Ivey Meet Kolb, Part 2

In the last post, I wrote about the standard Kolb Experiential Learning Model for mastering new skills. In today's entry, I want to show how the Kolb cycle applies to poker.

If you've forgotten what the Kolb model for learning is, here's a quick link showing the four basic phases of the learning cycle. As it turns out, it's not much of a stretch to apply Kolb to poker. To do this, let's imagine a day in the life of one of our Phils. Let's call him Poker Pro Phil, or PPP for short.

1. Concrete Experience. During a typical day on the felt, PPP plays his normal game at his normal stakes in his normal cardroom. This is the “Concrete Experience” phase of the Kolb learning cycle. PPP might win during this session, or he might lose, but all along he’s trying to play as perfectly as possible. He's also keeping mental notes of his play, especially key hands that weren't standard, or that he was unsure afterward of how he played them.  He's also noting how his opponents are playing, particularly the players that he regularly faces at these stakes in this cardroom. Bet sizing tells, type of hands played, positional information, and so on. He might write these things down in a notebook during breaks in the action, or just remember them for later, but PPP is having a focused "concrete experience" playing poker.
2. Observation and Reflection. Immediately after the session, PPP takes 10-20 minutes of quiet time to record the results and notes from his game session more fully in a notebook or journal. He records how long he played, what stakes he played, what his results were, and so on. He also writes down all the key hands he can remember, his impression of how he played, tricky spots he got himself into, as well as specific notes about other players and how they played, etc. He also begins the process of identifying what he did right—and what he did wrong in the session. In other words, our hero is actively participating in the Observation and Reflection phase of Kolb’s cycle, or as I like to call it: the Post-Game Review phase. 
3. Conceptualizing. The next step our hero takes is to actively work on and improve those areas of his game that he identified in the post-game phase. PPP might perform detailed hand reviews either by himself or with a study group, for example. He might post some particularly tricky hands on a forum for a wider audience to chime in on. Maybe he hires a coach to help work through the issue. He might even teach what he’s learned to others as a way of reinforcing his lessons. (Surgical medical residents have a saying that you “see one, do one, then teach one” to truly master a new operative technique. If it works for brain surgery, it should work for poker, too, right?.) Poker Pro Phil may also take some of this Conceptualizing, or Off-Table Homework time to make other, more general self improvement strides, such as watching training videos, reading a chapter of a poker book, listening to a strategy podcasts, performing mental exercises, working out, eating right, and so on.
4. Active Preparation. Finally, Poker Pro Phil takes the time immediately prior to starting his next on-table session to get ready to play. He reviews what he’s worked on. He then goes through a pregame check-list to ensure the lessons he’s learned are foremost in his mind. PPP might also do some mental warm-ups at this time, such as doing a Sudoku puzzle or something else to get focused and shelve all the other stuff going on his life. Oh, and Bankroll Management is front and center too, as well as game, table, and seat selection, too. In other words, PPP is acting exactly like any other athlete doing their last-minute warm-ups and mental game preps prior to entering the arena.
5. ...and then PPP is back to the tables for another Concrete Experience, where he will both apply what he's learned off the table, and begin to identify the next areas that needs improvement....

Many poker coaches recommend that a player who seriously wants to get better should spend an equal amount of time away from the table studying as they do actually playing cards. Many professional players echo this sentiment. Early in their careers, guys like Phil Galfond and Phil Laak reportedly spent at least an hour reviewing their play for every hour spent at the tables. Religiously.

Are you doing this? And if not, why not?

Answer: because you're probably not truly serious about getting better at poker. Don't believe me? Go ask Kolb. Or one of the Phils. They'll set you straight on the cycle.

All-in for now...
-Bug

Learning Poker the Hard Way

Imagine a Jane Doe. Jane is a thirty-something, smart, fun-loving girl. She enjoys games and puzzles and competition, but doesn't know poker from pinochle. Never played it as a kid, but was always a little intrigued by it when she saw it on television. She went to a party last weekend with some friends, and the group played a mini Texas Hold'em tournament that went late into the evening. Twenty people entered, including Jane, and it cost her $5 to play. The top few players split the prize pool. She was explained the rules and mechanics of poker before they began. These rules were relatively easy for her to grasp, and she actually went fairly deep before busting out. She had a lot of fun playing the game. It was challenging and exciting, but it was also frustrating in a way. Jane didn't mind that she didn't make any money, but she was frequently confused by the jargon that was bandied about during the game. More importantly, some of the players were clearly much better than others, and two of these guys ended up winning the lion's share of the prize pool. By the end of the evening, Jane was intrigued by this game she had previously thought was all about luck and chance. It was simple on the surface, but also complex. And the better players seemed to have an edge over the weaker players. This looked like fun...

So the next day she went to Google to learn a little more about poker....

...and OMG, was there a lot of information. Way too much, in fact, for her to process. Literally hundreds, if not thousands, of books on the subject, dozens of training sites, videos by the tens of thousands on YouTube, coaches under every rock and in every crevice, forums filled with experts and trolls alike, email lists, podcast broadcasts, newsletters, boot camps.... Holy cow, Jane thought, this is crazy. And exciting. And maybe even profitable, if she could learn more about it.

It was clear to Jane after just a little searching that poker was actually a game of skill. What wasn't clear, however, was exactly what the skills were that the good players had that the losing players didn't. And how did one go about obtaining those skills? The amount of information  available was almost overwhelming to sort through. Jane wanted to learn more about poker, but she was stymied by, frankly, the disorganized glut and overabundance of information on the web.

So Jane joined a poker forum. And she asked some basic questions about how to learn poker. And she got flamed for being a beginner and asking stupid questions. Didn't she know where the Search button was, for christsake? Worse, when she received back actual answers to her questions, the responses were all over the map, and often contradictory. One person would say she should join an online site and learn the game on the play tables. But then someone else chimed in that she would be ruined forever if she played on the play tables, and don't trust that particular site, anyway. Instead, she should read XYZ book. No, someone else would then write, the XYZ book is crap and totally out of date, so don't read it. Watch PDQ videos, instead. What? Those PDQ videos are horrendously bad! You'll learn terrible habits if you watch that crap. Oh, yeah? You're an idiot! If I'm an idiot, you're a bigger idiot...

And so on.

So Jane decided to just check out a book from the local library. Certainly that was a more sane and logical approach to learning the game, right? The library had two on the shelf, but they were less than helpful. The first one assumed she was an idiot (in fact the title included the word "idiot") and the other assumed she was already a skilled intermediate player who was ready for advanced concepts.

So Jane went to YouTube. What she saw there was mostly screen captures, with amateur players talking aloud while they played online. And the majority of videos she watched seemed like thinly veiled brags of winning sessions. Where was the actual information on getting started learning strategy and tactics?

So Jane went to a training site and watched some of the sample videos. These looked better than those on YouTube, but a) the subscriptions were expensive; and b) they mostly assumed she was already a relatively experienced player. The jargon and technical terms in even the beginning videos were far over her head.

Jane then, briefly, considered hiring a live coach. The first one that she contacted was incredibly pricey; the man wanted $500 per hour because "I'm worth it." Uh, huh, thought Jane. The second she contacted was more affordable, but he was also highly disorganized and confusing when she spoke to him on the phone. Worse, he wouldn't show her his own poker results, so she had no way of telling whether he knew what he was talking about or not. There wasn't even a set of lessons available from the man; let's just talk, see where you are, and we can go from there, the coach told her. We'll turn you into a professional player in no time. Figure four to five hours a week for the next couple of years. Let's start with this thing called Tilt....

So Jane called up her Uncle John, who played in a weekly home game. John said that she should give up trying to figure out the game; poker is all about drinking and luck, but if she wanted to come by some time, and didn't mind cigar smoke and getting hit on by the old men in the game, she could sit in and play. And they played $10/$20 stud, so she better bring a lot of money. Oh, and that newfangled Hold'em crap is for losers. We never play that stupid game...

Huh, Jane thought? I just want to learn how to play basic poker. Why can't there be some simple way to learn the fundamentals in a logical, step-by-step fashion? I just want to start simple. If I don't like it-- fine, but if I do, and I want to keep learning, how do I do that? Why is this so complicated and difficult?

So, ultimately, Jane got frustrated with the entire process. And then she quit.

I heard she picked up the game of pinochle and is quite happy now.

Click here to find out what happened next...

All-in for now...
-Bug

A Work In Progress

Got an email from a reader the other day with a question about my study habits. Here's what X wrote, "I have learned many things from your blog. Please keep doing what you are doing. I am myself constantly working on something new every day to improve with my game. I was wondering what you are working on in your own game right now. What are you studying in poker? How do you study?"

These are great questions. First let me state, like many people I know, I can be monumentally lazy one day, and over-the-top productive the next. I also have a lot of non-poker irons in the life fire that compete for my attentions, including a ton of work stuff, a long standing hot-rod project in the garage, a fiction book project that I've recently dusted off, and a new-ish electric vehicle conversion project that I'm slowly but surely putting together. All of this, coupled with the usual wife, kids, and home repair stuff sometimes leave me wishing for at least 34 hours in the day instead of the standard 24. Ah, if only...

Seriously, when it comes to poker, I'm always doing a few things to boost my game. In recent months, I'm spending a lot of time with podcasts, which I listen to probably 2+ hours a week while going for my lunchtime walk and/or in the car on my commute. I also try to watch at least one poker video per week (usually when working out on my exercise machine), and I almost always have a couple of poker books half read and strewn throughout the house. I'm currently re-reading "Rounders" for instance, plus I've got "How to Win the World Series of Poker (Or Not)" halfway finished, and I'm re-skimming Sweeney's "Dynamic Full Ring Poker, which I think is one of the more underrated poker how-to books around (but a little disorganized and difficult to read at times). Oh, and then I try to spend at least 10-15 minutes a day looking in depth at one or two theory or strategy posts on the 2+2 poker forums.

As far as specific techniques goes, I'm currently trying to get a better understanding of when and how to continuation bet. I think there is a lot of money people (me included) leave on the table in this area, and like many things in poker, I believe it's a puzzle that can be solved. Flopzilla has been my friend on this particular issue, as well as some reference books like Sweeney's. I'll be posting some things on the topic in an upcoming blog entry.

And then there's my near constant interest (read: obsession) with chewing over the basic nature of poker and how one can/should teach it to a newbie. I actually made a small break-through on organizing my thoughts last week, so stay tuned for a brief look in another future post on the subject. (As a sneak preview, you shouldn't be surprised to learn that it centers around my near constant interest (read: obsession) with the whole notion of Edge and Levels of Thought. Making money at poker is a function of two things: volume and edge, and the latter can be subdivided into three tidy little categories, which can each be further broken down into a series of tidy little teaching modules.)

The final thing I do that has helped my game more than anything else is what I'm doing right now: blogging. I am a huge believer that the best way to learn something is to try to explain it to someone else. Doing so makes you think in an active way (versus the passive techniques I mentioned above, such as listening to podcasts, watching poker videos, and reading books). Teaching/explaining a topic makes you organize your thoughts. It makes you study and actively think. It makes you understand. In short, it works. For anyone reading this blog, I recommend keeping your own journal, starting a blog, or just explaining a concept to another poker playing friend of yours on a regular basis. Like the method many surgical residents are taught by, us poker players should be following the See One, Do One, Teach One approach.

And that's about it for now. Time to get moving on to the next thing on today's to-do list...

All-in for now...
-Bug