A look at coaching

It wasn’t long ago that poker coaching involved sitting around a table with some novice and then showing them the rudimentary principles of certain games along with the rules. But with the advent of the internet has come more sophisticated ways of getting information across to the individual. In years gone by then it was poker books that provided the main learning vehicle for new players to improve their poker skills.

But over the past few years, a new trend has immerged with regards poker coaching and that is online poker coaching websites. This has taken poker coaching to a whole new level with many of today’s young online hotshots possessing far more technical knowledge of the game than most of the top live game players of ten years ago.

This is no surprise as the growth of internet poker along with the sheer growth of computer usage in general now means that with the help of software, players can analyse their games in a way that was way beyond even the most avid professional in the past. You can breakdown your entire game with the help of coaching, find out where your weaknesses are, correct them and then come back into the fray, a far better and more technically astute player.

But in this article, I want to look at the sheer advantages of using poker training sites and what they can really do for your game. Despite having played the game for over twenty years and six years professionally online, I recently subscribed to a poker training website just to see if I could learn anything that would improve my game. I think that what stops a lot of the older generation from actually going down this route is one of image and ego.

There are not many poker players in their forties who are prepared to accept that some young kid who has only been playing the game a fraction of the time that they have could in some way be better than them. This I feel provides a highly significant barrier for many players and most of the older generation (far from all) seem reticent to make the necessary changes in order to remain at the top of their game.

I joined Stoxpoker a few weeks ago and never regretted the move. I had played professionally for six years and yet that site still improved my game no end even in my specialist subject which is limit hold’em. The quality and knowledge of the instructors on that site was outstanding and the limit hold’em videos with Nick “Stoxtrader” Grudzien and Bryce Paradis were first rate.

The only thing that I was sorry about was in not joining sooner. In my mind, any experienced player should not prevent themselves from paying for this kind of service. I do not see it as paying for coaching but actually paying to be a part of a poker “think tank” and by doing so you will be listening to and watching some of the best online players in the world in action and talking about why they do some of the things that they do.

I also think that this addresses another often encountered but little understood problem as well and that is one of interpretation. When a person buys a book and reads it, they will only truly digest and remember a very tiny percentage of what they have read. The more that they read the same book, more and more data will be received but it can easily get to a stage where no matter how many more times you read that book, nothing else will sink in.

If the book was dull as many theory books are then the reader can actually start to drift and then reach a state where they are reading but not reading if you know what I mean. I have encountered this problem many times myself so I know that it exists.

This is why for me, coaching videos represent a major leap forward in not only learning and studying the game but in also remembering what you have been taught. It is far easier to recall something that is visual than something that is written and this is why coaching sites are so important in my mind.

Of course like anything else, nothing is guaranteed to make you a winner. The best coaching site out there cannot guarantee success for any player. At the end of the day, there are many facets to successful poker that the players themselves are responsible for and the main one is personal discipline. In this aspect then it is not too dissimilar to being on some weight loss program or diet. It doesn’t really count for an awful lot if you cannot maintain discipline and if you persist in eating bars of chocolate and ice cream then you are not going to lose weight.

It is exactly the same thing with poker, you can buy all the books, watch the best videos and all the rest of it but it is often the “soft” skills that define success. By that I mean having discipline and this comes in many forms. Do you have the necessary discipline to select only the best games? Do you select only the best seats and limits that fit your bankroll? Do you retain composure during bad beats and bad runs? Do you have the discipline to play online and concentrate solely on poker and nothing else?

Do you have the discipline to only play the game that you are best at and nothing else? Many novice players are simply unaware of things like bankroll management and table and seat selection so in those cases this is not a lack of discipline but a lack of knowledge. I am in fact referring to all the players who do know what to do and then for whatever reason only known to them, fail to do the right thing. If you know that what you are doing is wrong but you persist in doing it anyway then you have a discipline problem.

This is what defeats many players who are actually very knowledgeable about the game. But knowledge by itself while being very important is not enough. Poker is a game in which a persons individual personality comes to the fore and there are so many potential personality traits that are not conducive to playing successful poker that sometimes it can be difficult to imagine anyone beating the game at all. But beat the game they do and coaching sites now take a large responsibility in making a player into a winner.

Of course, Stoxpoker is not the only coaching site out there. There is the excellent Cardrunners with people like Brian Townsend, Taylor Caby and Andrew Wiggins contributing. Then we have Poker X Factor, Leggo Poker, Deuces Cracked, Real Poker, Sngicons, GZone to name but a few.

As a long time poker player and poker theorist then I have read and seen more poker material than the vast majority of players and most of it is not very good to say the least. But one of the underlying problems with poker books is that the material that is in many of them is often out of date if the book in question was actually written more than a certain length of time ago.

The online poker environment especially is changing at a very rapid rate indeed and what applies now probably will be out if date this time next year. This is another reason why poker coaching sites are of such tremendous value. They have the finest young poker playing minds on the planet making the videos and the videos are updated constantly with a wealth of new material and ideas on display.

But I do know that many people actually prefer having a book in their hands and I must say that this has a certain appeal to me to. However, I think that as we move into a new high tech era then software and computers play a vital role with regards how much we can actually learn about poker and at what pace. Software and poker training sites can fast track a player from being a novice with very little idea of how to play the game to someone who is very formidable in a relatively short space of time.

I have viewed and seen most things in the online poker world over the years from poker tracking software to automatic bots to poker odds calculators to poker coaching sites. But in my opinion, getting yourself involved with a first class poker coaching site could just be one of the best things that will ever happen to your poker game and if you don’t make the necessary commitment then be rest assured that your opponents will and you will then be in very severe danger of being left at the starting post.

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The Dean is sponsored by Cake Poker and can also be seen at the WPT, ONLINE POKER PRO, POKER PRO EUROPE, HENDON MOB, 2+2, BLONDE POKER, POKER NEWS, ALL AUSSIE POKER, FLUSH