MJ Gonzales On Where To Learn Elite-Level Poker Skills

MJ Gonzales is a renowned name in the world of high-stakes professional poker. The 36-year-old California native spent years crushing the nosebleed games anonymously before stepping out of the shadows a few years ago as a highly sought-after poker coach.

Except Gonzales wasn’t sharing his skills with your average low-stakes grinder. Instead, he was fine tuning the play of some of the game’s best, turning already-winning rounders into elite, money-printing machines.

His most famous client, Poker Hall of Famer and six-time WSOP bracelet winner Daniel Negreanu, told Card Player two years ago that there was “no question” that Gonzales had helped to take his game to the next level.

“I’m a better no-limit hold’em player today than I’ve ever been, by a wide margin,” Negreanu admitted. “Not even close. I would smash the guy that won everything in 2004.”

Now eager to share his knowledge with everybody, Gonzales is also the co-founder of Hybrid Poker, which is a poker training site that combines artificial intelligence systems with personalized coaching to help players win more at the tables.

Card Player spoke with Gonzales shortly before he appeared on a special ‘Cash of the Titans’ edition of PokerGO’s No Gamble, No Future show, buying in for $1 million. You can watch the entire three-day session on PokerGO.

Craig Tapscott: How do you go about choosing the best poker coach to take your game to the next level?

MJ Gonzales: Poker is a complex game that requires a combination of strategic thinking, mathematical calculations, and intuitive decision-making. Choosing the right coach can be a game-changer for your growth. But how do you choose the right one?

Understanding the importance of solvers is crucial. Whether you want to improve your tournament results or cash-game play, having a coach who can help you understand both game theory and exploitative application is paramount. A coach who can teach you how to interpret solver outputs can help you make both more optimal and accurate exploitative decisions.  

Before committing to lessons, it’s worth evaluating a coach’s teaching style through a trial session or by reviewing some of their video training content if it’s publicly available. Clear communication is crucial for a successful coaching relationship. You should communicate your needs and expectations to your coach at the outset and check in regularly throughout the coaching process to ensure you are making progress.

A game tree is a graphical representation of all possible decision points and outcomes in a poker hand. Players who lack any understanding or ability to see their full game tree are missing out on valuable opportunities to improve their game. Even top coaches in the industry often lack this ability. A good coach will help you to analyze, review, and study each node in the full game tree to find your weaknesses as a player.

They should also be able to help you learn how to exploit the mistakes other players make. Mass Database Analysis (MDA) and complex player profiling can be used to identify and analyze the most common mistakes that players make. This type of analysis can help you to discover how to exploit your opponents’ mistakes and gain EV multiple times.

Poker coaching can be a significant investment, but it’s important to view it as a long-term growth opportunity in your earning potential.

Craig Tapscott: As an experienced coach, what aspects of the game do you find most players struggle with?

MJ Gonzales: Many players struggle to understand the concept of Game Theory Optimal (GTO) play. GTO decisions most often create “indifference,” which actually forgives many of the most common mistakes your opponents are making. This type of theory-based play is actually a defensive strategy by nature.

For a rough example, in Rock-Paper-Scissors a GTO strategy of one-third rock, one-third paper, and one-third scissors actually breaks even against the world’s worst player who only throws rock 100% of the time. At the highest levels of the game, the best players are playing a hybrid of both GTO and exploitative play using this knowledge.

Many winning poker players have developed an intuitive understanding of how to make money through thousands of hours of play. Often these winning high-stakes players are approached and asked to teach their strategies as a coach. However, without a quantitative approach to each node in the game tree, the lessons these students end up paying for with these coaches are simply the coach’s genuine best attempt to explain their own intuition about individual hands and spots.

Craig Tapscott: What are some of the mistakes you see other coaches making?

MJ Gonzales: A lot of coaches mainly study by reviewing individual spots, hands, and/or using lookup tables to review hands played in the past. These aren’t the best ways to develop as a player.  

You need a coach who has:

A full understanding of the statistically-relevant game tree.
A deep understanding of GTO fundamentals at each of these nodes and a strong background in solvers.
Access to Mass Database Analysis of human mistakes overlaid across this game tree.
Expertise with node-locking with solvers to be able to utilize the MDA on human mistakes and develop the exploits.
Many individual simplified game-speed application strategies to take advantage of these mistakes that a student can both understand and execute.

An understanding of how the human mind optimally learns. There are many interesting neuroscience concepts that drive an optimal learning path, including the Four Stages of Learning and Flow State.

There’s a huge difference between a quantitative approach like the above, and trying to learn via another person’s raw intuition! Avoid coaches who rely solely on intuition and individual spot analysis, and instead look for someone who can help you analyze, review, and study each node in the full game tree to find your weaknesses as a player.

Craig Tapscott: Can you explain the Four Stages of Learning?

The Four Stages of Learning shows how people learn and acquire new skills. Individuals move from a state of unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence through four stages, each representing a different level of awareness and ability. The goal is to identify a student’s stage with a skill and help them reach Stage Four where it becomes intuitive.

The first stage is Unconscious Incompetence, where individuals lack knowledge of a specific area. In the second stage, Conscious Incompetence, individuals become aware of their lack of skill and need for learning. In the third stage, Conscious Competence, individuals can perform the task, but it requires focus and effort. The final stage, Unconscious Competence, is where individuals can perform the task without conscious thought.

The ultimate goal as a coach is to be able to identify which stage a student is at with a specific skill and help them move that skill all the way to stage 4 where it becomes easy for them! They should also ensure that the student is challenged but not overwhelmed, and help them reach the “Flow State,” where they experience deep focus and engagement.

Craig Tapscott: How do you avoid information overload?

MJ Gonzales: The poker industry can be a challenging place to obtain trustworthy information, as solvers are excessively complicated and require high levels of technical proficiency. It’s very easy to misuse a solver. They take both significant effort and time investment to use effectively, and their improper use can lead to unreliable and inaccurate results. We’ve also found that most players understand and retain much more information when playing in our guided training environment instead of drawn-out technical analysis sessions that go through solver outputs. This approach encourages learners to engage with the material while also applying their knowledge in practice, which can lead to a deeper understanding and better retention of the information.  

Given the infinite complexity of poker and the plethora of rabbit holes to explore, it’s all too easy for players to become lost in a sea of information and waste their time on statistically-irrelevant parts of the game.

Every player’s game tree and flaws are unique to them, like their poker fingerprint. But the ability of a student to figure out the best path on their own is insanely difficult. You can’t know what you don’t know… having external guidance is very important.

Craig Tapscott: Can you tell us more about your site Hybrid Poker?

MJ Gonzales: We pride ourselves on our unique training approach that takes the guesswork out of improving your game. You won’t be watching others play, you’ll learn by playing yourself.  

Our platform offers an AI-powered solution that keeps you focused on the full, statistically-relevant game tree. As you play, the Hybrid Poker AI learns about your specific game tree mistakes, isolating your leaks and tailoring your training to your personal needs. The system is engineered to guide players through the four stages of learning, keeping them in a flow state that maximizes their retention and growth.

The entire app is also built to grade mixed strategies, not just multiple-choice pure strategy questions, using a highly sophisticated algorithm that was incredibly difficult to build. 

We encourage our users to show up and put in daily work practicing in the app. It’s very important for your brain to be exposed to solutions to the game on a regular basis. This is how you get the volume in to move your understanding of poker’s game theory towards becoming “Stage Four” and intuitive/easy.

We also offer a free Poker IQ Test on our website, which lets you test your knowledge in a variety of curated spots and compare your results with friends and professional players. Feel free to take our test and see if you can beat Daniel Negreanu’s score. This test is just a taste of what the full app has to offer.

Finally, we make sure that our training is both effective and efficient. Our AI system analyzes the data from your play and provides detailed reports on your sessions, showing you what skills you worked on, overviewing your accuracy, and pinpointing areas where you’re losing EV. And because our training happens in real time, you’ll be able to apply what you learn immediately, improving your game with every hand you play.

Find Gonzales on Twitter @therealmjpoker and learn more at HybridPoker.com. ♠