Quote:
Originally Posted by Elrazor
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