2+2 is a valuable informational resource for anyone seeking to improve at poker. However, the organization of information on here isn't always optimized. I think a lot about how this great resource could be made even more useful, and I wonder if others have thought about it too. (I tried a few Google searches for past threads but didn't really come up with much.)

Here's just one example of the bigger conversation I hope to have. If this sounds interesting, please post a reply.

• Hand histories are the bread and butter of all the strategy forums. They're very educational, but does the present organization really maximize their value? Suppose I want to find HHs of hero calls with ace-high in small stakes NLHE. Wouldn't this just be seeking a needle in a haystack?

I get what you're saying, but for myself, I'd rather the information be more difficult to find since I don't mind doing the work to search for info, where many others can't be bothered, and thats fine with me.

For some reason I thought you were lazy Ace.

wp

The organization of information is in the books.

2+2 books? I'm talking about the thousands of HHs on this site.

Implicitly you seem to be saying that we're at a "sweet spot" where the information is easier to find than, say, in bound books or microfiche at the local library, but harder to find than a site that lets me find 50 AK hero calls with a clicks. That's a reasonable position.

I question whether we are at that one consensus sweet spot. For the danger of reducing the bar to learning for new players to be greater than the value of organizing the information for experienced players, the return to an hour of study for a new player would have to be greater than the return to an hour of study for an experienced player. This could be true if:

• We assume diminishing returns to time spent studying poker. IOW, getting from fish to competent reg is relatively more important than getting from competent to expert. That makes intuitive sense, although it's worth debate.
• Unmotivated players are able to make good use of the info once it's well organized. I emphatically question this.

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Is there another 2+2 forum that would be more suitable for discussing this?

Maybe "About the Forums" here:
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/55/about-forums/

Agree with OP.

Also, sometimes I sigh at the huge threads. Valuable content is somewhere in the middle, but I don't have 4 days to find it.


What do you suggest as an improved way to find specific hand histories?

Right now I'm aiming for more of a "blue sky" discussion, but I'm hoping that could eventually lead to concrete enhancements either within vBulletin or some other way.

I have a few thoughts. The most practical one is to explore the tagging capabilities of vBulletin. For example, here's a thread from another vBulletin site:

http://personalitycafe.com/entp-foru...her-types.html

Note the box at the bottom that says, "Tags for this thread" followed by "entp, relationships, romance". Each of those is a tag assigned by either the author of the thread or another registered user. Therefore, it doesn't depend on a moderator or any owner of the site to be a "librarian"; any user who wants to can classify to his heart's content.

How well does it work in practice? Hard to tell.... I think it tends to be somewhat underulitized on that site. Maybe others make better use.

So why does their vBulletin offer tagging functionality and 2+2's doesn't? Is it some change in configuration options or a plugin?

I always thought a wiki could be a nice addition to the site. It couldn't replace the forums but it would be a place where much of the accepted poker theory could be organised and linked to.

OP is correct: 2+2 clearly contains many, many times too many posts to read.

Even reading relatively small subsets (like the Well threads, or the MicroNLFR COTW threads) is at the limit of available time for a non-professional.

Whether the solution is a wiki, a tagging system, a subreddit or some other solution is unclear. It doesn't help that the emergence of coaching as a legitimate job means that a sizeable subset of the people who know the material best have an external motivation not to help.

Personally, I think something like a subreddit called "twoplustwo diamond miners" might be useful.

I thought so, too, so years ago I started one on Wikia: http://poker.wikia.com/wiki/Wikia_Poker . But I've not really stayed involved (got a little tired of Wikia) so it looks like it may have gotten spammy. We could certainly reinvigorate it, or put a wiki somewhere else if desired.

Interesting... I don't know anything about Reddit, but I will look into this. Feel free to push this idea forward on here. Thanks for the positive feedback.

One way to accomplish this would be by using google searching as opposed to the forum's feature. There used to be a google 2+2 widget before the last forum upgrade, but I don't know if it has been revised.

Yeah, I hardly ever use the native search on here. Google search (using "site:twoplustwo.com") is so much more valuable. In any search it is hard to come up with search terms that don't get thwarted by all the different synonyms and different ways of expressing the same concept.

As far as hand histories go, I believe there are a finite number of converters, so finding the field tags that would point to what we're looking for seems doable to me. E.g. format, stakes, #players, cards shown down, etc. etc. etc.

For those who used their own hh parsers over the years, some fairly complex searches are fairly straight forward. I think we need the next generation of google widget. We need someone to step forward and build us one; a leader among men, a software expert, a moderator, a.... I nominate Rusty.