Well I'm back in Austin, and I have to say, it's good to be home. I've now recouped a bit and washed all the degen off me, so I sat down at my desk to get to writing the blog post I promised. In my previous entry, I told people that I would write a blog post on a prompt chosen by my readers. So after checking out all the messages I got on Twitter (@INTERNETPOKERS) and the comments on here, it looks like prompt #2 won by a landslide: "on the difference between poker theory and poker play, and how they relate to study/practice." It's too bad, I was rooting for "how to play K motherfucking Q". I've got all sorts of top tips on how to raise preflop and stuff!

Well, grab a snack, buckle in, and brace yourself for some good ol' fashioned poker philosophy.

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Let us Consider the Poker Player

We all know that the first and foremost goal of a poker player is to improve his game. Whether it be his playing, his studying, his staying up at night thinking about hands - a poker player is always in pursuit of the mastery of his craft. Well, poker players tend to be an unreflective bunch, so aside from a burning desire to bolster his ego, we might ask: what does it take to become a master of poker? If we are to consider this question, it is helpful to first define and understand mastery itself. For the purposes of this question, we shouldn't look at mastery solely in poker but at mastery in general, because our ideas and intuitions about poker may cloud our objective evaluation of its meaning. We should look at mastery generally, and see what we can learn from it about poker. What does mastery mean, and how is it attained?


The Definition of Mastery

The concept of mastery has been studied by many researchers through history and has featured extensively in literature. For our purposes we can define mastery simply as reaching the pinnacle of skill in some field. Looking at masters of chess, carpentry, music, or whatever, the persistent question arises - what does it take to become a master? What, if anything, do masters of their crafts have in common? Well, I'll save you the breadth of literature and examples, but if you are familiar with the book Outliers by popular author Malcolm Gladwell, you may have heard the phrase "10,000 hours of deliberate practice." Studies of masters of varying fields and crafts all seemed to point to this result - among other things, it seems that nearly everyone who achieved mastery of their craft needed to put in 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. It seems like a sensible result, but before we can translate this conclusion into poker we must take a close look at what is meant by "deliberate practice."

Deliberate practice is difficult to define because it can mean different things for different areas of expertise. But it's clear that anything that constitutes deliberate practice must share these characteristics: it must be a focused activity, it must be designed specifically to improve performance, it must be repetitious, it must give direct unambiguous feedback, and it must allow the practitioner to self-correct. The deliberate practice of any skill therefore ought to be designed for optimal, efficient conditioning. So if you devise a system of deliberate practice for poker, you must keep these criteria acutely in mind. What is the best and most efficient way to condition yourself to play better poker? Stop reading and think about this question for a moment. It's a vital question that we are likely to pass over all too easily.


The Two Skillsets of Poker

Poker is a mental game. It is easy to conclude that because of this, as long as two people reach the same idea in their mind then they can make the same play in a poker game. In a game that requires no real physical ability, it seems like there should be few barriers stopping one from arriving at the correct play. Of course this is in some sense technically true, but this truism can rapidly be stretched too thin. The reality (which few people acknowledge) is that although poker is in some sense a "mental game," it is not a game that has one uniform mental skill that we call "poker skill." Actually, there are two distinct skillsets in poker which comprise your poker skill on the whole.

The first skillset is poker theory, and the second skillset is poker play (i.e. your instincts/habits). We group these together casually and call it skill, but these two skillsets are actually distinct systems. In fact it is helpful to think of them as two separate mental pathways in your brain. That is, there are two fully compartmentalized neuronal systems that you are developing as you improve your skill in poker, and they must be maintained and improved in different ways.

Poker theory is self-explanatory. Poker theory is your ability to dissect hands in a vacuum, to talk about lines and discuss hypotheticals. It is, in short, to be able to come up with the "solution" to a hand. It's a puzzle-solving skill. You learn all of the tools, the lines, the sleights of language and the concepts that are supposed to lead to profitable plays, you fasten them together and you come up with good lines. You can imagine that if poker were taught in universities, what they'd learn would be called poker theory. The second skillset is very different - it is on the opposite end of the spectrum. Poker play is a set of habits and intuitions. It's more akin to muscle memory than mental maneuvering; it's clicking the right button out of three with a 2-3 second reaction time. It's seeing a flop and instantly interpreting what its texture means, or seeing a checkraise and instantly knowing it's not a common bluffing spot, or seeing AQo preflop and instantly knowing it's good to 3-bet. Poker play is what makes you unable to pull off that river checkraise bluff, or what makes you give up too many pots when you call 3-bets, even though you "know it's bad." Poker theory is the part of your brain that treats a poker hand as a puzzle; poker play is the part of your brain that treats it as an experience.

The Gulf between Theory and Play

It's easy as a poker player to think that there is a great deal of overlay and interaction between these two systems. You might think "well, the reason I 3-bet AQo preflop is because of all of the poker theory I've studied," but this is drawing causality after the fact. It's like saying that because you read your driver's manual, you take right turns on red lights. But the reality is, you take right turns automatically; the part of your brain that knows what's in a driver's manual is never called upon while you're actually driving. In fact, if you observe the way people actually play poker, the vast majority of spots that people think they are actively evaluating and thinking through, all they're really doing is recalling preconceived strategies. Poker theory is complex, while poker play is basic; poker play is not your ability to understand a sentence, but more like your ability to understand individual words. It is pre-lingual, so to speak. Poker theorizing is a more language-based and methodical process, rather than an intuitive one. Poker theory involves a series of steps, some mathematical and some conceptual, and it follows a distinct and (usually) logical process.

If you watch an experienced poker player playing even a fast-paced game of heads up poker, what you'll soon realize is that in less than of 10% of spots is there any true theorizing going on. And by that I mean - all that the player is really doing in those 90% of spots is sifting through their intuitions and all of the memories that arise through their experience; there is no methodical, logical re-evaluation of what's going on. If this player played this spot 100 times over, he would likely never arrive at a novel interpretation of the hand. That is not to say that he'd never make a different decision, but he would never truly reformulate his ideas on the hand, or invent anything new.

It's important not to see 90-10 disparity between actual play and poker theory as a personal failing on the part of average players, or worse yet, "the difference between grinders and great players" (a coinage which I find rather throwaway). This 90-10 gulf is actually true for everyone, great players included. And it's just how it should be! The conscious brain simply does not have the capacity to be actively computing so many complex poker problems. This is the only way your brain could handle processing hands at the rate at which you play them. Poker theorizing is a much more involved and careful mental process than poker playing is, so it's no wonder that we spend so little time during play doing it.


Bridging the Gap

You might think to yourself - "well, if my poker theory is totally separate from my actual poker play and I'm not even using my poker theory in more than 10% of my spots, then how can I improve the other 90% of my game?" It might seem as though there's a great dam holding back your poker theory from spreading into your poker play, since 90% of the time you're simply doing what your instincts and intuitions are already telling you, even if an examination of the poker theory you know would lead you otherwise. This phenomenon is why you see curiosities such as players who understand poker theory very well, yet can't beat the games; it also explains why these type of players far outnumber the really strong players with little grasp of theory. It is possible to become a great player with little understanding of poker theory, but it generally takes a lot of luck to happen upon a viable set of poker habits, and such players tend to not have much longevity (think Zigmund, etc.) since they don't have any grasp of poker theory to help them adjust to evolving games. You might even go so far as to say that the law of large numbers predicts both a lot of people who understand poker theory and suck at playing poker, and very few people who don't understand poker theory yet are demonstrably very good at poker. It is clear that both poles exist.

So how does one in the end overcome this dilemma? It's all well and good to call attention to this gulf between theory and play, but how do we breach it and try to improve that other 90% of our poker game? Well, it all comes back to deliberate practice. Remember, deliberate practice is the quickest and most efficient way of conditioning a skillset. But since there are two skillsets in poker, it would seem that there should actually be two forms of deliberate practice - one for theory, and one for play. What comprises deliberate practice for theory? Well, this should be obvious - reading poker books, discussing hands on forums, talking about poker, or even watching videos. All of this engages directly with the poker theory part of your brain (the part that treats poker hands as a puzzle). But what is there for poker play? If you look at the list we've assembled - you've almost exhausted all of the standard things that people jump to when they think about improving their poker games. Well, the truth is, usually when people talk about improving their poker games, what they really mean would be more precisely that they are working on improving their poker theory. Poker theory is far more accessible to the conscious brain for conditioning, re-evaluation, and molding, since it is localized on a more conscious and rational level of thought.

Deliberate Performance

The question remains - what constitutes deliberate practice for poker play? As accords the definition we stated before for deliberate practice, it must be something that actively conditions our intuitions, is repetitive, self-correcting, etc. Well, here's the catch-22 - in poker, there is no difference between practice and performance. Practice IS performance. In most activities, one can break down the action into discrete steps and practice on simplified subsections of the overall activity. Think of a concert pianist repeating a certain coda, or a chess player examining a board and simulating various outcomes. In poker, this is not possible. Because poker is a game played for money, you can hardly play a 400NL game to practice for 400NL (since it would be itself the performance, since the same money would be on the line), and you certainly can't play a 100NL game to practice for a 400NL game, because the player pool and difficulty is different. If you could, poker would be a very different sort of game, but such is the unfortunate reality. Deliberate practice in poker is actually very hard to achieve, which is why for a game with such high monetary stakes, there are so few true masters of the game. Compared to something like chess or even music, it seems almost preposterous that relatively few players can play poker on a high level. The bottom line is, all of this makes it very clear that it's possible to learn and even become good at poker theory, but it is exceedingly difficult to become good at poker.

This article is running long and it's getting late, so I'll cut to the money-shot: what's the bottom line? How should you set up your poker studying or poker habits to best condition your poker playing? Well, since deliberate practice is no different from performance for poker play, the answer is twofold: our first goal should be to make our performance more like deliberate practice. The second goal is to try to create more interplay between your poker theory and your poker play.


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Now, unfortunately it's been a few days since I've been banging out this article and it's gotten pretty long. I could go into a lot more detail about how to develop good study habits in poker, but that's a whole topic on its own. But if you're interested in learning, I've decided I will be doing an online seminar on the topic.

As I was working on this article, I showed it to my good friend Tri Nguyen (aka Slowhabit) for his thoughts, and he suggested that I try doing a web seminar on this topic. He told me a lot of people would find it very interesting, and that I'm known from my videos as being an engaging speaker. I've never done a proper web seminar before but I really enjoy teaching, and this is a topic that I'm passionate about that doesn't seem to get much play in the common poker discourse.

Go to this link and sign up: http://www.dailyvariance.com/theory-vs-play/ for my seminar, which will be July 24th, 2011 at 11AM PST. If you sign up now, you will receive some free audio (check out more details on the site). *** My web seminar comes with a 100% Risk-Free Guarantee. If you are not satisfied - for any reason at all - ask for a full refund! No questions asked. *** It's about 5 days from now, which will give me some time to prepare in-depth material on the topic and go further down the rabbit-hole of breaking down the interplay between theory and play in studying poker. I am going to look at specific studying habits that high-stakes players use to improve their poker play, and various techniques that I teach my students which will make reviewing hands and sessions much more effective. If you don't want to check it out then don't of course, I don't want to make my blog all lame and commercial-y, but I'm actually kind of excited about this project and I hope to make it worth it. But I'll do my best not to blast it into your ears with a megaphone.

Over the next few days I'll be preparing some material to use in my seminar, also trying to research real estate in Vancouver. If anyone has any good tips on Vancouver living, let me know... but it looks like the prices in downtown Vancouver are pretty steep, haha. I guess that's to be expected.


Oh, and check out this song. Sweet Jesus on a pogo stick!





Thanks for reading,

Haseeb