Quote:
Originally Posted by bumpnrun
Poor OP. His question is legit just badly framed.
The game isn’t as hard as people will have newbs believe. You just do a thing, if that doesn’t work out ....do the opposite thing next time. Rinse repeat until lots of things do work out.
Can be applied to real world.
-George C
In poker it's not that simple. In tennis, say, if you play well you can see why a good play works as it happens and get immediate positive reinforcement on what you just did. But in poker, bad plays (chasing when the odds are not in your favour, for example) are frequently rewarded and good plays (going all in when you have the best of it) may not have positive outcomes (getting run down).
The fact that opponents' hands are mucked when they don't go to showdown (or in live play, after) makes it even harder to judge the wisdom of one's own play. Added to all that there are differences in how success and failures are remembered afterwards (see Kahneman), so self-analysis becomes very tricky.
Therefore players who haven't studied to learn how to assess what they are, or should be, doing often misjudge what is or isn't a successful strategy and they learn bad habits. Combined with small sample sizes, and the usual periods of rungood or runbad, poker can be one of the hardest games to learn by personal experience only.