One reason why i think 90% of coaching is illusion. The Coaching paradoxon theorem is at the end of post.


First of all,
- i have coached myself and turned away tons of students who were looking for the magic pill.
- Coaching was 80% fun and 20% for the money.
- I almost always offered high rates, almost up to my hourly to get rid of students who are not in for the real and look for some cheap **** fix.
- the reason why i have a 95% success rate with students is, because i only pick those who i know my coaching would help


(no, i'm not coaching atm so don't even think i'm writing this as thinly veiled hook up. don't even pm me. after all i'm here to rather put some grain of doubt in your mind...)


To everybody who considers hiring a coach:

1) You're probably having some illusion that 1-3 hours of coaching can change your life and fix your game and turn a net looser into a net winner

2) Long term what you need is either talent or hard work. LDO ? You'd think. But if you can't improve your game watching vids on training sites of some rly good players, what makes you think coach xyz can magically do?

3) The sickest part. People are advice-resistent. The 5% of my students who didn't bang it off were doing fine, but simply stopped "obeying" me. Oh yeah, these were rly simple things, nothing advanced.
You can tell them exactly what to do and what not. They will not listen.
If i tell you to plug in hands 1 hour/day into pokerstove and do some range analysis, get a feel for equity. How many are going to do it?


The coaching theorem paradoxon


If you're not willing to commit, don't get a coach.
But if you were willing to commit and have done it, you most likely wouldn't be looking for a coach!





p.s.: personal coaching can be useful. But be aware of the use and don't mistake it for something that it isn't.
What coaching should be is :
teaching you things in advance that you would have found out yourself (most, not all of them). Thus, saving you time and money (you profit from people who have payed for mistakes that you don't have to do)

Very short, obv not including every aspect.


p.p.s.: @ coaches, i'm not trying to ruin some business. After all, people do fall for the same thing over and over again in every area of life (hey, i include myself...not in poker, but yeah, nothing to be proud of lol).
second, feel free to discuss my post and tell me why i'm wrong.

I think a lot of what you say is very good advice.

On a personal level I do disagree with this part a lot.

I never received a lot of formal coaching (2-3 hours from one person a few years ago I believe), though I've gained a lot from talking with players in settings very similar to coaching sessions.

The biggest reason why I disagree with your statement is that I would definitely have done a lot more work with a coach in past if I got to do it all over again, the time and work it would've saved me would've easily been worthwhile in a lot of areas.

Yes, I could've/would've worked harder as well, but there's certain areas of the game that took me a long time to really understand in depth that I could've learned in 4-5 hours from the right person for $400-1200 dollars and that would absolutely be worth it in hindsight.

I still really like your post though and agree with most of the rest of it.

Well thx first of all for compliment.

have to give you some love back, since what you said is 100% in line with what i've written about in a long blog post over a month ago

I've never received one coaching session. I realized it at that point when i saw how fast (my former) students learnt. And one thing i'd definitely would change when starting over. The difference, - and this is important - it would be a conscious decision/investment to acclerate the learning curve vs an impulsive decision to get the magic pill (which i think is the cast most of the time)


I'm educating myself at the moment in a different field. And i'm spending a ton for coaching/courses. But as pointed out, the mindset is the important part.

ThinkItThrough

I think you are 100% correct that it should be a conscious decision to acclerate learning and not to find a magic pill as you so aptly put it.

That was the reason i joined 2p2 in the first place to improve my game; partly throu self teaching but also looking for coaching that i think would be of benefit to my game.

I am currently a small losing player over a fairly large number of hands, and realise one of my areas of weakness in self learning is that i find it hard to interept all the information available to me about my own game.

I know i make errors and too many , but i am hoping a coach will help me learn how to spot those errors earlier so i can work on fixing them myself.

Definately sound advice thou.

I agree with the sentiment of your post but don't agree with a lot of the statements. I personally have a well thought out and detailed curriculum for my students that has major impact in 5 1.5h sessions. The majority of the information comes in the first three. It has had a big impact and I have results to prove it.

I think that the major problem with coaching in poker is that coaches too often have no real goals for their students and no real method to assess and gauge their skill or to measure their rate of improvement.

A good coach has an agenda. Most coaches do not because they are not trained in teaching, they are trained in playing poker. However the two do not always overlap. I have had my share of non-serious students but even they had significant improvement in understanding after our work together. They just were not willing to put in the hard work to really incorporate the techniques.

zero

I have found..

Most of the time it is easy to tell right away who has "almost no chance."

You will have a higher success rate if you screen your students.

The right coach/student dynamic can be very rewarding for both. I have students from poker and other games who have kept in touch for many, many years- to all our benefits.

Things will probably go better if you are skilled at teaching- not all good games players are.

I think the term coaching is very wrong for 95% of the poker "coaches". Coaching to me describes a PROCESS in teaching or training, where in order to become a good poker player you have to become good at a wide variety of skills, not just poker theory.

I think most poker "coaches" should advertise as theory teachers instead of coaches, poker theory and application of that theory are different things, then we have the mental aspects of poker and understanding variance and accepting the realities of poker, which all have great influences on your poker performance. A real coach should be an expert in all these aspects, know everything you need to master in order to be successful, AND quickly be able to asses in what areas you are lacking, what is holding you back, and develop a plan to overcome that, whatever the problem is.

So in theory "coaching packages" shouldn't even exist really, coaching should always be a package deal, and a complete commitment form both parties. I've seen some coaches myself, and have to say the commitment of a coach to a student usually is close to 0 for the majority of coaches, you are just paying for an hour or 2 for asking questions on poker theory, or how to play hands. There hardly ever is a solid structure or plan made personal to the one taking the coaching, with process oriented goals, on how to turn the player into a better player.

I wouldn't recommend coaching to anyone, unless you are already in a good place, and the only thing missing is theoretical understanding of the game. REAL coaching is also a HUGE commitment from the COACH, but this rarely if ever is the case, I don't think the term coach is appropriate at all, for 99% of poker coaches.

Many guys charge rates that only a semi experienced or experienced player should be paying.

That's why video sites are around though. There are dedicated videos, video series, discussions (like here on 2p2) and more ranging from free to pretty affordable out there.

I agree that coaching is usually best left for players that know they will be playing awhile and have played long enough to know that with a lot of certainty.

There's too much impulse in this industry, but I could say that about plenty of other industries as well. Fashion comes to mind, as does automotive. At the end of the day the only real tool is buyer beware, buyer education. Threads like this and common sense go a long way.

+1

for micro players new to the game they can get a ton of value from any of the major training sites at ~$30/mo

that said once a student has done enough work on the "basics" a coach can speed the learning process for those that want to work hard on their games

Haha, that's funny, old post. By the way, this was WAY before i ever thought about giving coaching myself. (9months or so).

But nice to see so people can see that i think the same pre and post coaching

My motivation of doing it, is because i wanna do it "better" than i have seen coaches do.

I've changed my opinion on some small aspects, but the main line is still the same.

Does not compute, but those that can no longer win, teach