Thanks a lot OP, great stuff

Great read thanks.

Sitting here in West Denmark, all alone, it is VERY helpfull to get diamant help like this :-)
Please find air for more gold.
Maxidane

Why do you subscribe to this stuff ? Practice makes perfect but the claims made, which you repeat in part, are not sustainable by the research . Some "elite" performers are lazy but talented and other people without much aptitude practice till the cows come home without it doing much good (they improve from incompetent to slightly less incompetent). Even the titles of the books are risible "The Genius In All Of Us" ? Do me a favour most people are genius at nothing and never will be. I don't understand why you have accepted all the hype uncritically. Can you please explain this ?

Do you have a single example of someone who has truly applied themselves to mastering something and who are just 'slightly less incompetent' afterwards? Or even just 'decent'?

I've been working on this one a lot lately.....

'A) The Hand-Reading Game
-filter your HEM database for “Saw Showdown = True”
-reply the hand street by street, and verbally articulate (or write down, or enter into Pokerstove) your estimate of villain's hand range on each street. Was the hand he actually showed down within the final narrowed range you gave him?
-keep score, track results. If the hand villain showed down was in the final range you assigned him, you're 1 for 1. If it was outside the range, you're 0 for 1. Do 10 hands every day, and over the course of each week, track improvement in your average score out of 10
-you can add HEM filters to work on your hand-reading in a specific situation, for example when you're facing a flop check-raise, or when a loose-passive c/c's 3 streets, or in 3bet pots, etc.'

I've filtered it for pots where I won or lost over 50bb and the villain wasn't a shortstacker. I actually can't believe how good my results have been when doing the exercise and it made me realise that I'm really not applying the knowledge I have at the tables correctly. Although I have started now.

Also, villains really do have flush draws far less than you expect

There are tens of thousands, if not millions of them, of them. You will find a lot of them on golf courses etc. Not everyone is Tiger Woods or Bobby Fischer. Thousands have tried and have fallen short. The ones who fall slightly short you hear about because they are the 1000th best golfer or the 1000th best chess player but those who had little aptitude in the first place will not be noticed. Use your loaf is there honestly any point in trying to become a concert pianist if you show no aptitude for playing the piano in the first place ? The people who wrote these books are just selling snake oil. The science shows that practice makes people better than they were. It does not say that it makes them better than those who were naturally gifted in the first place.

I'm just asking for one concrete example. Yes there are hundreds of thousands of people playing golf or a number of other activities badly, but that does not mean they have truly applied themselves. Even if they may think so themselves - there are tons of examples of people (there are some famous threads on this board) of people who claim to have "done everything" but who clearly haven't and who aren't willing to accept it themselves.

Same with golf - you'll find tons of people who claim they have done and tried everything but when you look into it, it turns out their just pig-headed and stubborn and/or unwilling to actually put in the time and work to learn and apply what they've been taught.

Excepting stuff like becoming a super-model or a world class singer, which is stuff you do need to be born with a certain look/talent for, I have yet to see a single example of someone not becoming at least very good in a field they have truly applied themselves to.

We're not talking about becoming a top concert pianist - your statement was that there are people who truly apply themselves to something and yet do not manage to become more than 'slightly less incompetent' at it.

You are just nit picking and bickering for the sake of it. Perhaps you should turn your criticism to the people who write books with ludicrous titles like like "The Genius In All Of Us". Generally speaking if people are not very good at something compared to others then they do not waste years on it. It's common sense to those of us who are not deluded.

I agree with your main point but disagree with the part above. There are many physical activities and sports that people may not be able to become good at as they just don't have, and will never be able to achieve, the physical attributes that are necessary. Obviously this doesn't apply to poker though.

Of course it applies to poker. You need a certain amount of intelligence/ability to succeed at poker. Different players achieve different standards with similar effort. The same is true of almost all human activities. There is an example of this in the MTTSNG forum. One of the 180 experts decided to hothouse a fairly ordinary player. Said player has achieved an ROI of 3% after several months. However other players who have been trained for similar periods have achieved 10% ROIs and more with higher ABIs.

That's because the failures do not become famous and the ones with any sense give up and do things they're not hopeless at. Eddie the Eagle wasn't very good at ski jumping and he took that very seriously. The onus of proof for this laughable claim that we're all geniuses really lies with those who make the claim.

wat?

Eddie the Eagle didn't even care enough about ski jumping to slim down to a weight that would give him a chance to be good at it. How is this even close to taking it 'very seriously'?

Eddie the Eagle aside is there any reason why you have ignored every point I have raised ? It's as if you are not interested in the facts but just want to believe all this "we could all be geniuses if we tried" nonsense. I have come across quite a few poker players who have worked hard to become very good and who have failed to get very far. I can think of one right now who has spent the last six months being coached intensively who is about to give it up as a bad job because he's still only slightly better than break-even at low stakes and a loser higher up.

The reason is that all the other stuff you're trying to drag into this has no relevance for the one point you made that I am debating.

Your claim that there are a lot of people who can apply themselves to something 100% and yet only become 'slightly less incompetent' is what I'm debating - that's all I've been debating.

And you are making it abundantly clear that the reason you have not understood this yet, is because you're not even bothering to read my posts before furiously typing your replies to them based on what you suppose they say. I have never claimed 'we can all be geniuses if we tried' or even anything close to it.

All I'm pointing out is that while some might be too optimistic about what people can achieve just based on hard work, you are at least equally ridiculously pessimistic.