Black Belt/Bluff Europe Poker Academy

Black Belt/Bluff Europe Poker Academy

The worst way to learn anything is to hear it in a lecture.

It's the least efficient way of absorbing information, and that's the reason why I've tended to dismiss out of hand any idea about the usefulness of Poker Academies and the like.

However, I've also learnt that the most important thing about poker players is that we deserve free things and should always take advantage of this whenever it arises.

And so, nominally in exchange for a post event write up, I went to the Black Belt/Bluff Europe Poker Academy on Saturday (the 10th of April).

My initial – pre event – impressions were good. The scheduled itinerary was split up into easily digestible bite sized portions, and it mixed up straightforward lectures with workshops where hands would be discussed and analysed by the Academy Pro's.

A negative aspect of the Academy day is that this schedule was really only a rough guide.

Although it might seem like a good idea to be flexible about the exact format of the day, it doesn't really work. It could be a good idea for the longer 2 day boot camp that they also run – but essentially there was a lot of content that the organisers were trying to fit into the 7 hours of this day, and the only way that this could really be achieved would be to stick to this type of pre-planned schedule.

The positive flip side of this is that the actual content of the presentations were very good. They covered some good solid poker theory and the immediate feedback in the form of the types of questions that were being asked and the discussions that evolved from these lectures showed that they were all well appreciated and understood by the attendees.

Even better than these were the workshops.

The Academy group were seated on 3 tables and in the different workshop sessions a different Academy Pro acted as dealer so hands were played out and discussed and dissected accordingly. This is the efficient way to learn, it may have lacked the rigorous academic basis of the lecture material but advice given and lessons learned from these workshops are the parts of the day that are going to most directly improve the play of the people who attended.

It was these sessions that I was worried would get curtailed because of the time and timing 'issue'. Both workshops that were played did have their full allocation of time and even slightly longer, as they were just before breaks and ran into them a bit – a good reason to schedule them just before breaks. But there were three workshop sessions scheduled in the published itinerary and it's probably not too hard to guess after I've suggested how important I think they are that I think this was a huge loss to have lost the final one.

The most important question though is – is it worth it?

The short answer is yes.

It's an interesting and entertaining day that will improve your game.

The more complicated question is – is it value for money?

It was originally planned as £200 which included entry into the £50 evening tournament at the Vic, but some considerations meant that this had to be amended to £150 and you could play the £50 tournament afterwards.

As it happens that saves it to a certain extent. When the evening tournament is included in the entry then it becomes a question of – is the Academy value for money and is the tournament value for money. Many people will find that this tournament is not one they want to pay £50 to enter, this might be because they're mainly cash players and it might be because they don't think it's a good enough tournament to pay this entry fee for. Either way when it's included in the overall entry fee then it reduces the value for money you're getting.

Whether it's value for money to attend this Poker Academy at £150 is the complicated part of the complicated question.

If you're playing regularly enough at a high enough level then it's entirely feasible that it could tweak your game enough to increase your winnings enough to earn back what you paid out. That level may be $1/$2 or £1/£2 for example, but it is definitely a level where you are not good enough not to still improve your game from this experience.

Players at a lower level may gain more from the experience, but they're less likely to 'cover their costs' in this way, even with the extra knowledge and advice they have now gained. That's not to say that it isn't good value for them to attend – this is what makes it complicated. To reiterate my previous statement, it's interesting and entertaining and will improve your game, the fact that it might not strictly be cost-effective for some people could be compensated for by the added value of the other factors.

To truly gain the most from the Poker Academies people would have to attend 4 or 5 of them with different lecture line ups. Unfortunately I can't see this ever happening as the cost/benefit ratio would never work for the amount of money this would involve. But a simple follow up might do.

Once the Alumni of a number of different days had experienced the benefit of those lectures and workshops then an Academy Day which was purely composed of workshop sessions would be a very productive use of money. The benefit of being tutored in a small group by the attendant pro's would not only provide value for money for this event but the reinforcement of any ideas they had learned on their first Academy Day would make that initial investment even more cost effective.

All in all it would be a shame if these Poker Academies didn't succeed and thrive. They're a positive addition to the industry landscape and they deserve to go from strength to strength.