Accelerated learning: Chunking your poker education

[Zim]

Hey guys,

In brief: Learning poker through example is superior to learning via the fundamentals.

Not sure if this has been raised before, and I could be completely wrong, but I thought I might throw it out there ... as it seems to be something Ed refers to on occaision.

I'll try to be brief.

Used to teach English in Asia, actually ... I more pretended to teach it, but thats another matter. In any event, while in Japan I was subject to the most horrid English I have ever come across in all my travels.

The education system relied on a sort of grammatical approach to teaching English. From day one, sentences were broken down into their structures, and these structures into components, and once these components were learned, the structures mastered ... you could construct your own sentences.

Doesn't work.

Teaching another culture adjectives, articles, conditionals, etc .. only creates some of the most bizarre sentences you'll ever hear in your life. Some of them might even be grammatically correct, only no native speaker would ever use them.

Most often of course, the sentences were simply wrong. As an application of one grammatical principle might come at the expense of another.

The student, of course, was told to return to the books ... and study more grammar so he'd get it right next time.

I abandoned this approach (much to the delight of my students) in short order, opting for a lexical approach.

"The lexical approach to second language teaching has received interest in recent years as an alternative to grammar-based approaches. The lexical approach concentrates on developing learners' proficiency with lexis, or words and word combinations. It is based on the idea that an important part of language acquisition is the ability to comprehend and produce lexical phrases as unanalyzed wholes, or "chunks," and that these chunks become the raw data by which learners perceive patterns of language traditionally thought of as grammar (Lewis, 1993, p. 95).

*The key principle of a lexical approach is that "language consists of grammaticalized lexis, not lexicalized grammar."

Essentially, that grammar follows context. Yet a hundred million Japanese students were attempting to creat context from grammar.

This thought sorta hit me as I was working my way through SSH and trying to apply my understanding of pot equity, pot odds, implied odds, reverse implied odds, position, expectation, hand value, etc ... etc ... in the example quiz at the end.

Got most of 'em right, but not all of 'em. And in the afterthought, a question was raised as to how experts make lightning fast, correct, instant responses.

Some of these experts, I suspect, might not be able to explain the nuances of determing the correct odds, anymore than most native speakers could give me a definition of the second conditional, yet we use it correctly all the time.

(I suspect some might even attempt to brush off the question by saying: "poker's a game of psychology, not math.")

So I guess I'm thinking that the basis of good poker is not psychology or math, but lexis.

(hope that's not too much of a stretch)

"Lexical approach advocates argue that language consists of meaningful chunks that, when combined, produce continuous coherent text, and only a minority of spoken sentences are entirely novel creations"

When I think of applying this to poker, I think of immersing myself in hand examples played by professional players. Hidden within this context are all the correct fundamentals, much in the same way as learning a sentence "chunk" follows all grammatical rules.

Might be all wet here, and if this has been brought up before ... my apologies for the redundancy. As a newb, I'm simply looking at the most efficient way to learn poker, and I keep coming back to modeling competent players.

As opposed to making up my own sentences.

Thanks for any feedback, and if you have any thoughts on books that give a billion hand examples for limit, I'd be indebted.

Cheers!
Zim

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All the quotes are used from the following website:

http://www.ericdigests.org/2002-2/lexical.htm