Ivey, Meet Kolb. Kolb, Ivey.

Long-time readers of this blog know that I (strongly, obsessively?) believe there are three key categories of skills that separate the professional Hold’em players from the rest of the herd. These are the big important edges that differentiates the Phil Ivey’s, Phil Galfond’s, Phil Laak’s of the game from the Phil Nobodies: 1) Technical Skills; 2) Emotional Control, and , 3) Off-Table Preparation/Self Improvement.

The first category, Technical Skills, encompasses all the specific tactics, techniques, and strategies of Hold’em poker. These include things like correctly utilizing position, exercising solid preflop hand selection, knowing proper bet sizing, mastering opponent hand reading, knowing the odds and probabilities, correctly c-betting, playing deceptively, and similar Hold’em talents and proficiencies that fall into this big central yellow category in my so-called Skills Pyramid. There are countless books and videos and forum threads that cover each of these various topics in gory detail…. but the vast majority of amateur players never really take the time to learn the majority of these skills. I guarantee you, however, that Mr. Ivey took the time at some point back in his distant pasts to learn them.

The second big category of skills, Emotional Control, encompasses all the psychological and discipline stuff that separates the proverbial men from the boys. Recognizing—and eliminating—tilt from our game, for instance, as well as remaining patient, focused, and Zen like at the table, playing on that fine line between egoless and confident poker, playing with heart, and so on… these are the “psychological” things that fill out the right-side of my Skill Pyramid. Again, I can promise you that Phil Galfond has these things understood and mastered better than the average player does. Bad beats don’t affect Galfond the way it does most of the rest of us, and this is because he’s taken the time to master tilt control and the like.

Which brings us to the third—and highly underappreciated—category of poker skills: Off-Table Prep and Self Improvement. These are the away-from-the-table preparation, self-improvement, and homework/study things that may seem boring, but are so vital to complete mastery of the game. Again, Phil Laak clearly spends as much time on this part of his game as he does playing. You should too, and it’s why this category is what I want to talk about today. And I want to start that discussion by talking about how people learn.

There are a variety of different theories of education of how people learn and master new skills, but one of the most commonly accepted is something called the Kolb Experiential Model that school educators and sports coaches alike use to help their students learn and master new subjects and skills. The model is based on four discrete phases of learning. Here’s a graphic that illustrates the basic cycle of how this works:

In a nutshell, the student first has to have a Concrete Experience doing something that they want to improve upon; for example, imagine a basketball player shooting free throws and missing, or a student writing an essay and getting a bad grade, or another doing a math problem and getting the wrong result. The athlete shoots a few dozen basketballs in the gym, or the student writes a full essay and turns it in for a grade. There is feedback that lets the athletes/students know how they performed at the task. They missed most of the free throws for example, with the ball banging off the front of the rim. Or they received a D on the essay, with comments written in disheartening red ink about how they didn’t support their thesis with properly footnoted references. They did something that required a skill, and then they got feedback on how well or poorly they did.

The second step that follows this is a period of Observation and Reflection. The student has to think about what went wrong. They might write these thoughts down in a journal. The teacher said I didn’t support my thesis statement with footnoted references. What does this mean, exactly? What kind of references? Do I agree with her? What can I do to improve this in the next essay I write? Or the basketball player may reflect on why they missed most of their shots. I’m banging the ball off the front of the rim over 75% of the time. Does this mean my aim is off? Or am I just not putting enough power into the shot to clear the rim? Or is it something else? The athlete might keep a notebook with how many shots he took, how many he made, and how he missed. The point of this Observe and Reflect step is to write down what the facts and results were, along with some reflective thoughts on what probably went wrong.

The third step in the Kolb process is something called Conceptualization. This is where the student actually identifies a fundamental thing they can improve upon—and then goes off and works on that weakness. The basketball player might conclude that a faulty follow-through is the cause of the missed shots, so they go off and work on that aspect of the game with specific drills and techniques to improve the ball release. The budding essayist might study other writers’ works, or create outlines of future essays, or perhaps rewrite their own original paper. They could then meet the teacher during office hours and discuss the rewritten essay. Similarly, the athlete could have a coach work with them on shooting drills.

The fourth step of the Kolb learning model is called Active Preparation. Before starting the next homework essay, or heading out on the court for the next game, the student actively—and purposely—decides what and how they’re going to do differently this time. They visualize it before starting. They essentially take what they learned in the preceding Kolb steps, and they prepare a “game plan,” with specific things that they’re going to focus on during this next Concrete exercise.

And then the student goes back to the top of the cycle with another Concrete Experience (e.g., another free throw session, or the writing of another homework assignment essay). Results are again realized and the student or athlete succeeds or doesn’t. Then it’s back to Observation and Reflection, Conceptualizing, and Preparation. With active focus, the student gets better over time, finding mistakes and weaknesses and correcting them, and also finding strengths and reinforcing them….

…. Uh, okay Bug. Why am you spending so many precious words on this (and boring us readers to death)?

Good question. The answer is: I think this approach can directly be applied to learning and mastering poker. Learning Hold’em is no different than mastering basketball. You have to spend time in the Kolb cycle, working on specific aspects of your game. Concrete Experience (Playing), followed by Observation and Reflection (Record Keeping), followed by Conceptualizing (Off-Table Studying), followed by Preparation (Game Selection, Warm-ups, Pre-Game Checklists), and so on. In other words, the left side of my Skills Pyramid is populated with theses core ingredients of the Kolb Learning Model for a reason: it works.

In a future post, I’m going to show you why and how Mr. Phil Ivey, et al, have probably met and embraced Mr. Kolb—whether they realized it or not. Stay tuned for this and more exciting exposition...

 All-in for now…
-Bug

Writer's (Un)Block: Position

The biggest problem I have with my new columnist gig at Learn.PokerNews.com is deciding what to write about. No, I don’t mean I lack for ideas; au contraire mes amis. If anything, I have a glut of interesting topics and ideas. Picking and choosing where to start is actually kind of challenging, and I can honestly say I lost a little sleep in the last few days trying to figure out what might be the right place to begin.

So what did I decide for my first official article? Well, when in doubt, go back to the basics. The Learn website is focused on educating beginning and entry-level poker players, so why not start with a fundamental “beginning” concept? And right down there on the bottom rung of my Pyramid of Poker Skills is one of the most important of all concepts in poker: Position.

Yep, it’s old hat for intermediate and advanced players, but learning to play a positionally-aware game is key to learning to win. If you fail to master this, you will fail to make money at poker. Period. Yes, this is true. And, no, I’m not overstating it. Here’s a little graph I’m going to include in my article to hammer home the point:

I took this data from my last 10,000 hands of $100NL and $200NL played online: If this doesn’t convince you of the power of position, I really don’t know what would….

Anyway, I’ll let you know when the first article comes out in early November. And don’t worry; I’m going to keep posting here on the blog as usual. Turns out I have more than enough ideas for both my blog and Learn…

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

Hand Chart Construction, Part 2: Format

There are 1,326 unique starting hands in Texas Hold'em that can be dealt to a player. Preflop, however,we can think of a hand like Q♥J♥ as being functionally equivalent to Q♣J♣, and hands like 8♠7♥ the same as 8♦7♣. In other words, we can reduce this rather large number of 1,326 hands to a smaller, but still somewhat unwieldy 169 "unique" hands. 


Of these 169 hands, 13 are pairs, 78 are suited non-pairs, and 78 are non-suited non-pairs. Within these three basic groupings of cards, some are clearly stronger (and therefore more "playable") than others. Within the pairs, for instance, AA is clearly stronger than 22 before the flop. Similarly, AKo is stronger than AQo, which is stronger than KQo, and so on. The trick with a starting hand chart, therefore, is to display all 169 2-card hands in a manner that is both easy to read, but still informative in terms of relative strength. We also want to be able to differentiate playable hands as a function of our position, table dynamics, and the action upstream of us.

To do this, there are essentially three primary styles or formats we can choose from when constructing a starting hand chart: 13x13 Grid, Matrix, and Text. Here's little bit about each:

13x13 Grid. This is the format that programs like PokerStove and Flopzilla use. Pairs are located along the central diagonal that runs from the upper left of the grid to the lower right. Suited cards are above this diagonal, and unsuited cards are below it. Generally speaking, the higher up and to the left you are in the chart, as well as the closer you are to the diagonal, the stronger your 2-card hand is (e.g., note that AA is in the upper left corner, while hands like 32o are near the lower bottom right.)

13 x 13 Grid Format

• Pros: The chief advantage  to this format is that the chart is compact and easy to read. It's also easy to visualize where your hand sits relative to others in terms of general strength. In other words, how far up and to the left is your hand on the chart?
• Cons: The chief disadvantage with this chart is that it doesn't leave much room to add information on things like position, table dynamics, or the upstream action. Yes, you can use color, but this only provides a solution to one of these items.

Matrix Format. This is the style that I personally used when I was first starting out in poker. Down the left side of the matrix is a listing of hands, usually sorted into groups by the high card in the hand. Across the top are both positions and upstream actions. To use this chart, you simply drop down vertically along the left side until you find your hand, then scoot horizontally across the chart until you find your position and the upstream action. Easy peasy.

Matrix Format

• Pros: The biggest advantage of this chart is is ease of use and display of the information.
• Cons: The biggest disadvantage of this chart is that it's a little slow and awkward to use. The chart can also be pretty large if you want to include a lot of hands. This means it's hard to create one that sits fully on your desktop when you play; i.e., the one I used to use required me to scroll up and down.

Text List. This is the old-skool "chart," which is in reality just a list of positions, along with columns for call, raise, and so on.

Text Format

• Pros: you can fit a lot of information into a small, compact area.
• Cons: it's tough to read this this kind of chart in the heat of battle; graphical displays are almost always better than text displays when trying to convey information in a fast, concise, accurate manner. You don't see fighter pilots with text lists displayed on their HUDs, do you?

There are other types of charts, but these are the most common. So which one am I going to use? I haven't fully figured that out yet, but I know that I'm not going with number three (text list). Instead, I think I'm going to start with the matrix format as a means of simply collecting the data. Then I might try to shoe horn the information into some kind of hybrid grid format. Dunno. The trick is figuring out a way to display all the data into just one or two charts. We'll see how it develops. The next thing I want to do, however, is start creating the actual data that goes into the chart.

Back to Part 1  or  Forward to Part 3

All-in for now...
-Bug