Recently, I’ve been on a couple of poker podcasts and one of the things I’ve talked about is poker mental coaching and why I’m so critical of it. The following is from page 169 - 171 of our book Poker and More written by David Sklansky and myself and is from the psychology section which I wrote. It’s really all you need to know to understand why I believe that most of the poker mental coaching is fairly worthless.
Idea No. 3: The components of a game. While this idea is addressed in some detail in Real Poker Psychology, I don’t put it in these terms, and by doing so I think it’s a little easier to understand. Basically, you can divide almost any game into two components, the knowledge component and the execution component. The following is from the “It’s Not What You Eat” chapter starting on page 142:
To understand this better, let’s take another look at tennis. Suppose you’re a good tennis player, are on the court, and your opponent hits the ball over the net and now it’s your turn to hit it back. What do you do?
I believe that two things happen. First, you instantly know what you want to do. That is, you’ll decide what spot on the court you want to hit the ball to, how hard you’ll want to hit it, how much and what kind of spin you’ll want to put on it, and so on.
Notice that so far we’re talking about the knowledge component. Continuing with the excerpt:
Next you’ll have to do this, and that requires timing, speed, and coordination.
And now we’re talking about the execution component. Continuing with the excerpt:
Now let’s look at poker. It’s your turn to act and you have a decision to make. Suppose your opponent has bet and you have to decide whether to fold, call, or raise, and if the game is no‑limit how much to raise. Of course, a good player will know what to do in almost all situations quite quickly, and the remaining spots will take a little more time…
Clearly, this is the knowledge component of poker. Continuing with the excerpt:
…but will he need timing, speed, and coordination to get it done? That answer is no.
Again, this is the execution component of poker.
However, notice something interesting, the execution component in poker doesn’t exist, or if it does exist, it must play a minor role compared to the knowledge component. In an athletic sport like tennis, the execution component is quite important, and in my opinion in many athletic sports it’s probably more important than the knowledge component.
So why is this important? Well, the answer is that when I read the poker psychology books, and I also assume this is true of the coaching/counseling that many of these people sell, there’s a ton of stuff that clearly comes from the execution component of the sports world and is essentially worthless in poker. So we hear about unconscious competence, how it takes 10,000 hours of study and play to be an elite player, taking deep breaths (which I assume makes you more relaxed), and of course being thankful for the hot shower that you took in the morning which has something to do with gratitude which I assume is supposed to reduce stress. But I also don’t see how any of this helps to improve your knowledge of the game which is what you use to make your playing decisions.
