I'm reading a book by Mario Livio, Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein – Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe. As the title suggests, it is a study of how even the greatest scientists in history made major mistakes in the course of their work.
In his introduction, Livio writes, “We often blame the wrong causes for our failures. Incidentally, this is one reason why we rarely learn from our mistakes.
If you spend more than five minutes or so taking a walk around the world of poker, I believe you will see the face of every poker player reflected in that reality.
Surely, then, the first necessary step to correcting mistakes in poker is to properly understand what went wrong.
First step: Make the correct diagnosis
The problem is that we poker players, like all humans, find it much easier to blame someone – anyone – for what went wrong, than to stop and take a cold, honest look at how we might have been responsible for it.
Let me show you three examples of the most common types of poker blunders:
- Your friend calls you to complain about a bad beat that knocked him out of a tournament – but he doesn't say a word about the decisions that left him short-stacked, and thus vulnerable to elimination with the occurrence of a single bad card.
- A player at your table becomes irritated when a drunk guy calls his bluff with an unbelievable hand, such as a low pair. “How could you call me with that?” he complains angrily. You notice, however, that he doesn’t blame himself for underestimating the likelihood that his opponent would call.
- You walk home from the casino, still pissed off about losing your entire stack in a coin-flip situation. Your self-pity – “I never win flips” – keeps you from wondering if you could have waited for a situation to put all your money in with a better chance of winning than 50%.
Your doctor has little chance of saving you from an imminent ruptured appendix if he or she wrongly concludes that it’s just indigestion for which you need a dose of Pepto-Bismol. Similarly, you’ll never fix the flaws in your game if you chalk up your diagnosis to dumb luck or other people’s poor decision-making. After all, you can’t change other people’s bad games, or how the cards are dealt. The only thing you can change is how you play.
Step Two: Find the Right Fix
I understand that this seems obvious, but while it may be clearly obvious in general terms, it is not easy to put into practice.
A guy I used to play with sometimes in Vegas had a strange habit of making huge preflop open raises if, and only if, he had pocket AA – around $50 in limit hold’em $1/$2. He would occasionally get called or reraised by pocket KK, but by far the most frequent result was a straight fold. He would happily take the $3 blinds, plus maybe a few blinds from a limper or two. He would show his pocket AA and say something like, “If you want to bust this, I’ll make you pay dearly for it.”
He was convinced of the reason for this play: he was tired of losing big pots with pocket AA, so he decided to do what the old saying goes, “It’s better to win a small pot than lose a big one.”
The problem, of course, is that his approach to fixing this problem fails to maximize the potential gains from the best starting hand in hold'em. His chosen method is actually about 100% effective at protecting him from the pain of losing big pots with pocket AA. But that shouldn't be the goal. The goal is to maximize the average gains from the rare premium hands. The solution is a disaster from that perspective.
Okay, so you've made the right diagnosis and applied the right correction, what else is left for the third step?
Step Three: Get Another Opinion
It's not smart to assume that you've correctly analyzed the problem and found the perfect solution to it. We're much better at spotting other people's mistakes than we are at spotting our own.
Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist who has revolutionized our understanding of how people make decisions. He says, “I’m not very optimistic about people’s ability to change their thinking, but I’m quite optimistic about their ability to detect problems in others.”
Although he made this principle the subject of a scientific study, it is hardly a new concept. Two thousand years before Kahneman, we already had the biblical aphorism about being able to see a speck of dust in our neighbor's eye while not noticing a beam in our own.
Translated and adapted from: Three Sure-Fire Steps to Improving Your Game Skills
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