This is in response to Puck'n'Poker's post in Nate's tightness thread. Rather than unravelling yet another sub-thread out of that one I am replying to this here.
Puck sed:
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The thing is, I did ok until I read SSH lol (well I think I was doing ok, sample size was pretty small). I have no doubt it is an excellent book, I am just trying to figure out which parts I am applying incorrectly or if I have just been running bad for the last 3k hands (doubtful).
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I see this comment a lot.
Here are a couple of thoughts in response:
It's not that doubtful that you are running bad for 3k hands. It's easy to run bad for 3k and much, much more.
First of all, get some goddamn confidence.
You are a winning player. Anyone with the desire and discipline to study the game and the basic intelligence to find the right table is capable of playing a winning game. Yes you have leaks, but if you don't start out with a solid belief that you have a positive expectation then don't bother playing.
Don't try to extrapolate your leaks from your results. The lag is just too great. Poring over your stats to tweak your game is actually something that is more appropriate to advanced players.
Guys like Nate and Peter_Rus are long-term winners with huge databases and the analytical skills needed to squeeze knowledge out of this data. Guys like us need to forget about results and focus on what's right in front of our faces.
That means finding your leaks in real-time. Are you in a hand without a plan? Leak. Are you feeling uncomfortable and out of your depth? Leak. Feel like someone at the table is playing sub-optimally but don't know how to exploit it? Leak. Are you caught by surprise by someone's bet or raise and not sure how to respond? Leak.
Are you making plays because you think you're supposed to instead of understanding why? Big, big leak.
I think you'll get a lot more value out of SSH, 2+2, and all other forms of strategy if you take the following approach:
The main lesson to learn from these tools is not "play loosely in large pots" or "don't call a raise with AQ" or "bet out on the river when the 4th card to a flush comes and you've been the aggressor the whole hand".
The main lesson to learn is
how to think about the game.
I think a major disease for Poker novices is rule-of-thumb-itis. Our heads are stuffed with so many heuristics and guidelines that we become sloppy state machines. We get into a situation and check our look-up tables to see what the "expert" response is. We're like the guy in
Searle's Chinese Room, just manipulating tokens.
When you read SSH, you shouldn't come away with a better set of rules to apply to your game you should come away with a deeper understanding of the
process of Poker thinking.
Stop asking "what should I do with an unimproved AK?" And start asking how does Ed Miller, or David Sklansky, or Nate tha Great, or Tommy Angelo, or Izmet Fekali - or whomever you want - how do they think about the game? How do they analyze a situation in order to find the value in it? What conceptual tools are they using to break down complicated situations into understandable chunks? What skills are they using to develop their
own rules of thumb and guidelines?
Because if you aren't creating your own strategy you aren't on the path to expert play.
Btw, don't take this personally. I'm a major offender in this respect and this rant is directed at myself as much as anyone else.
/mc