soliciting ideas and feedback on potential names for this beast. We not only want your input, we need it. So, with that in mind:

What do you suggest as a name for this poker training product and domain?

The quick background/story on what we've been creating is this: a series of sequential, step-by-step lessons geared toward a new player who already understand the basic mechanics of playing a poker hand, including hand rankings, etc. The lessons will take him from raw beginner to a solid winning low-stakes player. It's based around the mastery of Level-1 thinking, and focuses on the core concepts and skills needed to beat micro-to-low stakes NLHE. These of course include the fundamentals of understanding basic villain types and tendencies, knowing simple poker math/odds/outs/probabilities, using position, exercising solid preflop hand selection (with recommended starting hand charts), knowing how to steal and defend your blinds, sizing bets, simplified post-flop continuation betting, and so on.

Each lesson has multiple parts, but you can think of it as being in two primary sections: a) the lesson itself, which explains and teaches the idea; and 2) a set of quiz questions the student has to take (and pass!) before moving on to the next lesson in the series. Each lesson builds upon the previous one, and the student is required to demonstrate understanding of the previous material before moving to the next lesson in the progression. By the time he/she is finished with the L1 lessons, they should have enough knowledge to readily beat a $.10/$.25 online game or a live $1/2 game at their local casino.

After we complete the L1 lessons, the next step for us is to, well, step up a level and create similar L2 training material, introducing and teaching the whole process of REDi to the L1 graduates, etc.

So what do you think? And, just as importantly, what are your suggestions for domain and product names? Feedback, comments, and ideas are absolutely welcome.

Click here to email us with your input!

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and ideas!

All-in for now...
-Bug

Sunday Sundries

Clouseau: Does yer dewg bite?

Inn Keeper: No

Clouseau: Nice Doggy

[bends down to pet a small mutt on the lobby floor- it snarls and bites him]

Clouseau: I thought you said yer dewg did not bite!

Inn Keeper: Zat eez not my dog.

A few weeks back I started working informally with a blog reader whom henceforth I shall refer to as Le Monsieur. He and I have exchanged a dozen or so emails in the past year or so on various poker subjects, but the focus always seemed to come back to the topic of learning and teaching methods. Long-time readers of this blog know I'm a little obsessed with this particular topic, especially re: ways in which a newbie to the game can/should learn from the ground up using a linear framework like levels of thought, my poker pyramid, and the three primary edge categories. I've been coaching a few online students over the past year or so, refining and tweaking these methods, and have indeed had some very good success with the likes of e-Pal (who, by the way, continues to crush the mid-stakes cash games down under). Anyway, to make a long story short, Le Monsieur approached me a while back with an idea for a training app that would be based around my teaching framework. I won't go into a lot of details here, but he has some killer ideas on short/repetitive/fast quizzing methods with immediate feedback to the student. He also has created some intriguing mock-ups for the user interface, plus has contacts in the NorCal tech arena that can possibly help steer us forward. Bottom line is I think Le Monsieur's content delivery ideas and teaching methods, coupled with my poker framework and base curriculum, could potentially turn into a killer training tool. The trick now (as usual) is to budget enough time in my already full life to work on my end of this bargain.

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And speaking of my end of the bargain... as part of this week's homework assignment on Le Monsieur's app project, I've been noodling around with starting hands. One of the things that I've stumbled upon  is the concept of "bunching". It's a small esoteric thing that poker nerds like me love to discover. Let me explain: For practical purposes, playing at a six-handed (6max) NL table can be treated the same as playing at a nine-handed (full ring) table in which the first three early position seats have folded. Said another way, starting hands at a 6max table should be identical to the last four seats + blinds at a full ring table. This is traditional wisdom and actually a pretty good way to transition from full ring to 6max... except it isn't quite accurate. By virtue of the fact that the first three seats have folded, we can deduce that the quality of their mucked hands were below what they needed to play in those positions. And because people tend to play big cards more than small ones, we therefore know a few things about the remaining cards in the deck. Said another way, we know that on average there are slightly more aces, kings, queens and jacks than usual in the last six seats at a nine-handed table in which the first three seats have folded, than there are at a 6max table. No, it's not a huge difference (in fact it's very small), but it is an actual difference. In a six max game, this means we can therefore raise a teeny-tiny-itty-bitty bit lighter than we can in a nine max game where the first three players have folded to us. Cool beans.

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I watched snippets of Phil Ivey winning his 10th bracelet this week at the WSOP. This particular event netted him something like $170K for first place, but the rumors  around Vegas are that he made about ten times that amount on a series of prop bets associated with him (and Negreanu) going deep and winning a bracelet this year.

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I'm really intrigued with the WSOP's new $1500 "Monster Stack" NL event. If I had time in my schedule this year I would have definitely played in this new event. Nearly 8000 runners entered this inaugural year, which makes it the second largest ever non-rebuy WSOP event in history. For $1.5K you get a massive T15,000 in tournament chips. Even better, the blind structure is very slow and gradual, more akin to a $10K event than a $1.5K. I'm already budgeting to play in it next year. Woot.

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In a training video I watched on an airplane a few weeks ago, tournament poker coach and trainer John "Kasino Krime" Beauprez of PLO QuickPro fame stated that there are four skills a tournament player needs to be successful in today's games:

1. Ability to play different effective stack sizes correctly, from 10bb up to 100bb.
2. Ability to be very aggressive preflop, including 4-betting light.
3. Ability to stay very observant of the other players, their stacks, their tendencies, and (especially) their states of mind throughout all stages of the tournament-- and exploit that information.
4. Have the wherewithal to join an off-table network of like-minded skilled players willing to share and work together to get better. And then participate and work on your game actively.

---Non Poker Content Below---

I had a death in the immediate family last week-- my mom. It was the punctuation point on a long and protracted illness she battled for the past two years. We all knew this day would come, but it still was a painful shock when it did. Heartbreaking, draining, surreal... I'm feeling all manner of emotions this week. I was also in a foreign country on a business trip when I got the news, which meant the added complications and frustrations of trying to get home early on an international flight on an uncooperative airline on very short notice. When I finally did manage to arrive home, I was greeted with not only sadness and grief in the family, but a ton of challenging things to help take care of. Various affairs of state, taxes, money issues, probate, death certificates, funeral service arrangements, siblings with differing ideas on how things should be handled, my devastated father, etc.. This has definitely been a very hard week for everyone. It was also a sobering reminder that life is far too short. My biggest takeaway thus far in this process is: make the most of your limited years on this spinning globe, and make the time now for those things you keep putting off for "someday" in the future. My mom did this right; she lead a full and fulfilling life; she literally told me a few weeks before she passed that she had no regrets in how she lived her life and would have done it all over the same way if given the opportunity. Can you say the same about your own life?

All-in for now...
-Bug

A little method to the madness...a.k.a. syllabus creation.

Bear with me, as this is a little complicated, but I needed to create a syllabus, or lesson plan, for taking a newbie from the very basic concepts up through poker mastery. And as I mentioned in my previous post (here), it all springs from the concept of gambling and expected value.

Once we've gotten the concept of EV across to our new student, we can then easily demonstrate that the profit we make (or the money we lose) is just the EV of each hand decision, multiplied by the number of hands we play. Roy Cooke talked a lot about this concept in days of yore, but it's still really important because it shows us where our money in poker comes from. Said another way, we have to play a lot of hands where we have positive expectation. But how do we maximize our positive expectation (and minimize our negative expectation)? The key to this is recalling the equation for EV, which really boils down into two parts: 1) maximizing the chance our hand is going to win and maximizing how much $ we win when we do; and 2) minimizing the chance our hand is going to lose and minimizing the amount of $ we lose when we do.

EV = (%Chance We Win x $ Amount Won) - (%Chance We Lose x $ Amount We Lose)

and

Profit = EV x Volume

My take on these equations is that there are three things that allow us to maximize profit:

1. First, we need to make better decisions that our opponents. This can be anything from deciding what games to play in, to making complex line decisions, to even knowing when to quit.
2. Second, we need to maximize the benefit of those decisions, or said another way: act more profitably on our decisions. For instance, if you've decided your on a value line, but have high fold equity, the most profitable thing to do might be to bet smaller because it makes it more likely that your opponent will call.
3. And thirdly, we need to learn to completely and totally ignore the results of individual hands, because this allows us to keep doing the first and second things correctly.

Okay, then what? Well, it's not a great leap to subdivide these three things into individual specific teachable skills. Long time readers of this blog know that I am a believer in the three key edges of Off-Table Prep, In-Game Tactics and Techniques, and Emotional Control. Taking the individual skills, I can easily slot them into one of these three edge categories. Here's a somewhat confusing, rough picture of what I mean by this:

I also believe that you really, truly, absolutely need to master all three of these edge categories. It's not enough to be technically savvy and skilled, and do great table selection, for instance, but be tilt prone and lose all your money when the results start coming in bad and you're not emotionally prepared to accept it. The key is being good at each.

But what does "be good at each" mean? For me, it means mastering the subset of skills in each of the three edge categories, but focusing on the simpler things first. Once that's done, it's a matter of building upon those skills as the student learns and progresses. To try to make this clearer, here's a picture of my pyramid of poker skills I showed a while back. It's arranged bottom to top in different levels of skill. Also, I've arranged the pyramid so that the off-table stuff is on the left, the tactics and strategies are in the middle, and the emotional control skills are on the right. A new player to the game needs to master each level before moving up to the next level. And this basically is my syllabus in graphical format:

Now, each of these blocks may be a single lesson, or it may be multiple lessons. For instance, bankroll management is pretty straightforward and can be covered in one or two short presentations. Other things, like R-is-for-Reading will require multiple lessons that build upon each other.

And that's it for now, as I'm out of time. I'm about to drive to the airport, strap myself into another big aluminum tube, and jet back across the ocean. Wonderful. And it's a red eye flight, to boot. Ugh.

On to the next bit of rambling on this poker training subject...

All-in for now...
-Bug