http://www.pokerstrategy.com/video/19725/Someone else posted this link on another thread. I have watched it and the guy talks about the math (american) of why he did this and what reason the other guy did this yada yada yada. If this kind of analysis is possible in the 4 seconds he is making the decisions in then i fucking give up as i am clearly playing against rainman. the guy has had 6 months to put together analysis and a powerpoint presentation on 2 hands and trying to claim his thought process during the hand was possible to this level.
he's full of shit right?
thoughts?
Wrong.
The best way I can think of explaining this is by using an example. In Jared Tendler's "The Mental Game of Poker" he talks about 4 levels of competence that can be broadly used to generalise development in any discipline/skill/game etc/. These are:
Unconscious Incompetence - You don't know what you don't know, complete beginner.
Conscious Incompetence - You've become conscious of what you don't know, you begin to understand where and how you need to improve.
Conscious Competence - After countless hours of study you become skilled/have had enough experience to gain skill. You need to think about what you've learned...otherwise you return to being incompetent.
Unconscious Competence - At this level you've learned something so well that it is now totally automatic and requires no thinking. In poker this could be anything from folding 23o utg to understanding why someone is exploitable when they open x amount of hands and cbet y board with z frequency. In the book he refers to this as "The Holy Grail of Learning".
The point of this is that in order to reach a higher level of thought you need to first establish the thought process over hours and hours of study and practice, only then does it become second nature. When it becomes second nature you can focus you energy on other intricacies of whatever it is you are doing. In poker this might be fake tells, reading other people when not in a hand, developing strategies and adjustments to your ranges when not in a hand etc. etc. This imo, is what seperates a good player from a great player.
I could write an entire essay on the subject of poker and learning and how it is applicable to every aspect of you life, exercise, dating/relationships, investing, business etc etc but that would be beyond the scope of a poker forum discussion and take a lot of time. Instead I'l give you one of my favourite examples from the book "Blink" by Malcom Gladwell. In it, an experienced firefighter uses unconscious competence to save lives. I don't recall it word for word but here is a paraphrase:
"A researcher tells the story of a firefighter in Cleveland who answered a routine call with his men. It was in the back of a one-and-a-half story house in a residential neighborhood in the kitchen. The firefighters broke down the door, laid down their hose, and began dousing the fire with water. It should have abated, but it didn't. As the fire lieutenant recalls, he suddenly thought to himself, "There's something wrong here," and he immediately ordered his men out. Moments after they fled, the floor they had been standing on collapsed. The fire had been in the basement, not the kitchen as it appeared. When asked how he knew to get out, the fireman thought it was ESP, which of course it wasn't. What is interesting to Gladwell is that the fireman could not immediately explain how he knew to get out. From what Gladwell calls "the locked box" in our brains, our fireman just "blinked" and made the right decision. In fact, if the fireman had deliberated on the facts he was seeing, he would have likely lost his life and the lives of his men.
It took well over two hours of questioning for the fire lieutenant to piece together how he knew to get out. (First, the fire didn't respond as it was supposed to; second, the fire was abnormally hot; third, it was quiet when it should have been noisier given the heat.)"I like this example because it's applicable to poker in that it explains why great poker players can make bad poker videos (see itallics), and why old people always think and say stuff like "there's no substitute for experience".
Finally if you don't understand how you can actually study a poker hand for hours (i.e. what a poker hand is made up of in terms of maths, ranges etc) you are at the level of unconscious incompetence when it comes to deeply analysing a poker hand. Basically, listen to the guy in the video and work out how to study hand for yourself/what tools are out there to do so.
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