Full House
Join Date: Mar 2008
Posts: 605
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Kind of spoon to pretend to be aghast at the revelation that dranger doesn't do as much studying as he should.
The problem is... noone ever really tells you exactly how much you need to study or almost more importantly why.
The things you need to know to play poker well are all pretty simple. But to play poker well you need more than to know them. You need to structure the correct way to view and think through a hand and then you need to repeat this process even if it has no challenge and lots of boredom a million times very deliberately and let the brain become optimised in doing this process. The brain itself will develop shortcuts and your understanding will become deeper and deeper, but repetition is key.
Most often what beginners do is to hesitantly get to something that approximates the right process, pat themselves on the back and move on to the next topic. Getting something right once is not really helping anyone. You need to practice practice practice until you get better.
Like I saw something absolutely retarded on TV last night where karate katas were mentioned and my wife made a comment. When she started karate there black belts came on afterwards to do some playing with sticks (kendo?) and as part of their warm up they did the same katas that the newbies were learning. But when they did them it was like a different world - there was so much more precision, speed and power in their movements. Why? Because they were black belts? Because they had learned other fancy moves? No, because they had repeated those katas so many times that they were just really really good at them.
So here it is - if you want to study poker define one meaningful exercise. Like EV calculation or putting someone on a hand range, or do some hand combination additions or whatever. Once you have decided your exercise you formalise how you practice it. Then you prepare a huge stack of exercises for yourself so all the information is there and you just need to run through it. Then you do exercises for 1 hour and count how many you do. And you do the same type of exercise 1 hour a day for a month and by the end of the month you are hopefully completing twice as many exercises (or more) as you do the first time.
That way you get yourself into good habits (going through the right process) which helps stave off tilt - you will be more inclined to auto-pilot in the direction of the ingrained processes. Your brain becomes optimised in doing these kinds of processing and along with the speed with which you can carry out the exercise comes a more profound understanding of it which allows you to better understand connections between different poker topics and apply concepts more correctly more of the time.
Edit note: The key to real mastery of any topic is to get the basic process right and then through repetition achieve an EFFICIENCY| in doing the right thing.
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