Hi Everyone:

Our January Magazine is now up and in it is an article by Robert Samuels who has a Ph.D. in Psychology that is debating some of the points I make in my book Real Poker Psychology, The article can be found here:

https://www.twoplustwo.com/magazine/...psychology.php

I also address one of the issues that Robert brings up in my "Publisher's Note" which can be found here:

https://www.twoplustwo.com/magazine/issue193/

All comments are welcome.

Best Wishes,
Mason

I had some trouble processing the key points Dr. Samuels was making.

An exaggerated view of modern poker. This statement has never not been true.

--

At the very beginning he states GTO is not attainable without real-time assistance. But then GTO is the focal point of the rest of his essay. Mason wrote in his book that all poker strategy can be condensed to about 60 pages of information - so it's not essential to memorize something huge.

The doctor says:

Implying that Mason's idea is risky or just wrong. But I don't think it has a lot of merit - one can make a mathematical mistake virtually anywhere.

--

Samuels could have written an identical piece about professional chess. That would have been more reasonable: classical chess is an extreme contest, and most players retire before the age of 40.

--

One thing that bugged me was this passage:

Which is an insane idea to all halfway decent players.

I personally think earnings can be increased a tiny bit at the year's end with an effort to pay attention to health and meditate once in a while. But that will be more true for some and less for others. Assuming it's true, I wonder if that makes this educationally problematic?

How does it work?

For the purposes of the discussion I am identifying myself as a former professional poker player who holds and MSc in Sport and Exercise psychology, and a PhD in Psychophysiology. I also hold a tenured position lecturing S&E and behavioural biology.

What I can say is that having first reached a decent standing first in poker and subsequently academia, is that the latter is far tougher. I agree with Mason that poker knowledge can be condensed down into a relatively short text. At most, I would equate the learning required to acquire all the technical tools required to play winning poker to one full semester of academic study for an undergraduate.

Anyway, the point I'm making here is graduating with a decent degree requires far more psychological skills than are required to be a winning poker player. The best undergraduates learn to become more adept with dealing with stress, are better at managing their time, take greater responsibility for their learning, exercise greater restraint, and so on, and so forth.

Why therefore, do undergraduate students not need mental coaches to train them to deal with these psychological barriers? Basically, it's because they develop their skills alongside the formal academic study they undertake. The best students, like the best poker players, spend a great deal of time studying. They develop skills like time management and self-regulation as a consequence of realising there are so many hours in the day, and if they want to graduate with a good degree and enjoy university life, they can’t spend all morning scrolling through social media. As a result, they are able to devote the required time to studying to ensure their assignments are completed to a higher enough standard. In both poker and academia, effort is directly rewarded by achieving better grades or winning more money. Very few other disciplines offer such salient positive reinforcement as a marker of your progress.

In my view, psychological coaching can, at best, improve performance by 10%. This is true for poker, and it’s also true for sports. Of course, at the highest level of sports, this can make the difference between success and failure. However, in poker the margins between winning and losing are not nearly so marginal. Therefore, for most players, they would be far better served by putting in some hard work on improving their technical knowledge rather than seeking quick fixes. If they do this rigorously enough, they will incrementally improve their mental game alongside their technical knowledge.

Hi Elrazor:

I agree with everything you said, but I want to add a little more to it.

In my book, I made the argument that understanding poker concepts and the appropriate poker theory was far better than studying (and memorizing) a countless number of poker situations. Part of the reason that I got into this topic was that I noticed that some of these self-proclaimed poker mental coaches were selling hand histories and deemed that they were very important.

Now I'm not against reviewing a few hand histories every so often, perhaps after every time you play poker remember a couple of hands and then review them away from the poker table. But when the emphasis moves to review thousands and thousands of hand histories and to do this all the time, I think it'll have the effect of driving you crazy.

I argued that the way to become a good poker player was to learn the finite but manageable number of concepts that govern expert play and to review a few hands every now and then. This is an approach that's almost the opposite of what some of these poker mental coaches advocate.

And for those reading this, and as Elrazor says, this will still require some study. So, you won't become a top-notch poker player overnight. It'll still take some time and there will be a few things, like starting hand charts that you might want to memorize. But it's certainly a lot easier than getting a college degree from a good school.

Best wishes,
Mason

Best wishes,
Mason

Agree. Most people are aware of the duel system type of thinking made popular by Kahneman and Tversky. One type being the fast and frugal, heuristic thinking; the other being the slower, analytical thinking. The basic knowledge you require can be committed to the heuristic system without much difficulty. This takes some initial learning, but provided you do this with sufficient care, eventually 95%+ of your decisions will become automatic. Most of these will be relatively easy to learn, such as learning about the value of starting hands and the importance of position. Others will be a little more difficult, such as adjusting your game relative to the strength of your opponents. Nonetheless, they are mostly decisions that become virtually automatic - the "unconscious competence" you sometimes hear psychologists talk about.

I used to do a little work away from the tables, especially when I was first learning the game (by posting hands on 2+2 for discussion). However, Once you understand the basic concept of poker and how it works, it becomes largely a game of heuristics. The evidence for this is how quickly expert players at one form of poker become expert in other variants. They may have to do some advanced work to polish their game off, but because they have the basics down (relative hand strength, position, reading the table), they will probably become expert players very quickly without the need to study 1000's of scenarios from scratch.