Working on Your Game - Part III

In the first two parts of this epic saga, I discussed two of the most important ways to improve at poker (without actually playing): reading and computer-based training. In this final part, I'd like to discuss an often overlooked way to work on your game: discussion with other poker players. It's a broad category that includes everything from newsgroup posting and private E-mail to talking about poker over lunch. Few serious poker players develop their games entirely in isolation.

Poker is hardly unique in this. In both science and the arts, little if any serious work takes place in a vacuum. There are certainly examples of successful scientists and artists who avoid collaboration and don't take criticism well. But a more typical pattern, especially among the most successful, is to develop new work in the context of collegial support. In fact, this pattern is almost inevitable. A mathematician or novelist may not solicit feedback on work in progress, but few if any completely ignore feedback on published work. Scientists and artists who are more proactive about getting feedback on their work will simply get more fine-grained feedback more often. Poker players, of course, also get feedback on their play, in the form of bankroll trends. Players who discuss strategy with their friends just get more directed feedback.

The easiest place to join an ongoing poker discussion has been the Internet newsgroup rec.gambling.poker (aka RGP). Unfortunately, following a pattern that's been repeated many times in many newsgroups, as RGP has gotten bigger, the density of helpful discussion has suffered and the density of nuisance posts has increased, starting a cyclic reaction that has driven away many valuable contributors. Nonetheless, it's still the most accessible forum for public poker-related discussion, and occasionally hosts lively discussions relevant to poker strategy.

A number of private discussion forums tied to commercial websites have cropped up, the most successful of which has been that of Two Plus Two Publishing. Private forums have a built-in advantage in that undesirable messages can be deleted by the moderators. Although there's often concern about editorial policies, and the interfaces are primitive and difficult compared to modern news readers, when well moderated, you never have to expend your energy plowing through the equivalent of cleverly disguised junk mail.

It's easiest to treat the online forums as though they were just reading material. And they certainly provide a counterpoint to the printed literature. Figuring out who to trust is nearly as difficult as answering the questions in the first place. However, as a tool for improving your game, online forums are most valuable if you make an effort to contribute. Even if you get no replies, the process of formalizing your thoughts can encourage you to think more carefully. Of course, if you post on RGP before you've done much reading, you're liable to revisit territory that's all too familiar to the regulars. And you're not going to benefit much if the extent of your contribution is vague, poorly considered rambling. However, there's nothing wrong with launching another discussion about playing A-K in the big blind, especially if there hasn't been one for a while. And if you've done some reading and still think you can bring something new to the issue, you're liable to get more interesting replies.

Although online forums can be helpful, which discussions take root can be random, or worse. I've posted often to RGP, but my best contributions are often ignored. Although I still believe I got something out of writing them, posting them may not have helped anyone. For more reliable interaction, in my opinion, by far the best way to augment your poker education is through regular E-mail contact with friends. Especially if you have friends who are at roughly the same point in their poker education as you are, working out questions about play interactively can be much more productive than doing so on your own. If all goes well, your friends will complement your strengths, challenge your assumptions, and motivate you to stay focused. Although you might dismiss a stranger's ideas without much consideration, you wouldn't do the same with a friend. And you can expect the same consideration for your ideas, even if they're easily proven wrong. If you have enough poker-playing friends, a small mailing list can encourage interaction without sacrificing the benefits of close personal interaction.

Above, I've focused on electronic forms of communication, mainly because I think making your ideas concrete in E-mail forces a bit more formality than conversation. There's another advantage to electronic messaging, which is that you can look back a few years later and see just how naive you may have been – or in some cases, just how insightful.

There are many aspects of a poker self-improvement project that I haven't covered in this short series. For example, treating poker as a skill in isolation may weaken your game. Even if your only goal in life is to be a better poker player, instead of reading a long series of poker books, you might be better served interspersing books on meditation, statistics, economics, and world history. Spending 10 hours a week reading about poker may help your poker game less than eight hours of reading and two hours of physical exercise.

Many people play poker because they enjoy it, and for those people, the most attractive way to improve at the game is probably just to play. Even just playing involves some decisions on how to work on your game. Although you can spend some time at the tables that will be both profitable and instructive, often your self-improvement and your bankroll-building goals will conflict when you're trying to find a table. In those cases, you have to estimate how much it really costs you, in expectation, to sit at a tougher table, and whether (or how often) you're willing to make that investment to improve your game.

We all probably improve more rapidly when we can find ways to learn that are both fun and effective. In this short series, I've tried to catalogue a few of the avenues to improvement that are often overlooked in favor of just playing. If you really enjoy thinking about poker, there are many ways to improve at the game that don't involve chips or cards, but may be at least as effective in making you a better player.