if you study poker 30 hours a week can you get good if you play one live mtt a month?

absolutely not, first of all, you cant really get any good if you only play live due to absurdly low hand count, so even playing live everyday is not enough experience, not to mention once a month

Well, if you're not going to play much, you'll need to read and learn a lot to make up. As I'm guessing you can't do that given you made the same thread two months ago, got good answers, and now feel the need to post this, Tutejszy's answer applies

If you play once a month what is the point studying 30 hours a week. Especially for a live donkament.

I heard a player (Barry Green) remark once about the difference between making a correct decision, and making a correct decision, in tempo, every time. If you study a lot, you are giving yourself the tools to think things through and make the correct decision, but the very act of figuring it out will give away a lot of information about your holdings, and will be mentally taxing.

If you play a lot, you start to see patterns almost immediately, so you can assess a situation, recall the correct decision, and act, all in a short and consistent amount of time.

Studying, practicing and playing are all critical to improving.

Op specifies live MTT and some of the answers above seem skewed to cash to me.

I don't know about good, but I reckon you could get pretty average at push/fold poker just studying ICM simulators for a few a hours week.

I can sort of see the rationale a little bit as well. I mean if you are a rec player, who only gets to play one live MTT a month for life reasons and can afford the buy in, plus you want to have a decent stab at each one, where's the harm in that.

I reckon I'm at least average in a low-buy donkament field and I play about half a dozen tourneys a year, and I haven't studied tournament play for 3 years or more.

Gimme 5 hours at week push/fold training I reckon I could go a little better than joe average in something like the Sunday Storm...which is a raging fishfest.

30 hours a week training though for one tourney a month is, as the man says, just plain nuts.

You need to play a ton just to see how many people will do things you never read in any book. Like nobody folds to a 3bet live. Ever.

I can't think of anything that you can get good at while only actually practicing once a month, even if you study your ass off otherwise.

Why would poker be any different?

OP no like of poker haha.

Play 10x (online+live)in monthy , is the minimum, and study

Show your work

Rugby players for example play once a week for half the year.
the rest of the time they are practicing.

Can't you with poker do the same? there's thousands of hands people have posted online, videos of people playing. can't i just practice in my head playing those hands?

Playing is a practice in itself.

It’s one thing to find the right decision when you’ve been studying for a an hour in a comfy chair and there’s no money on the line.

Will you make the same decisions when you’ve been unable to make it past hand 30 in the last 5 weeks because of coolers? What about when your bluffs are all getting snapped off in that session? Execution is a very real thing in poker.

Rugby players practice between games, and simulate game type situations during practice.

If you studied and practiced between tournaments, and by practice I mean simulate game type situations, including distractions and time pressure, you might be able to improve without playing a lot. There is still no substitution for live experience, as you will be facing a lot of different mental pressures in a live game versus practice, and you will be facing a lot wider range of opponent types in a real game. Studying is a critical component of improvement, but you have to have time in the seat.

Yes, you can get better by reading 30 hours a week and playing once a month, but you won't be improving nearly as much as the guy who plays one hour for every hour he reads.

There is no substitute for game time experience. This is true in professions, sports, and just about any skill based activity.

OP, if you are serious, then one tournament a month is not worth studying poker 120 Hours a month for. Think about that ratio for a moment. 120 hours of actual live play with NO study would be better than what you posted.

It's an interesting thought, but I'll say no. Maybe there are some savants that can study the game and hit the ground crushing, but for average joe's like us it's much more important to mix the study and play time. You're going to see people do things at tables you wouldn't otherwise read about or even see in hand histories. A lot of your edge in poker comes from adjusting to the mistakes your opponents make. Recognizing their weaknesses is something hard to learn from books.

since you came back with this silly retort. Ill hit u with another. think about all the 14-15 year old boys practicing sex with themselves. They have done some seriously high reps/, practiced while watching on line, thought of all kind of scenarios, etc. What generally happens when they play their first real game? It does not go as planned and they suk at it. It takes some real world experience to sort sht out. Same gunna happin in poker

Yes but on a ver slower pace than others that do spend the time to get better and stay aheadof the learning curve.

squid makin' it real.

Just because one method works for most does not mean it works for all. There is not one set way to learn, this is one of the huge flaws in the school system today.

Ofc you mess it up the first times, the guy the didn't practice messes up, it's nerves.

The difference is, once the guy that practiced gets over nerves and gets into a rhythm, he can start applying and experimenting with the things he learned immediately, he's already outlined the framework in his study and is aware there's more than 1 concept involved.

The guy that didn't practice has to go out there and learn there are other things to learn and then learn those things before application and experimentation. Meanwhile atw is in private untracked 3somes from spending 30 hours a week at school with johnny sins.

My minimums are playing at least 30 hours a week and studying at least 10 hours a week. I don't think that it would be right for me to work any less hard at my job than my wife does.

Also, I've had jobs where I grabbed every bit of voluntary overtime, sometimes working 60 hours a week. Why not do that when poker is my job?

The 3:1 play/study ratio seems to work well for me, but both are necessary, and I think that you should have more play hours then study hours:

1. You have to be at the table to make money.

2. It's one thing to study continuation betting in a book, it's another to see how different types of players react when you do it in different situations. That is learning just as much as studying a poker book is.

3. As previously mentioned, you can only see the patterns and get the long view from playing.

You don't really understand what the long-term means in poker until you experience it. When you start playing poker and fail to cash in your first 10 tournaments, it's a disaster. I played about 550 online tournaments last year and I understand from experience (even though I knew it from reading books) that if I'm making good decisions, my occasional first place will more than make up for a long stretch of min-cashing or not cashing at all.

No. It would be like learning to ride a bike by just reading about it and watching others. You might end up understanding the dynamics and physics of bike riding but if you haven't actually physically done it you still can't actually "ride a bicycle". And playing poker well is exponentially more difficult than riding a bike obviously.

Well I suppose you could say that Google's Deep Mind computer learned Go by first watching some Go porn before then playing with itself tens of thousands of times. It then went on to beat the world's top player 5 nil the first time out

I wonder if I am trying to learn this game the wrong way. Can somebody point me to some serious Poker porn? I think I have the playing with myself part already well sorted

there's thousands of hands posted online with c-betting in all sorts of different situations against different players. why can't i read/watch some of these hands and get a feel for when to c-bet, how much to c-bet and when not to c-bet?

Because human brains tend to learn best through a combination of practice and study, not just one thing? Your post is quickly delving into the psychology of human learning, and really isnt a poker question anymore.

Yes, you are correct in that all the information on various spots and ways to handle them is readily available online, and if you were capable of consuming, internalizing, and then applying it, you could probably be a good player. You could probably say the same about all the knowledge needed to become a neurosurgeon or astrophysicist, but thats not how we humans work.

Sure, I guess there could be some savants that can read 2+2, go to a cardroom, and start crushing high stakes right away. But for the other 99.999% of us that have average functioning brains, we become experts at things through years of practice and study.

OP why don't you just do it then? You've already made such thread and got the same answers. Clearly we know nothing, so if you don't like the answers then prove us wrong.