Learning from my sports heros

I saw a Saturday Night Live sketch recently when Lance Armstrong was the host that was funny, but also (intentionally or not) had a great message behind it. In the sketch Lance had entered a triathalon and after the swim found himself in last place. But, of course when he got to the cycling leg he blew past everyone easily and took the lead. Then when he got to the run he started waving his arms and legs around wildly without making any progress. The commentators said things like "oh my god it turns out Lance Armstrong, one of the greatest atheltes of all time does not know how to run."After the "race" he was "interviewed" and when asked what happened he said "geez, I guess I focused too much on the cycling." The point that came out here is that you can't just focus on what you're best at if you want to be great at something.

Larry Bird used to have this idea as the pillar of his off season training. He was always a great 3-point shooter, but instead of shooting three's all summer he'd work on rebounding or ball handling or whatever he was having trouble with.

One of the tough things about poker is there aren't any drills and there is no practice. It's hard to work on your weaknesses even if you know what they are. And most of the time it's tough to tell if it's something you're doing wrong, something your opponents are doing to you or something the cards are doing. The closest thing to a dry run is playing for less money against weaker competition in order to try out some new tactics. Unfortunately there isn't much to be learned about beating down weak competition for not much money. Playing against people better than you is the best way to improve, but in order to do that you've got to put more money on the line than you normally would (the more money you're playing for, the better the players).

A few things I've been working on are stopping to think and challanging convention. It's easy to go on autopilot and just make a standard decision (especially when you're playing 6 games at a time), but sometimes if you think about it you can come up with something better. I tend to act on my first impulse, my first read. But, I'm trying to stop more and take some time, even if it's just 5 seconds, to make sure I've thought about the pros and cons of every reasonable course of action. Usually my gut reaction was the best, and the vast majority of the time decisions I'm making are totally cut and dry. But sometimes I'm surprised at the difference taking a few seconds on a key decision can make. Furthermore, there are certain ways that almost all "poker experts" would recommend that you play certain hands. The problem is all the books and articles, even if they are on one specific topic, aren't written specifically for me; they're written for everyone. I know more about the way people play in my games than the authors. In my specialty, online single table tournaments, I've got more experience than any author writing about general no limit tournament strategy so I need to first look to my own opinion of what's best.

Another athelete that I'd like to emulate is Tiger Woods. Of course he's talented and has a great work ethic, but you'll also hear that he's the best golfer in the world between the ears. I wouldn't mind having the ability to hit a 350 yard drive, but I'm more interested in what it takes to make a 6 foot putt with everything on the line. Furthermore he treats every shot with equal care, whether he's 10 shots off the lead and trying to finish 45th instead of 46th, or he's tied for the lead going into the last hole of a major tournament.

I'm trying to take the emotion out of my poker game. It's easy when I'm winning and have been winning to be logical, calm and cool headed. And this attitude usually leads to more winning. On the other hand when I'm losing, and have been losing day after day, I find it almost impossible to stay calm and play my best. Also I'm trying to take every hand seriously. Sometimes after a long day where I've played literally thousands of hands it's easy to let my concentration slip on the last few (or last few hundred) hands. Some hands are more important than others, but they all need to be treated with care.

I read an article recently that talked quantitatively about winning and losing. The article claimed that for the average person the pain of losing was about 2.5 times as severe as the joy of winning. So winning $250 is as pleasant as losing $100 is painful. This sounds about right to me. If you take this as a given then you can find yourself ahead and still be pretty upset. Give yourself 1 "happy point" for a dollar won and 2.5 "sad points" for a dollar lost. Now imagine a scenario where you play 10 hands and win $100 on 6 of them and lose $100 on 4 of them. You're ahead $200 in 10 hands. Great! But how do you feel about it? Well you picked up 600 happy points, but all that happiness and then some was washed away by your 1000 sad points. Sounds pretty sad to me. As a professional poker player part of my job is to buck these natural feelings and try to stay as logical as possible.