I haven't read Masons Book, but based on what he stated i think it has some VERY GOOD information.

I can say this bc my company profits mainly/only when our players profit. So we have a lot of real DATA to support the thesis as i understand it.
I always stated that auto-pilot is a VERY GOOD thing and what we work on is improving the game of students.
Whenever students come with cry-baby-life-questions, i shut them down and tell them not to be ****$ and focus on improving their game.
Improving your game & playing solid lines is one big ingredient of success at the table.

People use mindset and all that psycho stuff as a EXCUSE for inaction. Unless you are beating midstakes, you do NOT need psycho-coaching.

I have several times declined students who wanted this from me.

I've been pounding on psycho-babblers forever, on record. My students call me often the greatest life-coach they had (FUNNY!) altho this might be a word play, because i don't tell people how to live and would NEVER EVER call myself a life coach.
There is a funny video clip from George Carlin about that...

What they really mean is that I believe in them and our culture, attitude and winner mindset is captivating and bringing the best out of them. Main problem is that our vocabulary is limited in this area and terms are not very well defined.

This is also where i likely will disagree with Mason (can't say for sure as i haven't read the book) and likely agree with my fellow high stakes players.

Motivation & Mindset & Purpose. Super important. Humans are not machines! Our before-after data with student also shows one of the success reasons being increased productivity. It's not a secret lol.

But the impact is NOT going to show while playing. So of course the stuff with 98% same decisions and then a supposed impact on 2% balbla...of course that's bullcrap and not statistically significant or provable (I'm with Mason on this one).

This is where the misunderstanding between the two sides comes from.
Motivation/Mindset/Purpose is what helps the student to STUDY in the first place. It will help to keep studying and playing when all the other ****$ go home crying over a bad beat.

Mason asking "example of a hand did you play differently based on coaching with xy" is just the wrong question to ask in order to evaluate the merits of a certain type of coaching.

A better metric would be to look at overall productivity (hours put in playing & studying). And then we could get into more vague metrics like "well being"...

I think for a high performer it absolutely makes sense to hire emotional counsel and i absolutely believe it can be worth it. That's what it really is, the other words just sound nicer (peak performance training)...

Everybody else, please save your money! I've never heard of any success story from "mental coaches" that was not strongly based on improving at the actual game.

When in doubt i also would give credit to somebody making millions at the game (Fedor Holz for example) and assume he's smart. Smart people can do dumb things, but when in doubt i put my money on winners

Hi Think:

I think if you read my book you would see that we're much closer than you believe on those topics where you think there's a difference. I also think you would run into a few ideas that you would find worthwhile that you're not familiar with.

As for putting your money on the smart person who has done well I have no issue here. But by the same token when dealing with an idea that comes from the world of mathematical statistics, wouldn't you want to put some money on the person who has real expertise in this field

Best wishes,
Mason

The post contradicts simple logic. As a poker staker your best interest would be not advertising or publicly endorsing methods that gained your players a competitive edge. This brings to the conclusion either you are posting under influence or taking part in a scheme.

Sure Elliot Roe endorses max-value as well. Seems to be the new trend everyone bigs everyone up and we all rise together.

He's not a shrill because he recommends a mental coach to someone who asked about mental coaches. He's someone whose people were helped by him, so when asked if Elliot is good, he said "yes." Not going to ruin his business if others know that.

it contradicts the logic of the self-serving egotist but since he presumably has learned to leave his ego at the door, perhaps he's just being friendly and offering his opinion

Just going to chime in and say I have read both of jared tendlers books and found them of some value.
Plus I have done 2 sessions with elliot roe and also found them of value. Sure he is on the expensive side and maybe one could argue that the price for value gained is not the best roi for mental game (I think it is fwiw)
To suggest that those 2 mental game coaches provide 0 value is quite frankly ludicrous.

It also comes across as somewhat disengenious from someone who has a vested interest in discrediting those practitioners.

I'm not saying this is the case here but, when the author of a not particularly well received mental game book. Stops other mental game coaches from advertising on their site under the premise they don't offer any value. It's only reasonable to be more than a little bit cynical.....



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If you would read my book I say this stuff has a little value which is different from zero value. I have no vested interest in discrediting these people and in fact lose out on the advertising revenue we use to receive from them.

As for my book, it's much better received than you realize. If you were correct they would just ignore it which hasn't been the case. And finally, going back to stopping their advertising here, you would be correct if this was the only advertising we have ever refused.

MM

Here you say they have virtually 0 value. Which is what i was referring to actually.

Also I have read various reviews on amazon and good reviews and they have been overwhelming negative so far.

To be honest it doesn't matter that much whether it's a great book or poor book. There is clearly a conflict of interest when yourself and 2+2 talk about these practitioners. Your a clever man mason you can see why people are treating your opinion woth sceptism.

Plus the way you are responding to quite reasonable responses bringing this up (lengthy walls of text, passive aggressive nature of posts) helps to reinforce that sceptism.

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Here's exactly what the book says (from the "Conclusion."

Okay. There are five reviews on Amazon. You should go into our books forum and you'll see the response is quite different from the Amazon reviews. Better yet, why don't you read the book and get a good understanding as to exactly what it says, especially since you seem to be so interested in this subject.

You must not be that familiar with me and Two Plus Two. If you were, you would know that I and Two Plus Two have been around for over 30 years, and our reputation is to complement stuff that is good whether we publish it or not, and to steer our users away from those thngs which we think are questionable.

Mason

In this thread you stated something different that it has virtually no value. I'm not really sure what you are getting at or disagreeing with tbh. I was just going by the exact words you used in this thread.
In my opinion to say the mental game coaching provides virtually no value is absurd. Whether that value is worth the money/time etc is a whole other question.

Plus obviously i am familiar with 2+2 can be seen by my post count that I gave been around here for a long time. I wasn't trying to question your intgreity mealy pointing out how it may look. Sorry if that was not clear in my post.

However, to be honest it seems like when people are disagreeing with you or pointing out how it may seem (even if it is not the case). You responses are quite over the top which kind of doesn't help the perception.

I will check out the reviews on 2+2 also to be fair.

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Bluffy:

As I've stated many times on these forums, when I read the stuff from these poker mental coaches, what I see are ideas from the sports world which are designed to help athletes with speed, timing, and coordination which are attributes that should have little to do with poker. I also see things related to a misunderstanding of the short term luck factor and virtually no understanding of what tilt is and how it affects a player, and no understanding that that probability theory and games based on probability theory, like poker, can be counter-intuitive to many people. For example, Tendler's idea of "revenge tilt" is not tilt at all. Thus my conclusions and why my book is very different.

Mason

Hi Everyone:

I want to follow up on the sentence that I bolded above. From my book tilt is defined as follows:

So we can see that a tilted player has lost the ability to think rationally.

Now let's look at Tendler's "revenge tilt." Here a player has made a decision to get back at another player. It's usually not a smart decision but it's certainly made in a rational manner. What has happened is that the player in question has decided that instead of maximizing expectation, which is what poker should be about, something else has become more important, and in this case it's getting revenge on a specific opponent.

Usually when we see someone deviating from maximizing their expectation they're losing in the game and decide to maximize their probability of getting even, and this can be done by increasing their standard deviation (the short term luck factor in poker). The problem with this is that it should also reduce their overall expectation since the short-term luck factor can easily be increased by playing too many hands and by playing some of them too aggressively.

But notice that this is also not tilt since a rational decision has been made. The player is well aware that in the time they have remaining, playing their usually more solid game is unlikely to get them even. And for those interested, in my book I give this the name of "pseudo tilt" which is something very different from tilt. And this is one of the reasons why I say that these poker mental coaches often don't have enough understanding of poker for their services to have much if any value.

Best wishes,
Mason

This is a specious distinction. Somebody motivated to "get revenge" on an opponent may or may not be rationally deliberating about it, or aware that it is sub-optimal in terms of their overall EV. What they certainly are, is influenced by their emotional state, of frustration or annoyance, or dislike for that other player.

I would define tilt as any state of mind in which our play, and the mental equilibrium which assists us in maintaining optimally skillful play, is undermined by our state of mind. This might manifest as so-called "hard tilt" where a player is in a very obvious state of rage or anger, and acts dramatically poorly in game as a result. It might manifest as any number of forms of "soft tilt" such as gradually increasing boredom, irritation, or distraction. These are all states of mind, related to our emotion and our concentration, which detract from our ability to play well. Obviously being annoyed or angry with another player will also detract from our ability to play well.

Combating tilt has to do with cultivating a state of mind in which we maintain equilibrium, in which we are calm, collected and responding to the total situation, rather than reacting to one part of it. Our ability to be rational is not a binary quality, but a spectrum, which is influenced by our emotions, our reactions to others and our relationship to our own minds. The very best way to get rid of tilt, whether it be hard tilt, soft tilt or any other form, is to work on cultivating mindfulness, through simple techniques such as daily breathing meditation, which will enable us to see our own reactions coming, and avoid over-investing in those reactions before they build up and overwhelm our ability to think clearly, calmly and to play well.

The fact that someone knows that they want to "get even" and have limited time to do so, does not make their decision purely rational, as the desire to "get even" is still prompted by an emotional reaction to another player, of frustration, dislike, etc. You say "something else has become more important". When we examine why it has become more important in that moment, it comes down to emotional reactions like frustration, annoyance, dislike etc. This certainly qualifies as a form of tilt. Tilt doesn't require the elimination of all rational capacities. We don't have to become a psycho to have tilt issues. Tilt can be obvious, or subtle. It is any degree to which our ability to play rationally is undermined to any degree.

It is our relationship to this reaction which we need to work on, in cultivating as close to a "zero tilt" mental state as possible. When someone is angry, they may know that they are angry. They may know that being angry is -EV. They may choose to continue playing in that state, or they may have lost control and be acting purely compulsively. Or, a player may just be gradually decaying from A game to B game through boredom, and not even notice the decay. These are all varieties of tilt in my view, as they are all sub-optimal states of mind which can be avoided through working on our own mindfulness and self-awareness.

Meditation as a means to achieving deeper mindfulness is extraordinarily useful in tackling any variety of tilt. It takes time, and must be done daily for best effect. It is simply a way of clearing the mind, allowing us deeper and more insightful focus, into both ourselves and into any decision point we may have in game.

Tilt due to Anger = Amygdala Hijack = CNS starts working to be ready to "fight" (real or not) = Shutdown "Logic-Rational" Thinking + lot of other stuff (Not usseful "right now").

You can only use autoinstructions and a few "left brain".

Can I get back to the OP and ask who besides Tendler and Roe would someone recommend as a life coach? And what do their lessons entail exactly? I am looking for someone to help me in many aspects of life and not just on the felt. I see Gripsed and Pawel Jablonski offer life coaching lessons and I'm wondering if anyone has had any experience with either?

when did Lou Holtz start playing poker? thash shom really inshrashing shtuff

As with many things, the value of coaching exists in the beholder. In a pursuit like poker with incredibly compressed feedback cycles (tiny gains in "skill" are multiplied over a multitude of hands), it is inarguable that making a one-time investment to increase the % of the time where you play your "A" game has the potential to have an extremely high ROI.

My qualm with anything regarding "mindset" is that improvement cannot be quantified or measured. As Popper would say, it is unfalsifiable -- because mindset can explain anything, it explains nothing. In a pursuit incomprehensively clouded by variance, short-term successes are credited to the coach's teaching and continued failure to the student's "failure to apply the lessons imparted".

In my experience, the forcing function of taking the outside view on your play/habits/life is universally valuable, almost irrespective of the lens used. For this reason, I think any "coaching" -- even if it is just sitting down with a close friend, can be a great investment.

I evaluate coaches on two dimensions:
1) Are they selling vaccines or bandaids? Are they giving me tools that I can use on my own and reducing my dependence upon them, or are they like so many mediocre personal trainers who have a new workout to try everytime I'm in the gym?
2) How much is this tailored for me? Is this a one size fits all system (i.e. compiled from the internet) or is it specifically created to fit my individual needs/style?

The notion that mental game improvements cannot be measured or quantified is a very common perception and extremely understandable. It is indeed almost a contradiction in terms to be able to quantify a quality, or to objectify a human subject. The history of psychology and psychiatry are in fact full of erroneous approaches to human subjective experience where an objectifying approach did violence to the humanity of the subject.

However, I'd argue that this doesn't mean we cannot see substantive, steady and clear improvements in mental game. We certainly can do so. A gradual deepening of our focus and awareness is something which we can steadily track in our understanding of ourselves and the world around us, and the inability to reduce it to a quantifiable unit is not evidence that we cannot perceive a genuine and incremental improvement in our mental wherewithal. I don't have time to write more now, but I think this is a fascinating issue and I address exactly this reason for reluctance to study mental game in several of my vids on the subject.

Close, but it was in fact Colonel Mustard in the Library with the Candlestick.

A+++

Thanks for taking the time to write that.

This is why we fight the cull. Great post man. Link to your vids please?

Thanks Not sure I'm supposed to post direct links, but you can google search LuckyLuke to find various bits and pieces. I believe PokerStrategy have 4 minute previews for free of all my vids done for them, including mental game, I'm LuckyLukePS on there. Or you can PM me for private coaching.

Best of luck!