Darkened Poker

I have noticed a lot of posts on other blogs and forums like 2+2 where people are getting down and giving up after just playing poker for a few years.  They say things like “I am still making mistakes and if I meant to be a poker player I should be getting it by now”.   I feel for these guys as the learning process can be brutal and the set backs many, but they are giving up for the wrong reasons way to early.

There has been a lot of research into the learning process as everyone has been trying to figure out if there is such a thing as natural talent or is everything a learned skill.  After years of tracking kids progress from all ranges of IQ’s, incomes, ages and genes through a lot of different disciplines ( chess, music, sports, engineering).  They are coming to a consensus that what really matters is time, in general an expert level in most anything can be reached by someone of an average IQ in about 10,000 hour of practice.  An excellent read on this subject is “Talent Is Overrated”.

So our parent were right, it does just take a lot of hard work and practice.  The hard part is getting that much practice as 10,000 hours is quite a bit of time.

10,000 / 12 hour days / 6 days a week = 2.67 years of nothing but poker

10,000 /  8 hour days / 6 days a week = 4.0 years of full time poker

10,000 /  3 hour days / 6 days a week = 10.6 years of working + poker

These numbers are kind of interesting because they closely follow what we have seen in poker thus far.  After the money maker affect of 2003 poker was dominated by nothing but amateurs.  These guys had been playing for years and started coming out of the home games and into the casino’s, tournaments and WSOP.  Very few of them were really great so the pro’s were sharing the spot light with a bunch of random different amateur at the final table of every event.

2-3 years later we saw the rise of retired or independently wealthy people that started to make more than their fair share of final tables.  Right after poker got popular these guys had been playing a little all their lives but now had all the time in the world to devote to it and were the first ones to really get good and consistently run up against the pro’s.  Watch all the early WPT final table interviews, its always some retire or rich guy that got hit with the poker bug.

4.0 years later we saw the rise of the young guns in poker that through numbers and skill in  new style of play started dominating the poker events.  These kids that start playing online poker right after 2003 in high school almost full time and then dropped out of college 4 years later when they realize how good they had got and how much money they could make.  Watch the 2005 -2006 WSOP and WPT events, these kids replaced the retired and wealthy people as the challengers to the pro’s.

The 10.6 years is the rest of us poor saps, we get sucked into poker but already have life full of responsibilities and can only devout a small amount of time to its study.  Like it or not this groups progress will be at least twice as long as everyone else.  It is 10,000 hour of good practice so staying up till 4 am just to compensate and get more hours in is not going to work.  After a full day of work and putting the kids down a 4 am study session is going to be minimal gain at best and more than likely you will be so mentally numb that your just dumping your bankroll.

And this longer learning curve is were the trouble starts, they see all these young kids in high school getting really good really quick and passing them.  They start to think there is something wrong with themselves as they are older, wiser, have more patients but are suddenly getting their butts kicked.  They ask these young guns how long they have been playing and the answer is just a couple of years so they think they must be to old to learn or something like that and give up.

Don’t give up, it is just a matter of time.  The games are not going anywhere and if you keep practicing you will get just a good as everyone else.  It is kind of a downer that we were not born in 1982 and was just hitting 21 in 2003 after playing online poker full time for 3 years while living at home.  We would all be very rich right now.  But the great thing about poker is once you learn you can play for the rest of your life so there is no real hurry to get to the finish line.

If you fall into the last group you just need to re-adjust your expectations and realize that you may still have a few years of practice left before winning your WSOP bracelet.  Mark my words though in 2013 we will have gotten our 10 years of practice and the internet kids, retired, independently wealthy and the pro’s will have to share the WSOP with us again.

♣♥♦

Tags: Deliberate Practice, Learning process, Poker, WPT, WSOP

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