I'm not a big Negreanu fan, but I agree with him on this. In fact, I think he's simply stating the obvious.

So Ed Miller is a winning player in the 2/5 games and small buy in tournaments correct? If so, he has credentials to teach others how to beat 2/5 games and small buy in tournaments. If your goal is to be able to do the same, then he might be an excellent coach for you. However, if he wrote a book on how to beat the super high roller tournaments, I would question the content since he has no experience applying what he would have written. There would be no evidence to support the content's effectiveness. Extreme example: If the best NLH player in the world wrote a book on Stud, but has never played a single hand of stud, I wouldn't buy it.

The gist of my blog, and apologies if this wasn't clear, is that if you are going to learn to be better at a specific aspect of poker, the person teaching you should have credentials to show you that they are successful at applying the strategies they are teaching you.

The Ed Miller example doesn't really apply because according to what you have shared he is successful at the aspect of poker he is teaching.

Daniel, what about Mathematics of Poker?

More generally, it seems obvious that a mathematician or game theorist (who might not even play poker) could teach a good player a lot about the game, and this could be easily transferred to book format for use by players far superior to the author

Why do I get the feeling Daniel is working on a book?

Absolutely. Having someone breakdown the math of certain situations is information a player can use to get better and the person doing the math doesn't have to be a great player. Is this the book by Bill Chen you are talking about?

I would add that at the highest levels of tournament poker math becomes far less relevant since most all of the players in the event would have a decent grasp of it. Those that give up something, myself included, give up very little in terms of equity.

You will see in those events that different players choose different preflop raise sizes. I imagine you could break down what the optimal raise size is for preflop raising, but someone making it 1150 vs 1125 isn't going to be what makes or breaks that player. Now is someone was making it 4k as a standard raise at 250-500 blinds, it's safe to say he isn't very good and the "math" would be a significant factor as to why.

Bad read! Not working on a book at all. Frankly I think the medium is mostly outdated anyway with Twitch and online training videos prevalent today. I think the best way for people to learn poker today is to watch others who are successful actually play poker.

Yeah I was talking about the book by Chen, I've seen it cited as 'most useful poker book' by several top players.

Given that you agree with the concept though, and also given that a larger share of learning resources are math/theory based these days, I'm curious why you're still confident that the teacher needs to be better at applying what they're teaching.

Not sure if you are serious here but if you are. Then I'm sorry you really don't know what your talking about.

Giri is one of the world's elite what separates an average gm and a super grandmaster is more than being able to calculate more than 2 moves more (it's actually likely a few more than this in some spots anyway)

Even not just considering calculation ability Giri will certainly have deeper understanding in almost every aspect of the game which is why he is an elite player.

As someone said it early ITT many many top chess players have coaches who are far below them in ability.

The reason is there is way more to being an effective coach than playing strength alone same goes across all sports/games.

Math of Poker is not about optimal betsizes.

You misunderstand. I realize that the better chess player is usually better at all aspects. I was merely speculating given their ages and given the fact that she hired him as coach that in this particular instance this is what was going on. Grandmasters at 70 lose to 20 year old players that know a bit less than them who they would have beaten at their peaks.

(Looking this up it seems that my speculation seems close https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Tukmakov)

I got through half of that book. I like Bill and I'm sure the book is helpful to a lot of people, but it's not aligned with how I approach poker decisions. I don't think that way, and I found it to be a difficult read for me.

To answer your question, I think poker is more complex than just understanding the math and fundamentals behind the game, otherwise more people would be really successful at it. Learning this stuff can, and is likely very helpful to people who don't yet have a fundamental foundation for how they approach poker decisions effectively. Knowing the fundamentals is one important asset, but there are so many more. As I said in a separate post, at the highest levels most everyone has a decent grasp of the fundamentals but what separates the pack is their ability to read their opponents and create plays that are player specific.

I realize that. I just used that to illustrate an example.

Giri is male fwiw

This gm also would not have even come close to beating Giri even when he was at his peak. Highly doubt he knows a bit more than Giri either (most likely the other way around)
He was never an elite player not even close really more of an average gm in his prime.

As I said before and others have ITT with regards to chess at least. Very often top players are coached by players who even at their peak were nowhere near the top level.
Since they were never at the top level it's very unlikely they have more technical prowess.

Coaches like the legendary dvorestky are famous for having highly detailed training plans and techniques to improve their students in certain areas (lots of them born out of the Soviet era training schools). Dvorestky was not even a grandmaster (International mastet) actually but is probably the most acclaimed chess author and trainer of all tome

The wiki u linked merely showed he was a good grandmaster but short of being an elite player by some distance as well.

Anyways not to totally derail the thread but dnegs I am sure has done a lot of 'research' into this view I am sure.

I would imagine poker is very similar to chess and other games/sports. You don't necessarily have to be an elite player to write a good book (coach or whatever however) you will certainly have had to play to a relatively high level.

Ok, but then in "only the elite players themselves can write the best poker books" you don't really mean "elite" you mean "winning".

You mention mental game authors as an exception where it isn't really related to playing level. Would you put "poker tells" in the same category? Interested as we have the as yet underrated author Zach Elwood in the thread.

One way elite players can help though is as sources of recommendation for books. A lot of the authors mentioned positively in this thread would be recommended by elite players.

I admitted I was guessing about this situation. But even if you are right that Giri has more knowledge as well as skill, that doesn't preclude the possibility that there are certain situations that the Russian is more knowledgeable about. If it isn't that then what other reasons do you see for hiring him.

Say there are 100 things to know about poker. 25 are fundamental. There is a book that teaches the 25 fundamental things plus 10 more that are highly technical. The author doesn't know a lot of the 65 remaining things.

Now consider two elite players. They both know the 25 basic things. And the 65 things just mentioned. But one of them picks up the aforementioned book and reads all of it while the other reads half. Who is favored between them?

?

Mainly top players high coaches for preparation reasons for tournaments/matches.

Some don't have any at all though and work solo.

Magnus carlsen the current world champion (and you could argue strongest player of all time) has a team of about 10 players/coaches.

Normally it's for in depth opening preparation (aided undoubtedly by computer and database analysis). Though it can often extended to playing training games in certain types of positions they are aiming to get in the tournament or match.

It can also be mental game and practical preparation. I recall dvorestky talking about preparing one of his players for a world championship qualifier by devising physical mental and technical regimes.

Which included yoga/swimming/tennis for example alongside purely technical work such as studying certain endgame types.

I think Daniel's mostly right about poker. The only highly paid coach (to my knowledge) who wasn't a highly regarded player is MDMA (who subsequently became a high limit player!). So I think there's a disanalogy with chess, but I can't put my finger on where it is.

I certainly agree that many top poker players have difficulty explaining their strategies.

I know that I read most of the well regarded poker books (and watch the videos) that come out, and it's only rarely that something I watch in these learning materials makes me play a hand differently.

There are of course exceptions, mental game stuff doesn't require the author to be a good player, and theoretical books like MoP don't require the authors to be top players.

I could have made the blog longer and add some caveats. One being that the most successful 2-5 cash game grinder is more likely to be the ideal coach on how to maximize profit in low limit games, versus being coached by a high limit heads up specialist.

I disagree. A lot of people just don't want coaching from people who aren't proven world crushers (or at least winners). So it's obviously going to be hard to find people who've had successful coaching from losing players.

That's pretty perverse. I'm gonna guess the causation goes in the opposite direction and that people want coaching from winning players because they know the winning strategies.

This is a pretty cool observation that I tend to agree with

I've been playing 5/10 and 10/20 online for about 6-7 years and winning, so while I'm not like a nosebleed player, I think I'm high enough to say that I've accomplished enough to judge whether poker advice is probably good.

I can say that while Ed Miller might not beat above 2/5 live, I have no idea, I've basically never found anything in his books that I thought was wrong. I think there were a couple spots that I thought would be suboptimal in an online game but based on his population reads of the live games he plays in, his reasoning was perfectly fine.

In fact, I mostly tell people that Miller's recent books and also the Sklansky/Miller NLTAP book are basically never going to be wrong or out of date is because none of them have blueprints of "if you have x hand, do this and it will be +EV" except for the very basic bread and butter spots that will basically always be the same. Almost the entirety of NLTAP are general guidelines with formulas that say "Plug in your opponent's calling %, their raising %, etc on this board and you will have the answer of what you should do". They aren't giving you those reads, you have to get them yourself by playing and learning how other people play both in general (the current meta of poker) and your specific opponent. I guess there is a section of like quick tips and since I haven't read the book in awhile I don't remember for sure how specific the tips are so maybe some of those are out of date but I actually remember them being relatively vague enough to always be accurate.

I mean even preflop standards, which are like the most solvable thing, they don't even give you that book without a caveat of "these are highly fluid, you shouldn't just play based off hand rankings, but IF YOU MUST HAVE SOME here are our recommendations"

Anyway, getting those reads of like what you think your opponent's frequencies are on a given board vs your line and turning them into actionable decisions especially on the fly is a skill that you don't have to have to write about poker, but you do have to have to win at it. Also sometimes you don't have time to like reason out everything but you can quickly make connections between the situations you solved earlier or read about in the book that were solved in examples and go "oh this is roughly the same spot, so I know it's correct to do x".

So I mean I don't know why Ed Miller doesn't beat higher stakes. Maybe he has enough money from other ventures or from books or whatever and doesn't want to go through the variance because for most people it takes a lot to build a pain tolerance that you need for like 10/20 (10/25 live I guess?), especially live where I imagine you could easily lose 3-4 5k stacks and not make it back for awhile as slow as those games run. But having read all his books, even though I didn't learn anything particularly new from many of them, I recommend them to basically everyone learning midstakes poker, whereas I know DN is very successful but I took an issue with way more specific things he said in his books that I don't think are optimal especially online.

(If someone is going to take issue with my statement and say that I can't take issue with Negreanu's advice because Negreanu has made more than me, pretend I said Hellmuth instead since I think everyone agrees his books are garbage)

That's currently why far fewer players are successful at it, everyone really is that good, and the rake eats most players alive who don't study hard. It's very easy to learn GTO short stack plo and nlhe, limit is a little more sophisticated than shortstacking big bet games, but there isn't that much action around for those games anyway. The learning curve is less than 3 months for someone good with math in any case, and in any game.

More complex decision making of course takes a couple years, but this doesn't put off math types who actually have fun learning. Just think of learning to count cards in BJ. Some basic theory gets you a slight edge, and to extract the part that lets you consistently overcome variance, you need to practice to remember complex arguments in the decision tree.

All you have to do is look at the public data of PokerStars plo games to see that most people are really successful at playing near GTO poker. The biggest winners are fewer, and the ones that are still winning have pushed themselves to find thinner and thinner edges.

Stars regs...these guys are good.