By
grapsfan |
Published
Jul 18 2009, 09:31 AM
I recently returned from a week in Gifu, Japan with sporadic Internet access (mostly off), no cell phone coverage, and no English-language channels on the hotel television. Deprived of information I could comprehend, my mind drifted…to the topic of how we consume and comprehend new information.
I’ve been an admirer of musician Michael Franti and his various projects (Beatnigs, Disposable Heroes, Spearhead) since I was in college. Yeah, he’s been around a long time. Well, he has a great new single out called “Say Hey”, and I think it’s the catchiest song released in the last year or so. Is it that obvious my iPod was a close companion during my Gifu sojourn? Anyway, in this song, Franti has a line where he sings, “The more I see, the less I know.”
I feel precisely this way about life in general. When you’re bombarded with unfamiliar stimuli and new information, the brain’s natural reaction is to filter most of it out. The person who can remember everything they hear and see is exceptionally rare. This goes doubly for data indicating an internal flaw. Nobody wants to hear news regarding our ineptitude, and we typically tune out someone telling us we’re doing something wrong.
Poker is a perfect example of this philosophy. After some time (multi-tabling online, this time is fairly short), you develop a general style of play, based mostly on your personality and what seems to work for you. Do you have the patience to wait for hands, and maintain enough focus to know what to do when you get them? Are you comfortable with pushing the envelope and gambling every perceived edge to get a huge stack? Do you know what to do with the huge stack when you get it? Is your biggest advantage in post-flop play, or knowing the best short-stack push/fold ranges pre-flop?
Whatever style you play is fine, as long as you’re winning. Where the game gets complicated is in the attempt to increase your knowledge base, and modify philosophies or styles to take the next steps in competition or financial return. You open your mind up to new ideas and strategies. You try to become someone else, in an attempt to match his or her results and success.
There’s only one catch: unless medical technology has dramatically changed during my isolation, you can’t become someone else. You can only be you, with your limitations, tendencies, and deepest-rooted fears and insecurities. Expecting to get away from what has worked for you for so long, just because you read a book or watched a video, is like trying to push a cart sideways.
This isn’t to say we can’t add new tricks to our repertoire. On the contrary: as our opponents get better, we have to if we want to keep playing profitable poker. But how?
This is what I thought about in Gifu, Japan.
And the answer I came up with is…baby steps. Slow the rate of new information to a crawl, absorbing each small increment along the way before moving on to the next.
The “baby steps” concept goes against our inner being. Humans are, by nature, gluttonous when it comes to things we like and are excited about. I get a new book, and I read it. All of it. I sign up for a training site, and you can’t get me to stop browsing new instructional videos, chock-full of insight from great players. I want the Holy Grail of Poker, and I want it yesterday.
We have to be disciplined enough to put the brakes on, and let our subconscious catch up with what just flooded our short-term memory.
Identify one problem you have, focus on it, and make sure you have the fix in place before moving on to the next issue. Let’s say you have no difficulty in accumulating a big stack in a tournament, but often gamble or tilt it away before reaching the serious money. So you decide to improve your tournament results with a subscription to a training site. Good idea.
Should you sit down and watch all the videos right away? Absolutely not! To deal with the gamble problem, find the tightest pro you can, and watch their videos. Look for hands where they make the big laydown to protect their stack. Listen to their thought process in accurately assigning hand ranges. Understand what they’re doing, and why. Nothing else exists but you, the pro who has the answer to your problem, and the problem itself.
Now, you think you’ve got it under control. You’re ready to change gears and nit it up, if necessary. Do you move on to the next video, by the next big-name pro? Absolutely not! Put your time in at the tables, with the express intent of practicing what was just preached. Drop down a buy-in level or two, to make sure the money you might lose playing out of your comfort zone causes no additional pain. Play until the new technique is as much a part of you as what came before.
After you’re good and ready (nothing wrong with being overly cautious), then you can identify the next leak and find the next bit of information to help you along the way. Plug one leak at a time.
Make small, incremental moves.
Take baby steps.
The less you see, the more you’ll remember.
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