I was having this debate with someone over discord and wanted to see what the broader community thought.

My position was that a coach should charge less.

My reasons for thinking this are:
1. Reliable, variance free income (main point)
2. Break from the monotony of grinding (different source of income)
3. Many people enjoy teaching poker and discussing it (they enjoy it and are willing to make a bit less to do it)


His points for coaching charging more are:
1. Why earn less money for a related task
2. Making games harder for yourself so why sell knowledge for cheap


However, I can see exceptions for charging more than the on the table hourly for maybe elite high stakes players who really don't want to share elite knowledge, or for people in small or geofenced pools, if they don't want to make the pool tougher or share MDA on players they play often.

Thoughts? Does it depend on the stake or situation (such as if the coach earns primarily from coaching and doesnt put in much volume).

Good coaches way more.

Bad coaches way less.

A coach should charge whatever the student/mark will pay. Their ability to teach and what they are able to teach decides where in the spectrum of student/mark their customers are.

There is a distinction between playing and coaching:

"All you paid was the looking price. Lessons are extra."

Lancey Howard in The Cincinnati Kid

In Poker where coaching is more individual - your brand name, or perceived value, is worth more than what you can actually bring to the table. Similar to how some more famous players can charge astronomical markup and still sell out.


But if we're only talking about a hypothetical efficient market, then yes I totally agree with you. Should charge less for coaching based on the points you made. Variance reduction has a monetary vavlue, just look at the stock market ROI (risky) vs government bond ROI ( no risk) has 3-4x difference in returns.

I think they should RNG their prices

Haha

a good coach should be transparent and charge what's agreed to. for example being up front with their win rates and when those win rates are from with proof if possible (online.) they should also be willing to provide references. Now that's not to say win rate is the be all end all to coaching, but a good coach should be beating the games they play soundly.

but as far as the rate he charges vs his hourly win rate- it doesn't matter if it's more or less. it matters how good the coaching is. 2 guys can have the same win rate and one can be a much better coach than the other. The coaching income being variance free doesn't make his coaching less valueable.

You need to account for prep time. A one hour session doesn't always translate to one hour of total work for the coach.

The pricing model for hourly coaches is kinda flawed and doesnt work perfectly. In the end it's the coach that decides his own price so it seems like the most reasonable and the most common is that depending on how many hours you want to coach you base your price on that.

Everyone has a price, if you take a really good player like Linus for example if he announced today that he would be coaching for x per hour (x being the hourly) he would be swamped by messages, more than he could take on. So he raises the price to 2x or 3x and it kind of continues in a similair way. So with a really top coach you would end up paying most likely a lot more than their hourly since the supply is really low for endboss coaches but the demand obviously very high. High end coaching really isn't a buyers market. But if you pay enough I'm pretty sure you could get whoever you want to coach you (the price might just be astronomic though). It happens occasionally that people who dont want to coach get some absurd price that they cant turn down.

But on the flipside, the smaller stakes coaching market really is a buyers market. There is tons of supply and not really that much demand. If you look for a low stakes coach you have tons of options really, and it seems to me that there are quite a lot of coaches (even on this forum) that overcharge like crazy for midstakes and below. Many of them who dont seem to have any interest of playing or improving on their own. They typically spend heaps on marketing like having fancy websites or ads. Unless they are completely clueless or just refuse to play they would be better off investing that money/time into their own game to maximize their hourly. Not sure where the limit lies, but if you got a coach playing below nl400-nl600 you should not be paying a single dollar above their hourly is safe to say. Might even be significantly less. With that said I do think that its +ev to take coaching in like 95% of cases, its very hard to not make back the money regardless of how bad the coach is. It just might be better options out there / higher ev options

The correct answer is clearly "whatever the coach perceives to be market value", and I'm curious as to why the OP thinks a poker player should set money on fire by cutting his hourly to make the games theoretically tougher

Coaching will always be higher due to the ROI you can gain over the course of a lifetime and the prep time involved for the coach. On first glance, your point about variance-free money makes a lot of sense.

One way to think about it is this example:

- You play 500 hours of 100nl per year
- You pay $100 for one hour of coaching from a coach that beats 100nl consistently for $30 per hour
- You want your investment to payback within five years

As long as that one hour of coaching benefits your hourly by 4 cents per hour, you got what you needed. You could apply the same logic to your own (unpaid) study time.

None of this is to say all coaches are worth it....

Depends on how good a coach they are. So its more nuanced than we think

So many more variables to take into consideration aswell as last poster mentioned.

Depends how good the coach is.And also depends on the players skill.

I think it depends on how good the coach is.

whatever makes the coach the most money during the time he wants to spend coaching

Exactly. I used to coach for $100/hr and it turned out to not be worth my time.

You have to first spend time promoting yourself. Afterwards, you spend ~1hr chatting with the potential student about how coaching will work/payments... After that you spend another hour or so prepping, and only then do you get to coach the guy for the hour (which always ends up being a bit more than an hour). So, overall you waste 3+ hours, while only being paid for one. And if you do your job well, it doesn't take more than a few hours for the student to improve enough for him to be satisfied and not need you anymore.

In general, more. Takes prep time + work to prepare for sessions, it's not just showing up to bang out a quick hour. It can vary a bit + is market-dependent, though. I enjoy teaching lower-level players, and do so for less than my hourly (simple prep, more saturation, lower poker budgets from students). High stakes crushers definitely have good reasons to charge much more.

I only coach my dad and used to coach a girlfriend.

Since I love playing, and don't see any reason why I'd want to coach other than for the money, I would charge a lot more than my hourly, at least 3 or 4x my win rate. And if the player was in my player pool I wouldn't coach them.

All of the reasons you listed describe motivations of the coach. None of them deal with what should be the true determiner of the price, which is the value of the coaching/information. Scarce info and elite insights and exploits, or access to advanced training tools and solvers should be very expensive. Basic shove charts or beginner's tips can be had for free or a couple bucks on some sites. It doesn't matter how much the coach's hourly is, what matters is what he teaches you.

Whether you should be willing to pay what someone charges is less to do with their reasons for wanting to charge that much and more about what that service is worth to you. If they choose to make only $50/hour from playing because they're not into the stress that comes with high variance and low edge but are an exceptionally popular and well-reputed coach whose previous students all report being a great coach who adds several bb/100 to their game and they want to charge $300/hour, they should be able to charge it.

The idea that a coach should charge less than they make on the table is entirely arbitrary.

Coaching has its own benefits. They say that you only understand something if you can explain it to someone else - coaching helps you organize principles in your head, sort out what's important from what's not; it reminds you of bits in your game that maybe you'd have forgotten about; it more effectively forces you to live by your principles.

I think coaching rates should correspond closer to the value they bring to the student instead of their own personal hourly playing rate.

There should be value placed in the years and time spent gaining experience/knowledge.