A Very Good Exercise

[ZootMurph]

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Lots of people have reccomended this in the past and I never understood the point. Why take away stats if you have them? If you aren't paying attention to stuff when stats are up then I think that's a seperate problem all together and i don't really see how this will change that. Is it supposed to show you that paying attention is important? I thought everyone knew that.

Now if you want to talk about playing fewer tables once in a while, I think that's a valid idea because it gives you more time to think about things. I just don't see what advantages come of depriving yourself of stats.

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My point is just that I tend to use the stats as a crutch and hence miss out on a lot of very valuable information. It's a training exercise, not a "maximize value" exercise. The idea is by forcing myself to not have stats now, I train myself to be more observant at the table, meaning my reads with stats included will be even sharper.

It's like when they put eye-patches on the eyes of young kids. By compromising vision in the short-run, you greatly increase acuity in the long-run.

Obviously there are many for whom this wouldn't be useful, because they're already good at this, but this seems to me a very rational way to deal with what I imagine is a pretty common problem.

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I agree with W Deranged here. I know when I was having a bad run, I started playing only 1 table to refocus myself. When I started doing that, I found some things which aren't reflected in the numbers. For example, there was one guy I played a lot of hands with. His PFR was 3%. You'd think that his raises were only AA, KK, QQ, JJ, AK and AQ. But, he NEVER raised preflop with AA or KK, which I saw him show down 3 times. Maybe this is just because of sample size, but this is a pretty telling read. Another example is a LAG I was playing with that I'd played a LOT of hands with previously. His stats are 47%-31% and his showdown number was 53%. However, on this day, he seemed to be folding an awful lot on the flop. Probably having a bad day and compounding it with weak postflop play thinking he is beat all the time. It was useful information that the numbers alone couldn't give me.

So, anyway, I agree that the stats should only be part of your read, not the whole thing.