Nah that's actually why I became "affiliated" with them.

But anyway, I really haven't followed this thread. So is there research supporting your claim?

DM

Of course you've been following this thread. That's why you're posting in it.

As for research, my book is based on mathematical modeling and statistical theory, so there's no need for research on my side. Also, despite all the name dropping we see in Cardner's book, I know of no studies involving poker players. (If any existed, I'm sure she would have referenced them.) Furthermore, I doubt if any viable studies with poker players can be done due to the large short term luck factor -- statistical theory does raise some flags.

And this brings us back to Red Chip Poker. Why are they supporting this stuff which in my opinion is garbage?

And one last thing. At the beginning of this thread I did put up the first 10 concepts from the "Recent Erroneous Concepts" chapter in Real Poker Psychology. Why don't you address some of these.

Mason

What is the math equation you used to figure out; physical fatigue and mental fatigue are independent?

Go run a couple of miles and you'll be tired. But if you're an expert poker player, you should still be able to play well. If you don't understand that I can't help you.

MM

My responses in italics

Concept No. 4: Setting goals is important to achieving success at the poker table. No. How about learning how to play better, and once that happens you either won’t need to set goals or they’ll take care of themselves.

I see no harm in setting a goal. Maybe you're setting a goal to learn something new. My goal: xx. In order to do xx I much study xx to achieve it. IE; My goal is to learn a new language, I need to study Rosetta Stone.

Is there really a difference between setting a goal to learn something and just learning it? What's the harm in the goal? Maybe it's a positive to that person. It's may make them feel good to hit that goal.

Concept No. 5: You need “to concentrate intently during games.” If you know how to play well this is fairly automatic, and GTO players shouldn’t need to concentrate much at all.

So "GTO" players don't have to think about what the "GTO" play might be. I take nothing away from limit poker, but this is easier for a limit player than a no limit player. And how can anyone be a "GTO" player if a game isn't "solved"? (IE No Limit Hold' em)

So yes, I think concentration is import at the table, especially because looking for exploits might take more concentration. This is especially true for the low limit where no one cares what the "GTO" play is.

And lastly these "GTO players that don't need much concentration" What % of the poker population would you say they make up?


Concept No. 6: Successful players are self-confident. This is probably true. But if you talk to unsuccessful players or those with just marginal results, most of them are self-confident as well. Again, learning how to play well is far more important than this.

You keep using learning to play as an excuse. So does this mean until we know something 100% or close to it, we should be confident in ourselves?


Concept No. 7: You need your brain to be firing on all cylinders. If you know how to play well, decisions can be easy and fairly automatic with only a small number requiring more time. So why do you need your brain firing on all cylinders?

As if there are no variables in poker or life..... I know how to walk well, but I have to adjust to changing terrain all the time. And I think till the day we all play "like "GTO" robots, we will require our brain to be firing. Maybe not all cylinders, but a good amount of it.


Concept No. 8: “Sleep deprivation reduces judgment and performance on complex tasks.” Clearly this is true and poker is a fairly complex game. But once you understand how to play poker well, and this can take a fair amount of work and study, it shouldn’t be that complex anymore. So if the game is good and you’re an excellent player, your edge should be just as high whether you’re a bit tired or not.

I've played tired and made a ton of mistakes, these days I try as much as I can; only to play when rested. So yes I think sleep make a major difference.

I notice a big difference in poker and life after a real good night of sleep. I'm pretty sure this has be researched to death, not sure how you can disagree with it.

Concept No. 9: Eating grains will make you want to go back to sleep. This may be true but does it mean you’ll now play your poker hands differently? If you understand how to play well, I doubt it.

I guess your a robot. Well limit hold em is pretty robotic. (I'm not taking a shot at you, I don't play limit hold em anymore, but It's the game I cut my poker teeth in and made good money in.)


Concept No. 11: “Many top poker players are in excellent shape.” As the text points out, people who are in excellent health are also frequently the ones willing to work on things, which is a good characteristic for becoming a top poker player. So while it’s great to be in athletic shape, it should have little to do with your poker strategy.

I think being in better shape helps you do just about everything better.
"Athletic" shape may not make a difference. But being "in shape" definitely make a difference in everything.

Concept No. 12: Keep “accurate records of all the hands you play.” Wow! That will be a lot of hands, and most of them will be straightforward and just be a waste of time to go over. On the other hand, remembering an interesting hand or two and then thinking about these is certainly worthwhile. Also, keep in mind that to learn poker well, think in terms of concepts and not a countless number of individual situations.

Ok we agree, we don't need to write down every hand.

DM

You get pretty close by mixing up your play in such a way that even if your opponent knew how you were doing it he wouldn't have an exploitative counter strategy that gained him a lot of EV. The most important thing is to make sure you aren't folding so frequently in certain spots as to allow him to make a profit with two blank cards. Its not too hard to come up with such a strategy. And it won't be that much different than the perfect, solved GTO strategy.

Just want to say at the outset that I have no "credentials" so people who wave diplomas in place of argumentation may wish to skip this.

These two quotes are inconsistent. The first one is correct IMHO and requires objective assessment of one's level of play, rather than confidence.

You're not a native speaker, so I don't want to sound like I'm attacking you but that isn't what confidence means at all. You're talking here about improving the ability to make correct decisions, not using mental game techniques to feel confident about them. As Mason points out in his book, the first is far more important and the second should flow from the first anyway.

His question still stands, if Fedor1 is 98% confident that he should 5-bet a certain opponent all-in, so he does it, how does his winrate differ from Fedor2 who uses mental game techniques to feel 100% confident he should 5-bet all-in, then does it?

This would be scientific if you rated yourself out of 10 at the start of play rather than afterwards ... if you think your mental game level changes during play then you would record the amount in your stack and the new mental game level - but never retroactively. If you blunder off your stack when you had previously said your level was 9 then you must count the blunder as part of the 9 play. You can change your level from the next hand onwards only.

If poker psychology was a science rather than a pseudoscience then experiments like what I just described would be the bread and butter of it.

...

(On the example of hero sees a juicy game but is tired.)
Hero needs to be able to estimate whether he is a winner or a dog in this game. If he feels tired (or perhaps he has just been munching on a cereal bar so knows the tiredness is in the mail) then Mason thinks it won't affect his winrate much if at all. Other authors think it will affect him a lot so presumably he shouldn't sit in the game.

The view that it doesn't matter whether or not we are overestimating the effect of a healthy lifestyle on poker results because it helps us with our lives generally - well we need to know the truth now because the question is whether or not Hero should sit in this game.

This is a good example of how surrendering disciplined logic for convenience can bite us - and because we've given up on logic and discipline we can't know how and when we're going to get bitten.

Sure, if that happened to me I would be angry. It wouldn't much affect how I played the next hand though because there is no next hand, and tilt relates to playing poker.

It's a bit different multi tabling tournaments and SNGs online and it would be nice for this to be acknowledged in the book.

Where does Mason claim she said that taking a shower would help?

At least in the book sold currently on Kindle he claims she said that feeling gratitude for the shower would help. It may have been edited of course but it appears in the context of suggested technique for use at the table, so the edit would be quite large.

I really don't understand the meaning of the title of this thread.

Now admittedly, I hadn't followed this thread until the last post and I read the first post and then skipped to the last post.

And LektorAJ, you are wrong that tilt is not possible after getting knocked out of a tournament. While Mr. Malmuth makes the same claim in the section on tournament poker, he also says, "...I have even noticed that on occasion tilt can carry over from one day to another...So it's clear to me that tilt can last a long time."

So if his claim on tilt ending once a person gets knocked out is correct, then his claim that tilt can last is incorrect. And if his claim that tilt lasts is correct, then his claim that tournament players don't tilt is incorrect.

The two seem mutually exclusive.

Since I can't edit, I am quoting to point out the part about tilt lasting is in a different section than tournament poker.

I also wanted to say I have a big issue with Mr. Malmuth's response to Ms. Cardner's concept eighteen. Paraphrasing, she talks about becoming a poker expert being daunting while Mr. Malmuth's response is to say learning is easy. Becoming an expert in something is NOT the same as simply learning something.

If you want to read exactly what she said about the hot shower, you can read here:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/33...=mason+malmuth

Best wishes,
Mason

I don't think you understand correctly what I wrote. On page 96 of Real Poker Psychology it says:

Notice that this says it's "difficult," not impossible. And while a person can certainly be on tilt after he gets knocked out of a tournament, he certainly won't be on tilt in the tournament since he's no longer in it.

And for those who haven't read the my book, the tournament chapter is a little over two pages with only a page devoted to why it's difficult for tournament players to go on tilt. It's not a major part of the book.

Mason

Why does its (tournament chapter) length have any bearing on anything? If something is good, or bad, it doesn't matter how long, or short, it is.

Care to address the point I make in the last paragraph above?

Finally, can you give us a ten word definition of what tilt means to you? Not an explanation, a definition.

Hi Alternate Identity:

I think there's two things at play here. First, you need to read some of Cardner's 10,000 hour advice, which in my opinion is noinsense. It doesn't take 10,000 hours to become a top poker player and that's because it's not the same as an athletic sport that requires things like speed, timing, and coordination (and if you're familiar with athletic training, it can take a long time to develop top notch speed, timing, and coordination).

Second, and this is just a general comment that I believe applies to many of these mental coaches, is that if poker is not this incredibly difficult occupation that takes many years of practice and training to master, (unlike an athletic sport or perhaps a musical instrument), their services are not as needed as they claim, and this is another reason why the high prices they try to get for their services are certainly not worth it.

Best wishes,
Mason

There is the theory someone does deliberate practice at music or tennis, observes the feedback of hearing a bum note or seeing the tennis ball going the wrong way and 10000 hours later they are an expert.

With poker, there is no immediate feedback mechanism. An amateur player might donk-bet his TPWK, see his opponent fold and congratulate himself on "protecting his hand". So in the case of poker, deliberate practice means having a coach live sweat you for 10000 hours to provide the feedback and I simply disbelieve that anyone has ever done this.

So this is important - the idea of applying the 10000 hour rule to poker, a game without immediate feedback, is not backed up by the wider psychological literature.

It may be true that the result of the hypothetical 10000 hour live-sweat training program would be the ability to play almost unconsciously, sliding chips forward in a state of automatonism with an apparently blank mind, but as as Mason points out, its not clear why that would give better results.

First of all, I noticed you quoted very little of your sentence about tournament poker players and tilt. Had you done so, I think it would have supported my view more than yours. I have your book near me and I can quote from it if you wish.

Regarding the 10,000 hour rule, I have read Cardner's view on it and I do have issues with it although not as much as I have with your view on it. It seems that 10,000 hours is what it takes to cause certain changes in the brain. Now does that mean it takes 10,000 hours for someone to become an expert at anything? Who knows. Perhaps, I don't understand it correctly. Something that I think can also be said of you and your view.

The one good think about e-readers is the search function is faster than a person searching through a physical book which means I can quickly reread Cardner's view on the 10,000 hours and poker.

But there is STILL quite a difference between learning something and becoming an expert. When you first learned to drive, were you also an expert right then? No. Moreover, poker is more complicated than driving a car.

I believe a non-psychologist said it best about poker, "It takes a minute to learn and a lifetime to master."

The "issues with simple ideas..." is highly insulting, don't you think?

I would be interested to hear Mason's views on performance enhancing drugs:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29...chess-1650586/

I'm assuming he doesn't think they would have much effect.

I understand Mason's position.

I find this poster's point compelling: (whatever strategy we are discussing within NLHE outside of GTO) the best decisions are likely to be the 1's with most information accumulated. Surely mental focus and all related parts (ie the Cardmer material), allow you to make better decisions/not fall into negative thought-patterns.

Yes being a v good poker player has a relationship to playing winning poker but how does having a poor diet, lack of sleep, being over-weight allow you to retain concentration for a long period (and continuously obtain and analyse the available information)? This is fundamental to being a good NLHE player!

Hi jacobite:

The following is from the "Recent Erroneous Concepts" chapter, page 230, of my book Real Poker Psychology.

Concept No. 32: “Being well rested has been shown to be helpful to all types of athletes and performers, so it should benefit poker players.” It’s obviously good to be well rested, but this is much more important when timing, speed, and coordination are involved, and that’s not the case with poker.

There’s also a great counter example to this. In 2010, Phil Laak played 115 hours straight and finished with a profit of $6,766. Notice that this comes to almost $59 per hour which would be a good win rate in most games.

and the following is a footnote from the same page in my book that refers to the second paragraph:

This comes from the “Common Motivational Problems and Their Solutions” in Positive Poker: A Modern Psychological Approach to Mastering Your Mental Game by Dr. Patricia Cardner with Jonathan Little.

So while being well rested is nice, you can't have it both ways.

You need to understand that in activities that require things like speed, timing, and coordination, (and poker is mainly a knowledge game) being a little tired is much more important. Also, and I talk about this in our book Poker and More written by David Sklansky and myself, there's a difference between being physically tired and mentally tired.

Best wishes,
Mason

What is 'Poker and More'? Did I miss a new book release? Don't see a topic discussing it.

Thank you for the response Mason.

I haven't read the book but I have read the thread.

I appreciate the tennis argument but explicitly discussing NLHE where i) betsizes aren't fixed and as a result, the number of different lines a player can take is quite large ii) the purpose of the game is to maximise expectation. (The theory behind this: there are a number of strat.'s with differing pay-off's in a hand. I feel poor life choices leads to non-optimal decisions taken. Now even though the non-optimal choices may still be winning 1's losing sight of the original purpose (seeking out and taking the max EV line) is v important and near impossible with poor choices made away from the table i) due to the large number of different choices ii) due to the lack of focus on collating and analysing relevant data in this mind-state.)

In a science there would be controlled experiments of play under different conditions so we would actually "know" these things and be able to measure them instead of just "feeling" them.

Apart from Dr Cardner's secret PhD thesis there hasn't been any actual research published on poker psychology afaik.

with all respect, but what is concerning nowadays online poker I believe you are very very incorrect with your statement Mr. Malmuth (what is concerning live poker I will not be arguing as not have enough experience). a part of having deep understanding of games, having well good work ethic is crucial for be able to play online for few years and staying on top level. gl for you to playing several tables at once with all sort of different opponents for several hours per days,4-6 days per week, 10-11 months per year without properly sleeping. after few weeks you will understand how much timing and speed of your decision making process affect your hourly. even playing GTO it will be difficult, and when applying exploitative strategy it will be almost impossible for most players to do this and stay at Top level when playing tired, not mentioned creative playing which often guide us to situation when we evolve with our skill during the game.

we are in 2018 now, competition in poker evolved. at least online.

how many hours he was sleeping after that? when his next session took place? what was his hourly rate during the week of play and next week in total? on average he won more than he would do while playing with usual rhythm?

about 10 years ago, I played 33h session of live poker in France at ACF, I barely knew poker rules, no clue even why? I bet or just call. wasn't even familiar with such definition as CB. at the end I was very very tired. I finished session with total profit of about 1300€ on blinds 2/4. is that proof of something?


of course, we cannot became very good poker player just by eating healthy, going to gym and sleeping well etc. but in my opinion it will be difficult (and in most case impossible) to staying on the top for several years without taking care about our health.

I think you’re confusing being mentally tired with being physically tired. In our last book Poker and More I address this topic. You’re describing above a situation where a player needs a vacation and that’s not what I’m addressing here.

Also, in an athletic sport where speed, timing, and coordination are required, these attributes will degrade much quicker than your ability to think, which appears to be something that many of these poker psychologists don’t seem to understand. So while they talk about the Olympic athletes or MMA fighters they help, they don’t realize that the advice which may help these people should have at best only a minimal benefit to poker players.

Best wishes,
Mason

Well, I do not not think I confusing being mentally tired with being physically tired. Simply, because I suppose that we can only being physically tired and this state of body can subsequently impact our state of mind. Except rare situation, when somebody have been diagnosed with some brain disease (depression for instance), that's is natural order of things for me. But I am not psychologist so can be wrong of course.

I have not read yet Poker and More, but glad to know that you and Mr David Sklansky still publishing after so many years. I always was big fan of books published by 2+2. They are very good books.

What is concerning situation which I described (4-6 days working week, 10-11 months in year) I do not think is something extraordinary in term of schedule for normal working person in most professions, so no additional vacations should be needed. Yet, oppositely to most profession which people do in regular job, is very difficult to maintain top level of our activity as poker player without right work ethic which include healthy lifestyle. This guide me to conclusion that poker simply became some sort of completion on high (world class ) level. And I think it will continue to develop in this way up to extreme level. I allow myself to say, that I it can be to that point that in 10-20 years there will be not such thing like professional poker player without having many people around him which help him to boost his results. Like is the case now in any sport. In fact it already start to happen but on very low level compere to athletic sport (probably because money involved are still to small).

Again, I agree that firstly is body which suffer from missing food, sleep etc than mind. So of course bad diet have big impact on athlete efficiency and small on poker player efficiency. But this impact exist. What is concerning properly sleep impact is simply huge in both case! The athlete cannot regenerate after training without right sleep, the poker player cannot memorize and process information at high level without right sleep. Creative thinking which is important when applying exploitative strategy or in learning process will be not as much efficient as it could be if sleep deprivation occur. The mind works just like that. It was proven from biological perspective in other fields. So additional edge can be obtained. Do not benefiting from that is trowing away EV which is core objective of poker player.

Of course, it happen that sometimes some people exaggerate with certain assumptions (probably, sometimes, including you as well Mr Malmuth). But what is concerning psychological aspect of poker is fairly fresh subject. There are some concepts put in place but they are more hypothetical or just confirmed to small level of confidence. As for the present moment I didn't hear that somebody made real research on this subject in isolated environment.

(p.s. sorry for my English. I am not native speaker.)