I'm confused about this. Tote once said that you should be beating 25/50 before you start teaching people how to play cos if you ain't beating 25/50 you are prob lacking in some fundamentals and may teach some stuff incorrectly. The games have got tougher since then perhaps it's gone down to 5/10 now? How do you know if your coach is teaching you correctly or not? I can't beat 2/4 so I can't be good enough to mentor.
I don't necessarily agree with Totalise about this, of course the mentors aren't going to be perfect (who is) but they may be able to help point out a few leaks and improves someones play, that has to be worth it. Just because someone can or can't beat 25/50 doesn't mean they cannot help someone out. I am former maths teacher and some of the worst teachers I had was when I was at university and some of the best maths teachers i have seen didn't even have a degree in maths.
Fwiw Byron you are probably doing yourself down and correct me if im wrong you have made living out of poker for a good few years, surely you would be able to offer decent advice to less experienced players not that im volunteering/pressuring you, just saying.
My brother wanted to learn poker so I gave him a list of books, he joined cardrunners, emailed maybe 5 hands total to me and I did one coaching session while he played and I'm embarressed to say he's probably equal to me if not better now. If people want to be mentored should they not read books, strat forums and join a training site first? For example Mad has posted a hand about commitment on this forum I dunno if non mods are allowed to reply or not but my answer to that hand would be to read Pro NL. The whole book is about commitment, it would be impossible to condense it all into one post. Mad has a mentor but apparently hasn't read the best book by a zillion miles on NL. I'm not trying to have a go, really I'm not but if I wanted to learn almost any subject I would read the good texts on it before getting lessons.
Of course there are a tonne of resources out there, but people learn better in different ways. One of these methods is mentoring and can work alongside other forms of learning.
So is this mentoring thing meant to be for beginners - if so why don't they do what my brother did first? Or is it for more experienced players, if so put me on the List! But if I ask the question here aren't I effectively asking for charity? I could pay any one of dozens of poker coaches to teach me why should I ask someone to do it for free? There are clearly some excellent players who post on Blonde who I would love to mentor me, but why should they give their time up to teach a donk like me when they could go work in Oxfam for a few hours or something instead?
It is not necessarily for beginners though of course the whole learning centre is focussed at that group. If people don't wish to mentor for free, they won't volunteer. I don't see it as charity or anything like that and im volunteering because its something im happy to do, I certainly im not a great or even good poker player but if i can help someone out on even the smallest leak that will be enough. Can you teach poker in Oxfam shops, I might look into it?
Not trying to have a pop just trying to clarify exactly what you guys are trying to do here.
No offence taken, you have made some interesting points. So are you intersted in being a mentor or a student,Byron?
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