This is the 16th installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.
How does one learn poker? I often get asked this question, and over the last few months, I’ve been approached a number of times by people asking me to coach them. Each time I’ve turned them down, explaining quite honestly that I’m still learning the game myself, and am not competent to coach anyone. But how am I learning and how did I learn? If you’re a beginner to the game, maybe falling in love with its complexities as I once did, where do you start?
Poker is a deep enough subject to be taught in universities, the way game theory or mechanical engineering or computer programming are. The problem is that its body of knowledge is recent and dispersed. There were a handful of books a beginner could learn from ten years ago, and they’re mostly redundant now. The explosion of online poker in the last decade led to an exponential increase in the analysis and understanding of poker. Despite this, there is no existing equivalent of a college course on poker anywhere, no syllabus one can follow.
Anyone who teaches you poker will be doing so in a piecemeal manner. For example, a typical online coach will ‘sweat’ you – ie, watch you play – and comment on aspects of your play as he watches. Or he might review your hand histories and tell you things you could have done differently. But the ideal way to teach a subject is to teach fundamentals first, then proceed, in a modular fashion, through different levels of complexity. None of the various training sites for poker have managed, or even attempted, something of that sort.
I learnt poker when I stumbled upon it online, played with play money for a while, then got interested and bought some books, and finally took tentative steps into live poker. I was lucky that during my learning curve, the games were very soft because everyone else in India was also new to it, and I ran good in my early days. In other words, I learnt while being profitable. That is almost impossible today.
If you’re learning the game, here’s my advice to you. Number one, understand that this is a game where luck plays a huge role in the short term, and any skill you develop only manifests itself in the long run. So do not be results-oriented, but process-oriented. Having said that, don’t use this as a crutch and delude yourself into thinking you’re better than you are.
Two, be self-critical. In other fields, if you don’t improve, it’s okay, you get away with it, the world is mediocre. In poker, if you stop learning, you lose money. So question every action that you take, even when you are winning. Don’t be defensive.
Three, keep working on your game. Ideally, for every three hours of playing, put in one hour of analysis. This will expand your thought processes and bring clarity to your play.
Now, what do I mean by working on your game? There are three facets to this. First, you take in information. Read books and watch training videos. Ed Miller’s books are excellent for learning cash games, and Jonathan Little and Betrand Grospellier have written the most state-of-the-art books available for tournament play. For game theory, check out Matthew Janda and Will Tipton. As for videos, see Vanessa Selbst and Andrew Seidman’s videos on Deuces Cracked, Janda’s theory videos on CardRunners, Andrew Brokos’s on Tournament Poker Edge and everything on Run It Once, Phil Galfond’s amazing site.
Second, interact with the community, and get exposed to cutting-edge thought. Forums, especially Two Plus Two, is where the modern game was born. Become a participant, keep testing your assumptions, learn from your peers.
Third, do lots of analysis at home on hands you play. There are some fantastic tools out there, like The Odds Oracle by ProPokerTools, which helps you analyse and understand equities, and Flopzilla, which helps you understand how different ranges connect with different types of flops. These are as essential for a poker player as a gym is for a bodybuilder. Put in the hours.
While learning about poker, I also learnt a lot about myself – and some of those lessons were difficult ones. But let’s leave that for another day.
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For more, do check out the Range Rover archives.