Quote:
Originally Posted by DumbosTrunk
It's both, I just wanted to open it up for debate.
My view is that winning is the most important quality as you need to know how to win before you are able to help others win, followed by ability to transmit winning strategies to others (whether orally, written, ...). Being able to break things down in easy to digest principles helps a lot. Any teaching experience is definitely a plus.
It was posited earlier that winning well over a statistically significant sample is largely irrelevant, and I couldn't disagree more.
I can only compare over my two experiences. I am a fairly decent teacher when it comes to something I consider easy and basic. I know how to simplify things and understand the fundamentals so I can teach them. However when it comes to advanced concepts, I am a terrible teacher.
It is because I just subconsciously know stuff. Bringing it back to poker, I can consciously say that an opposing player has a certain range and that our holding does not beat that range, but I KNOW it does in this instance. It is the same in other fields I am familiar with. Programming, project management, stock investing, etc. I don't know how to break things down to teachable nuggets because I cannot consciously say why they are right.
The other example is my wife. Foe a while she worked in IT training and then she was a high school teacher. She had an innate ability to break things down so her students would understand them. She might not have even completely understood them herself. You could give her a new piece of software she never saw before and a basic training manual and she could teach anyone the basics of the software.
She was just a good teacher. Subject matter was secondary.
Where I am going with all of this is that when it comes to teaching, it isn't just about the teachers skill in the subject matter, the relative difference between the teacher's skill and the students skill matters as well. Also teaching newbies is absolutely a skill.
There are probably tens of thousands of players who can barely beat $2/$5 that would be better teachers for brand new poker players than Phil Ivey would be. Phil is obviously a better player no fricken doubt, but he would be unable to connect with the newer players. Also, teaching is a skill.
Lots of variables here to be making definitive statements. Especially considering the skill of the pupil matters as much as the teacher (which is something I have not seen mentioned here yet).