Hi Everyone:

I just ran across the following article on a site called "Out of Position" that contrasted my positions on poker psychology to that of Patricia Cardner who I have been highly critical of. The article is located here:

http://persuadeo.nl/823-2/

To start the discussion off here's an excerpt from the posts that follow the article:

I want to address the response by persuadeo, the article's author, because this is not my point at all. What I say in my book Real Poker Psychology, is that once your understanding of all things poker becomes strong, and this includes strategy, this knowledge will solve many, if not all, of the mental problems that the poker mental coaches like Cardner claim they're addressing.

Put another way, a strong knowledge of all things poker should merge into the so called mental area of poker and many of the mental issues, with tilt being the best known example, will be solved or at least greatly improved because your mind will be better able to process information presented which it could not do at an earlier state in your poker career.

Notice that this is very different from what Cardner advocates and I consider most of her advice to be worthless. As shown in my book, poker is mostly a game of knowledge, and taking sports psychology, which mainly addresses stuff like speed, timing, and coordination, should have little value when applied to poker. These comments also apply to much of the information that the other poker mental coaches that I'm familiar with advocate.

Best wishes,
Mason

That is a more than fair correction of a rather sloppy comment response; I sense more coming. I recognize Mason's point in his second paragraph here as exactly what I was writing about, and hopefully I captured it in my blog post itself much better, where I tried to reconcile their points of view and provide some alternative commentary on an enlightening and sometimes challenging dispute. If I didn't succeed, well, I did my best and got a legendary poker writer and thinker to click on my ridiculous blog.

Hi persuadeo:

I thought your blog entry was an honest look at the issues here and while it's clearly favorable to my side it certainly is also critical of me in spots.

Also, when you read my book, try to think in terms of whether the execution component, which includes things like speed, timing, and coordination, has very little to do with a knowledge game like poker, and the large majority of advice we see from Cardner and others is all about execution since they don't understand how poker differs from an athletic sport. Thus this is why I say that most of it is worthless for poker players.

Best wishes,
Mason