Playing Out of Trouble - An interesting perspective on the best long-term approach to learning to play poker

by Daniel Kimberg | Published: Aug 09, 2005

A decade or so ago, while I was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, I picked up a dangerous habit: golf. Every day, I'd drive or walk to and from school through the Schenley Park golf course, a municipal course that at the time would let you play all day for $8, and where you could easily lose your ball in the fairway (I believe it's since come under new and more caring management). Golf isn't a great hobby for anyone on a tight schedule, but it was only a matter of time before I gave it a shot. It turns out that the condition of the fairways wasn't really much of an issue for me. I got much more practice digging the ball out of high grass and punching it out through trees than I did hitting picture-perfect irons. A few years later, when Tiger Woods was turning professional, I remember commentators pointing out that one of the strengths of his game was his ability to play his way out of trouble. His wildness off the tee had inadvertently contributed to one of his major assets: his ability to recover from jams that would cost lesser golfers strokes. I always figured I could benefit in the same way, although I never got good enough at the rest of the game to have any use for my extensive skills at chopping the ball out from under a pile of leaves.

Oftentimes, on the road through the golf course, I'd see a strange-looking van/truck, loaded down with odd equipment and moving along at a breezy 5 miles per hour. The van, it turns out, was a project of CMU's robotics (or possibly computer science) department, and it was learning how to navigate the road on its own. I wish I could tell you more about the project and how it progressed, but I heard only one substantive bit of information about it ever. Supposedly, one of the difficulties they found in training the van to drive was in teaching it how to recover from errors. A van that's learned to drive by steadying itself between the lines is liable to get into trouble if, due to the vagaries of real-world circumstances, it finds itself outside those lines. I don't honestly know if that was really a problem for the van, or just one of the many problems it solved easily, but there's an intuitive lesson in there that parallels the one on the golf course. If you've never seen trouble, you'll never learn how to play out of it.

At the same time, I was also learning how to play poker. Todd Mummert's IRC-based poker server, coincidentally housed in CMU's computer science department, was a great place to learn how to play without risking real money or having to travel hundreds of miles to the nearest legal casino. There was no other serious online poker at the time, and most of the people who used the server had no easily accessible public cardroom. So, it was a great way to get in tons of practice – at least in principle. The problem was that although there was a range of skills, basically everyone was just learning to play. So, the games were more than a bit on the wild side, and not necessarily great practice for live games at that time. And, of course, since it wasn't real money, it was constantly tempting to make bad calls, to look someone up just because you wanted to know what he had, or to experiment with wild and crazy styles. It's much harder to do these things with real money, especially if the money is meaningful to you. The poker literature reinforces this, constantly reminding us not to chase or to get too loose before the flop. Even back then, I was definitely one of those "you play like you practice" guys. I didn't see the point in trying to learn how to play poker by making decisions I knew were bad, especially in a game in which discipline is supposedly so important. I can't be sure I would've played exactly the same for real money as I did for play money, but for better or worse, I came closer than most.

Erratic vans, wild golfers, and loose poker players have one positive thing in common: They're all in the best possible position to learn from their mistakes. Does that mean making these mistakes is a good thing, at least while you're learning? Maybe. Of course, there are other ways to learn things, and a strong argument can be made that making heaps of mistakes isn't the best way to learn anything. That's why they sometimes call it learning the hard way. And especially with poker, where the correctness of your decisions is only loosely tied to the immediate outcome, practice at playing a loose, aggressive style can be dangerous. But I think it's worth considering the possibility that trying to play too well too early on can be harmful to learning to play good poker. Playing bad cards and/or from out of position isn't a great idea, but when you're forced to do so (for example, when shorthanded, in steal situations, or in tournaments), it takes a great deal of judgment – judgment you won't have if you've never been there before. Judgment is arguably the hardest facet of the game to master – learning which opponents are liable to have what kinds of hands in which situations, and how they're liable to respond to your actions; learning when your bad kicker is unimportant; learning how to tell when your opponent is ready to fold a winner. Perhaps starting off at least a little on the loose side isn't such a bad idea after all.

On the face of things, this does seem like bad advice. Making mistakes just to learn from them seems at best counterproductive. But this isn't the classic setup; the idea isn't to make these mistakes, suffer the consequences, and thereby learn not to make them anymore. The idea is to learn from what comes after those mistakes, including whole classes of situations that will come up much less often if you always play your starting hands by the book. Of course, most players play very loose when they get started, and there's no sense encouraging them to play even looser. But I think there is probably a class of players, much like myself 10 years ago, could stand to get into a bit more trouble every now and then. To be sure, poker presents any number of difficult decisions, on a continuing basis, no matter how conservatively you play. But even today, 10 years later, I feel like those wild and crazy players may have learned something that was much harder for me to pick up.

Lest anyone take this column too seriously, I should add that making mistakes intentionally is not generally a good idea, especially if you're really learning how to drive, and not just playing golf or poker. But the ability to play your way out of trouble is an extremely useful skill that's worth developing when the consequences aren't so great. An overly tight approach to poker when you're first starting out may not be the best long-term approach to learning the game.