24 The Newbie Chronicles: Quantitative Self-tests

[mdlm]

For quite some time I’ve wondered if there is a set of tests that I can take in the morning to determine whether I am in good physical/mental/emotional condition. If there were such tests then I could plan the rest of my day according to the results. For example, if the tests showed that I was in A+ territory along all three dimensions then I would play lots of poker. If the tests showed I was in F- territory then I would go back to sleep.

I thought of this when I read a story about a company that decided to stop doing drug testing on its employees and simply do performance testing. The idea is that the company doesn’t really care if an employee is on drugs or not. All they care about is whether the employee can do his job. There might be some employees who are on drugs who can do their jobs and some employees who are not on drugs who can’t do their jobs.

US Special Forces, which are in the news on a daily basis nowadays, are supposed to go through some very rigorous psychological/emotional/physical tests both during selection and during training. I assume that the military has lots of data on what the test scores mean. I even saw one test which compared cortisol levels in the blood stream of special force soldiers to the levels in normal soldiers.

I have found a software program (ThinkFAST by Neurobic Software) which tests various sorts of intellectual ability. It has a quantitative measure called “Brainpower level” which it reports after every session. My idea is to calculate my Brainpower level every day and then correlate it to my poker performance. If there is a good correlation then I will take this into account when deciding to play poker.

Unfortunately, I have not found a similar test for emotional/psychological state. I would like something to tell me whether or not I am particularly angry or upset or irritated or happy. However, there are a variety of biofeedback devices that will passively examine you and tell you something about your emotional state. There is one biofeedback device that looks like a mouse. You put two fingers on it and it measures the “heat level” (I assume that this is a synonym for temperature). If your fingers are cold this means that you are uptight and it invites you to do a “hand warming” relaxation exercise. It appears to give a quantitative reading of your “uptightness” which I can then correlate to poker performance.

I’m curious to know if anyone has any experiences or thoughts to share on this. Clearly, if this works it would probably lead to an amazing improvement in EV/hr. Say that I can eliminate the bottom 10% of my sessions (ranked not in terms of how much money I win, but in terms of how well I play). Those sessions would probably all be negative EV and I would increase my total earnings and reduce the time I need to spend at the table.


==>
Comments on Comments

Waveygravey picks up Louie Landale’s comments about making a computer play poker and says “the robot will only be as good as the poker player/programmer that made it.” This is certainly not true for chess and I doubt that it would be always true in poker.

jasonHoldEm suggests that I should ask the forum’s advice on what my Phase 2 goals should be. I will certainly do that if I get to Phase 2.


==>
Goal Update

Last week I spent 18 hours on poker: 7 hours in PokerPages tournaments, 9 hours playing TTH, and 2 hours on 2+2.

I have spent a total of $476.43 out of my $1000 budget.

An update on each of the four goals (which are to be accomplished by 3/30/03):

1. Read and study Jones’ “Winning Low Limit Hold ’Em”
I have confirmed 2 1/3 out of the three points I need to achieve this goal. A point (flush draw value bet) is pending an analysis of 10,000 hands.

2. Beat Acespade
Goal Completed on 11/5/02.
Over a period of 100 hours (3600 hands) I beat Acespade’s best lineup at the rate of over 4 BB/hr.

3. Beat Masque World Series of Poker
Goal Completed on 11/17/02

4. PokerPages 85% rating in one calendar month playing 20 tournaments
My rating is now 80.82%. I played three tournaments this past week and finished #106 out of 157, #1 out of 187, and #72 out of 170.