The Coaching Debate

Posted by Verstehen

January 14, 2010

This past weekend I had a brief session where I was coached by a local high stakes player. Actually, “coached” is probably overstating it, as a) no money was exchanged and b) he was playing, not me. I watched him on Teamviewer – a very nice collaboration tool that I recommend for poker coaching and sweat sessions – and we were talking on the phone while he played. He played 5-6 tables ranging from 5-10 NL to 25-50 NL at pokerstars.

The most valuable thing about being coached by a better player is, strangely, developing confidence in your own abilities. While I assumed that he would drop bits of wisdom that would profoundly change my NL game, that wasn’t really how it worked. What helped me most was seeing that we were thinking about things pretty similarly most of the time, but that he was a bit better at reacting to gameflow and planning future actions. But it wasn’t as if he thought about poker completely differently. The same basic questions – should I bet here? what am I representing? what range do I put him on? – apply at every stake. It really is the same game even at 25/50, you just have to give your opponents much more credit for responding quickly to you.

From a purely entertainment perspective, it was interesting to watch him play against some of the mid-stakes heroes like nanonoko. A lot of these players play a fairly straightforward game but play almost tiltless poker that makes it very hard to win big pots off of them except in cooler situations. I was surprised to find that the big winners were not playing a particularly unusual style – the stats and post-flop game seemed pretty standard. I think I somehow expected they would wildly deviate from the norm in some area – preflop stats, c-betting, check-raising – but they are just a bit better at all areas of the game it seems.

Now, about coaching more generally. There has been a little furor on 2p2 lately where people have been questioning the value of poker coaching, and even suggesting that coaching is a bit of a scam. Given the extremely high cost of most poker coaching – I only play 1/2 NL and I would probably be looking at $150+/hour for a coach – I think it’s correct to be a little skeptical of how much value you can receive from coaching.

I would be willing to guess that a lot of the benefits ascribed to coaching are psychological. I used to tutor students in statistics, a subject many people feel uncomfortable in. Half of my job was just reassuring them that statistics was not an intentionally tricky, obscure field of study, and that most of the basic concepts were actually pretty simple. I communicated real information as well, but what a lot of people needed was reassurance that statistics could be understood by anyone (and it can be, you don’t even really need college-level math to understand the core concepts of statistics like the central limit theorem).

Because poker is so dependent on confidence, I think the value of being coached is just validation: having a better more successful player tell you you’re not crazy. Of course players learn new things as well – I saw the high stakes player make a river bluff-shove that I never would have considered but his reasoning made perfect sense given the board and opponent. But players get coached because poker is a lonely business and it helps to have someone on your side (even if you have to pay them to be there).

In other news, this site appears to be pretty dead. I’m the only person who has posted in the past three months and I’m thinking of just moving along and starting my own blog. I am a bit more tech-savvy than when I started here and feel a bit more comfortable with WordPress and hosting my own site. I appreciate the opportunity I was given here but it seems like pokersift.com is kind of closing up shop. Best to all of you and keep at it. – Adam

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