Ability to Predict a Players Skill based on Intelligence.

[TomCollins]

I'm not sure I buy expirience as the top factor. Why do you think we see dinosaurs who have been playing years and years being destroyed by the young gun quick learners. Winning without expirience is unlikely, but I would say the correlation between expirience and degree of winning is one of the least linked factor.

I would replace expirience with something that actually accounts for serious studying w/ expirience or something that actually matters.

[SpiderMnkE]

I have no problem with removing experience from number 1. The reason I put it there is because it is the reason most of the other factors get perfected. Especially the emotional control issues.

I can tell a noob immediately in a chatroom when they blow up after a bad beat. I've been playing a lot for about a year now.. and I'm just getting to where a bad beat means nothing to me. The only time I really get mad is when I believe I have made an incorrect play.

So experience encapsulates the time you've had to practice you pot odds calculation, hand reading, bad beat experiences, it sort of sums up all you know about poker to that point.

So maybe a young gun can become great with little experience.. but it is the little he has had that made him great.

But if this isn't a big deal.. then certainly something else could argueably be numero uno.

[Toonces]

Perhaps, a better way to look at it is with a required foundation, then add-ons. For example, Willingness to Study (Constant Learning) is a minimum requirement to play the game at all well. Without that, none of the other factors are likely to help.

[Blarg]

Book-based learning can be a direct substitution for experience. It can substitute someone else's experience - a huge amount of it, plus their careful thought about their experience -- for one's own. A book can be a free ride that way.

The 2+2 books and some other books I've read can shorten everyone's learning curve enormously for just 25 bucks a pop or so.

I was up from a $200 bankroll at the 7-stud live tables in Commerce and the Bicycle Club in Los Angeles to the 10/20 in just a couple of months, and got to the 15/30 not too long after. That was only possible because of the experience of Chip Reese, Ray Zee, Mason and David Sklansky. They didn't make me great, but I could have lived a lifetime without stumbling across the concepts they got across, or figuring out exactly how to apply them and how seriously to take them.

I think experience can be an astoundingly minor factor. For 25 bucks, you can just buy a book and profit off someone else's experience.

Of course, for some people experience will much more critical, because they won't be readers, or maybe they don't have access to good books in their language.

I'd drop experience way down, and keep discipline at the top.

It is a kind of over-arching virtue that controls whether other virtues even come into play. It's very different from many other abilities, in that even very stupid people with perhaps little to recommend them sometimes have enormous amounts of it, and the most brilliant, beloved and admired people sometimes have almost none.

Discipline says whether or not you pay attention every hand during a session or just go numb after a while and play mechanically; whether you tilt and how badly, and how quickly you recover from it; whether you have the patience to sit through readings and re-readings of books and learn the numbers; whether you have the present-mindedness to remember to bring in all the mathematical and other ideas even under stress or when thrown off your usual track by self-doubt; etc. And it takes discipline to walk away when you know you're not playing your best game and will likely just make things worse if you continue playing. It takes discipline to keep your ego in line and not be crushed by defeats or made stupid by victories. You can have all the abilities and virtues in the world, but it takes discipline to apply them and keep applying them. And to admit it to yourself when your discipline has slipped and you're screwing up.

I've seen quite a few bright, capable poker players without the discipline to consistently win. Sometimes you feel almost obligated to call those guys with nothing just so they go on tilt.

[sherbert]

[ QUOTE ]
...a list of skills needed to play poker? I will just throw something out there to build on.

1: Self Control - Emotional Indifference

2. Basic Math - Understand simple probabilities



[/ QUOTE ]

Here's a few random thoughts:

Memory. This is twofold; remembering how particular players play in different situations; remembering individual hands. I'm reasonably good at both of these, whereas I often find players can't recall hands they played against me.

Sadism. You mentioned emotional indifference, but I think it may be slightly more subtle than that. I'd say many good players have a slightly sadistic edge. Let's face it, playing winning poker is not a very nice way to go on, is it. Or perhaps it's a substitute whereby one's sadistic instincts can be expressed in a vaguely socially approved or subliminal fashion.

The logic which leads to making good deductive reads. Not only the ones that go, 'he must have the A of diamonds, King of hearts,' but also where you eliminate hands, so, 'he can't have top pair'. I'm fairly sure this improves considerably with experience.

[Blarg]

[ QUOTE ]
Sadism. You mentioned emotional indifference, but I think it may be slightly more subtle than that. I'd say many good players have a slightly sadistic edge. Let's face it, playing winning poker is not a very nice way to go on, is it. Or perhaps it's a substitute whereby one's sadistic instincts can be expressed in a vaguely socially approved or subliminal fashion.

[/ QUOTE ]

I think this is saying much more about you than about poker.

In my view, you just do what you have to do to win in poker. There's nothing particularly sadistic about playing poker; it is just the exercise of skill and often a good bit of luck, and it all falls within the scope of the game. Everyone knows the rules going in, and they can hardly feel it is cruel that they're losing instead of doing the winning. And they're not cruel being the one who doesn't lose, either. SOMEBODY has to win, after all.

I have no issues with that, and think it's as fair as fair can be, and as logical. It's not a game where every player wins.

If you're going to feel bad about winning, you pretty much can't play any game or sport at all, or compete in any way ever. That would be hard to do without maybe just digging your own grave and then jumping in.

[sherbert]

I was wondering if this would provoke any reaction. Does it say more about me? If you say so. Since you don't know me, I suspect that's a bit presumptuous, but still...

This is just my take, but after years of playing in casinos, I think that a lot of poker players - not necessarily just good ones, will take some vindictive pleasure in the discomfort experienced by the loser.

Don't forget - sadism is to a greater or lesser extent, a part of human nature. We are a very destructive species with very destructive tendencies. There is absolutely NO reason to suppose these tendencies are less likely to surface at the poker table than they do anywhere else; quite the reverse. However poker is a pursuit where they surface a lot more than say, crochet, to pick an absurd example. Sit down in a big game and watch the amount of needle that goes on.

You say the losers can hardly feel it is cruel that they are losing... well, who knows. Nor is it, per se, as you point out, thereby cruel to win. That doesn't negate the fact that poker may well bring out what could be called sadistic traits in some players. The descriptions of Johnny Moss certainly tally with a somewhat sadistic take at the table - or emotionally indifferent.

Or read a few of limon's posts. The mentality of a lot of winning players is of how to best exploit the weaker players. It's certainly not a life is lovely kind of mentality. I'm not making a value judgement here - I'm just reflecting on what I see with my own eyes. The notion of emotional indifference was I thought a good one; I just thought an extension or subset of that would be a sometimes or somewhat saidistic pleasure in the suffering of others. Let's face it - all winning players rely on people losing money. I don't think many of the losers particularly enjoy the experience - which raises a separate (to this thread) question, of why on earth they continue in this vein. It's always been a mystery to me. Masochism? [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img]

[DPCondit]

[ QUOTE ]
Or read a few of limon's posts. The mentality of a lot of winning players is of how to best exploit the weaker players. It's certainly not a life is lovely kind of mentality. I'm not making a value judgement here - I'm just reflecting on what I see with my own eyes. The notion of emotional indifference was I thought a good one; I just thought an extension or subset of that would be a sometimes or somewhat saidistic pleasure in the suffering of others. Let's face it - all winning players rely on people losing money. I don't think many of the losers particularly enjoy the experience - which raises a separate (to this thread) question, of why on earth they continue in this vein. It's always been a mystery to me. Masochism?


[/ QUOTE ]

I was sitting in a game, and this guy says "do you know why people gamble? It's because they need to feel the pain it gives them" with a straight face. I guess that's true for some people, although they probably don't admit it consciously. He was admitting this consciously, and still kept playing, I just said "really, that doesn't sound all that wonderful", and grinned to myself, because I knew why I was there, for quite a different reason.

Don

[Blarg]

There's nothing presumptuous about it at all. You're the one who said it, nobody else.

If anything is presumptuous, it's the use of the word "many" in describing the number of poker players who have or exercise sadistic tendencies. Many people believe the earth is flat, but I think you were trying to get beyond simple numbers and describe something more like a relative number, as a percentage would. What does "many" mean to you when you use it here? You didn't say "most," but you probably meant some sort of significant percentage of poker players are sadistic. A greater percentage of them than, say, of regular people all over the world who believe the world is flat.

That strikes me as unfair.

"Many" people who do all kinds of things or profess all kinds of ideas may have this or that characteristic, but that doesn't make that characteristic itself characteristic of the particular thing they are doing.

You're kind of tarring and feathering according to some pretty loose standards there. Sadistic is not exactly a term to use too breezily.

I certainly don't think it makes sense to extend your hypothesis even further by supposing that "good" players might be sadistic.

[ QUOTE ]
You say the losers can hardly feel it is cruel that they are losing... well, who knows

[/ QUOTE ]

I meant, of course, that they couldn't FAIRLY feel it is cruel that they're losing. After all, they knew the possibilities going in and the only reason they're not winning is because they'd have to turn someone else into a loser, so...while it's easy to feel empathy there, sympathy comes a little harder. It's less cruel for me to beat you than for you to beat me.

[ QUOTE ]
The descriptions of Johnny Moss certainly tally with a somewhat sadistic take at the table - or emotionally indifferent.

[/ QUOTE ]

He's just one guy. I don't think we can use one guy's personality as a fair stand-in for the hundreds of millions of other people who play poker.

[ QUOTE ]
The mentality of a lot of winning players is of how to best exploit the weaker players. It's certainly not a life is lovely kind of mentality

[/ QUOTE ]

This is how competition works. It's morally neutral, as long as everyone is playing the game voluntarily and can leave whenever they like.

For many people, it's quite an enjoyable challenge and a positive thing. Is tennis cruel because you try to outfox your opponent and take advantage of his weaknesses? Is anybody who picks up a racket a masochist?

I'm thinking you're looking at challenges, especially voluntary ones where all the rules are known and completely above-board, very much in the wrong way. You seem to be supposing unjustifiably negative things of both the game and its players.

That's why I said your suppositions seem to say more to me about your own personal view of things than poker or its players.

[Blarg]

By my guess, well under 5% of poker players are there for the money.