[W. Deranged]

So I decided it was about time to make a long-winded, musing type post about poker that didn't involve any specific hands or anything like that. Three things have inspired this post. The first was the really gut-wrenching online session I just played, where I played horribly from start to finish, never felt comfortable at any table, and seemed to be making unsatisfactory decisions every fifth hand or so. The second was my lengthy live poker playing experience in Vegas this weekend, which reminded me why I prefer playing live so much more than playing online (and the answer is not simply free Yager shots). The last is my new, and apropos, title of "posts better than he plays."

While started kind of as a joke this weekend, the title is basically true. I post much better than I play. Not that I think I "play bad," but simply that I think my general ability to break down, analyze, and articulate poker concepts after the fact or divorced from actual playing situations is much better than my ability to apply the same methods of analysis to real-time situations and hence play sound poker. I am constantly feeling, particularly when playing online, that I am making bad decisions; sometimes I am, sometimes I'm not. The important thing is that many times while playing I just feel like I have no idea what's going on. I sometimes feel like I just lose the analytical poker skills on which my game is based and start to shoot from the hip.

What I've come to realize is that playing poker is very much a two-part endeavor, at least for me. To put it in Aristotelian terms, there's a "theory" and "practice," which, in my opinion, are separate things.

The theory behind poker is what we do every day on these and the other forums here. We talk about pot equity and odds and relative position and value-betting and so on and so forth. This theory can be removed from it's context and applied to abstracted poker situations, which we can talk about slowly and deliberately without the pressure of making decisions. We can run spreadsheets and go to Pokerstove and do Bayesian analysis and argue about reads and so forth. Even seemingly momentary poker skills like hand-reading have a theoretical component, one which is becoming increasingly technical and increasingly abstract with the growing sophistication of statistical poker software. (Can you ever imagine, for example, Johnny Moss talking to Amarillo Slim about how a player's post-flop aggression factor needs to be calibrated to his VPIP?)

Personally, I love the theory behind poker. I would almost find it a fascinating thing if I never got to play it, and could actually only discuss it in forums like this. This is part of the reason I "post better than I play." But, to put it crudely, musing about theory and speaking in poker abstractions alone can't make us any money. We need to put the theory into practice.

And this is really the point of my post: the practice of poker. Every day when we all play poker we are forced to integrate a ton of concepts into very quick decisions, analyzing many different factors (hopefully correctly) and ultimately coming up with a decision. The kind of analysis that we all do at the table is in some sense fundamentally different from that which we do on these forums. We have no recourse to statements like "well, it's very read-dependent" or "meh" at the table. We have to make decisions immediately and hopefully correctly. Those of us who multi-table have an even greater challenge on our hands.

So what I've determined is that, as confident as I am in my grasp of the theory behind poker, I often feel like I'm a total fish when it comes to the practice of it. Part of this is experience. I don't doubt that by number of hands I'm one of the least experienced among us. I play many fewer hands than many of you probably do (I think my Pokertracker has less than 50,000 hands for me over the past 6 months or something). Poker is not my job or my primary interest, so the experience part is just something I'll have to take care of on my own.

But there's more to this discussion. And I'll offer it as a challenge to my beloved Small Stakes Forum:

How can I (and everyone else) become better at the practice of poker ? How can we get better at making decisions at the table? At prioritizing the various data we must deal with? At having confidence in our decisions? At screening our emotions from our reason? At paying attention to the most important things (a particularly important consideration for multi-tablers)? At feeling comfortable while playing?

Just a few thoughts. I'd love to hear any comments from anyone about times that they felt they started to play the game better, which is a very different thing from understanding the game better.