Imagine if you were playing in one of the biggest poker tournaments of your life. You’re getting close to the money. You’re nervous. It seems like there are so many things that you are supposed to keep track of, and it’s all coming at you so fast. You look down at Ace – Jack and raise.
This guy in the big blind, who seemed to be picking on you all day, re-raises. “Not this time pal, I’ve got a real hand,” you say to yourself. You re-raise him back. You must have almost half your stack in the middle now.
He looks at you for a while, then calls.
The flop comes out all small cards. He insta-shoves. You’re so mad but you have to fold.
That is the beginning of the end for that tournament.
He used a classic “Stop-and-Go” move. And because you didn’t know that move existed, he got half your stack.
There’s an interesting psychological quirk that happens to many poker players when they are working on their game, it’s called the Dunning-Kruger effect. It states that unskilled people overestimate their ability. In other words, you don’t know what you don’t know.
In 1999 at Cornell University in upstate New York, Dr. David Dunning and Dr. Justin Kruger were sharing a laugh about a news item. Seems there was a bank robber who thought he could make himself invisible to surveillance cameras by rubbing lemon juice all over his face. His logic was that since lemon juice can be used as an invisible ink to send secret messages, then if he covered his face in lemon juice, the security cameras would not be able to see him.
This got Dunning and Kruger to thinking, and after a series of tests with undergraduates, they found that the lowest scoring group on the test vastly overestimated their performance.
They formalized the findings into what’s now known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
To put this another way for poker players, it’s nearly impossible for you to know the things that you don’t know. This manifests itself all the time at the table. You’ll see a person with a small pocket pair call three bets on an extremely scary board and win the pot.
He’ll say something like, “I had a pocket pair.” As the rest of the table shakes their collective heads in disbelief. This player doesn’t know about board texture or scare cards. From his perspective, a pocket pair is a strong hand. So he calls three streets, and gets rewarded with a big pot when you were bluffing with Ace high.
So how do we uncover the things about our own play that we don’t know we are bad at? That seems like an impossible task. How do we set out to learn about the things that we don’t know we don’t know?
That is the inherent problem with most poker training websites. After you sign up, you are dropped into a sea of videos. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure style of learning. So you watch a video on 3-betting. Then another video where a pro makes a deep run in an online tournament. You see him make a sick move. The next time you’re in your local tournament, you try to imitate that sick move, and it backfires horribly.
What went wrong?
Most likely, there are many, many skill and knowledge steps between you and that pro that you don’t know even exist.
What would be really great is if you could sit down with a professional player and just start at the beginning.
Say to the pro, “If I had never played a hand of poker, and you were going to teach me how to become a world class tournament player, where would we start?”
Then along the way, there are going to be some things that you already know pretty well, but there are also going be many things that you don’t know. Many things that you had misconceptions about, and many things that you had backwards in some way.
But the cool thing would be that you’d be fixing leaks and making adjustments the entire way as you listened. When it came time to make an advanced play, you’d actually understand why that move works, and under what circumstances you should deploy it.
That’s a totally different way to learn poker.
If you could sit down with a multiple WSOP bracelet winner, what’s the one question you’d want to ask him? Leave your question in the comments below.