hi there,

you offer coaching for 50-100$ an hour, someone who accepts that offer will only accept it if he thinks he can make these $ back at the tables or it wouldnt be a good deal for him.

After a while you have no students anymore and your winrate at the tables has dropped significantly.

So whenever you set a price per hour, think about your own winrate in the future and think about your longterm plan of keeping your students.

i think coaching below 500$ per hour is destroying the games more than the coacher benefits from it.

the only way that low cost coaching makes sense for the coacher is if he is not playing anymore, but then his coaching advice is probably not worth the 50$ per hour.

what do you think about that, true or false? and WHY?

Coaches usually don't play the stakes they coach at. e.g. I am playing NL 400 and higher, I coach up to NL 200.

I would crush all those guys even if I coached them because I am still way ahead of what they know and can readjust to what I tought them.

Look at all the training sites teaching you how to play, yet how many can beat NL 1000?

You honestly think if Ivey would teach you you would make him make less cos you would be able to compete with him?

<handwaving goes here>

If you would tell me all your secrets how you study the game i could maybe get as good as you after a while.

Sure you can readjust but so can i and you know who wins even more over the longrun, the rake!

But if you give me only ABC advice like in most videos and dont give me the weapons to solve problems on my own (a few videos do that) or inventing new tactics on my own, then i guess i couldnt because i had to watch a ton of videos and would fall asleep while doing that.

But then your coaching isnt really worth as much as i think it is, maybe that is the trick what makes coaching attractive. The students overestimate the value of the abc advice.

I dont think Ivey would ever tell someone his secrets, thats why he is the best, he keeps his secrets. If he would tell me his secrets, maybe i could compete with him after a few years, the only difference is the intelligence and the experience after he told me his secrets.

false

Here's a little hint of where you're going wrong: I don't care if someone I teach becomes as good as me, or even better. I don't need to play them. The fish are still there, and with all of the people playing poker, I will never reach the point were every single one of them was taught by me or another coach.

I do not teach, but I feel confident that regardless of the number of coaches out there, some people will still play poker for fun. Some people will always suck. Some people can't be taught. Some people don't care about learning. There are always people from whom you can win money.

In an exact and perfect world perhaps communism works as well.

Truth is, players, coaches and students alike, are very inefficient. There also are just not enough of them to make as big of an impact as you are implying.

The skills that allowed you to progress faster than the rest of the field will continue to allow you to progress in the future, even if you share your secrets with dozens of students.

Training sites reach a wider audience, but it's not as hands on nor as effective as 1 on 1 coaching (it's also a lot cheaper, so I don't want to imply anything negative), so a training site with 1,000 members offering great, winning strategy videos may only be effectively making the games as hard as a good coach with 15 dedicated students he works with for a few hours a week.

Truth be told, even students I've had that "get it" and show immediate successful results often either 1) get greedy and move into a game with a higher ceiling (hu cash) 2) move up too fast (even when they know better) and lose a lot of the profit their improved skills have earned or 3) cashing out too much of their profit and/or becoming unable to handle emotional and mental aspects of the game.

While there are plenty of examples that come to mind of students that have been successful and have made good money, a lot of students fall off the path for one reason or another. A coach with 10 students a month may only be contributing 1 or 2 players of his skill to the poker pool, the rest may be equally as smart or as skilled but they may just not apply themselves as well in areas I previously mentioned.

Now, stepping back and taking a look at the whole picture, what you get is each coach slowly but surely making the games tougher, but at what kind of rate? The naysayers and paranoid people picture this big pyramid where coaches are teaching all these hidden secrets about the game to students and students are slaving over their computers, going from 10NL to 10kNL overnight, making all of the games so tough! Truth is, a lot of the game is focus, emotional control and balance and most coaches just don't teach that very often or very well. Even with more efficient/improved coaches, I would still not be too worried about games getting too tough overall.

Afterall, look at PLO, the nosebleeders were making that game popular well over a year ago and by all accounts every level is still pretty damned fishy.