It's not often I find in the mainstream poker magazines a piece of advice that is just plain wrong, but here's an example. The February, 2009, Bluff has an article by Sam Chauhan (whoever that is), "Tournament Mindset: Your Beliefs Are Your Reality."
He writes, "I don't care if this is your first tournament or 100th. You have to go into every tournament feeling that you are the best. Why would you give a psychological advantage to any player by telling yourself that he or she is better than you?"
That's just insane. If you are playing in your first-ever poker tournament and you think that you are the best player there, you're delusional. Period. You aren't the best. Without much doubt, you're probably one of the worst. With incredibly rare exceptions of preternatural raw talent, poker is a skill you develop only with time and experience.
In my opinion, what you should be doing is not pumping yourself up with false notions about being the best player, but making realistic assessments of your skills relative to each of your opponents, and on that basis pick your targets selectively. You also need to adjust your play based, in part, on skill differentials. That is the whole concept behind the Kill Phil strategy. In brief, more skilled players have an advantage when playing on later streets, and will be reluctant to get too much money in pre-flop just hoping to get lucky. They will want to play against you in many, many small pots, taking advantage of their skill advantage to outplay you. That's much better for them than shoving with a pair against your A-K on a coin flip. So you exploit that situation by forcing them to play in exactly the way they are trying to avoid. Why play the game on the territory where your opponents are most comfortable and have the edge on you? Better to acknoweldge that they have a skill advantage, and force them to just plain get lucky if they're going to beat you for a big pot.
But if you have deluded yourself into thinking that you're better than every one of your opponents, you can't make concessions like that. And you will, therefore, not make the strategic and tactical adjustments that you should to maximize your chances of success.
Horrible advice, Mr. Chauhan. Just horrible. Do you really enter the WSOP Main Event convinced that you are the single best player out of the thousands there? If so, please have your psychiatrist bump up your medication dosage, because you really need it.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Bad advice in Bluff magazine
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4 comments:
This man has read "The Secret" one too many times.
Awww, don't be so grumpy, Grump. Poor kid just watched too much PBS pledge week crap.
I bet he has a crystal card protector too.
You and I will be his just game with only tinfoil hats too protect us.
I dunno, Rakewell. I didn't read the full article, but I agree generally with the principle that when playing a tournament, you should go in with the belief that you are the best. If not, why are you playing?
I'm not talking about mindless self-delusion as much as self-confidence. If you go in to the game expecting to be outclassed, you will play weak...and be outclassed. Even Doyle Brunson has written about the concept of psyching oneself up. In one of his books, he wrote about a guy who would talk himself up in the mirror before playing, and while Brunson thought it was nuts, it worked. There is something about being in the right mindframe that aids in success.
Maybe that's not what Chauhan was saying, since I didn't read the whole article, but I do believe that some self-delusion (and by self-delusion, I really mean false confidence) is useful to give off an air of actually being competent and comfortable at the table.
I still disagree, High. If I were to enter, say, a WPT event and got a table draw that included Doyle Brunson, Phil Ivey, Daniel Negreanu, Chris Ferguson, and Todd Brunson, I think it would be utter insanity for me to sit there telling myself that I'm the best player at the table, let alone in the whole tournament. That doesn't mean I can't have self-confidence. It just changes the nature of the confidence. I can pump myself up to make smart decisions, to take advantage of how I know those guys play, to exploit the fact that they might think I'm scared of them, to remember not to be intimidated into playing weak-tight, etc. In short, I think that having confidence is a good and essential thing, but that does not need to mean an unrealistic assessment of one's relative level of skill.
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