Playing poker with music (response to Schnitzelfisch)

brilliant post

I could not agree more with all your points. I very rarely listen to music when playing as it does affect my concentration especially when tired. The only thing I would say is that I believe one can probably condition oneself to play with music and not be affected by it

You're assuming that everyone plays better with 100% attention though. Not everyone does. It is very possible to overthink things, especially at microstakes where you just gotta valuebet noobs.

What's your opinion on binaural beats?
Do you think it can enhance concentration and learning ability, or is it just placebo?

binaural beats to me is like drugs... better don't use it because you will have at first better mindfulness but you would need to increase binaural beat frequency to sustain that effect that you had at first and without it your mindfulness will decrease, that is just my experience

@metza - This is a different problem though - it's a gametheoretical leak. I don't think it makes sense to decrease your attention superficially in order not to overthink situations. Just work on the problem itself, you become a better player by doing so.

On binaural beats: Here we enter a field which Schnitzelfisch adressed - few studies, missing control groups, weak control for confounding variables. There are hints towards an effect of binaural beats on anxiety, quality of life etc., but more research is needed. Furthermore it depends on what kind of beats you use (frequency, offset etc.). I know there are some on youtube, but I'd be suspicious about the correct frequency ranges etc. To this point I think a large portion of their effects are due to placebo, which is not a bad thing, though. Here I am with Schnitzelfisch - if it works for you, go with it. But don't expect too much from it.
I'd keep in mind though what wealthybrainer said - you get used to them, they lose effectiveness (given there is one) and your baseline decreases. You'll perform worse without them (same like coffee, cigarettes, drugs...).

Edit: If you are more interested in this kind of stuff you can search for yourself on google scholar. Lots of articles are not publicly available, but the abstract usually contains the bottomline, which is sufficient for most people I guess.

There is music - not profit. During a game of poker to be the most relaxed. No unnecessary thoughts and worries on your mind. The maximum that can be listened to, it's classical music, but not loud. Thoughts must be clean and most relaxed nerves.

Very good post. I've always thought maybe I would play better without music, but have never tried it due to me just loving music ♦ Maybe i'll give it a go.

I can hardly be considered an amateur in this field, but I do know I used to play classical music in the classroom with disruptive students aged 11 to 15 and it helped calm them very nicely; except they did ask why they couldn't have eminem instead.
Productivity was indeed increased, but whether that was the music or they were terrified of me is debatable.
Not sure how this would relate to poker though, just my 2c worth.

Extremely interesting topic, and i have thought of this for years actually. I've found out that if i made it a rule to play without music, then i would sometimes make excuses for not play, just because the times goes a bit slower without it.

I've been playing piano since i was 5-6, and loved to find the most difficult and almost impossible songs to learn, and mostly that is classical music.
Then i got the idea to try out opening a playlist full of classical, and it went over expectations until 1 day where i first ran pretty slim, then later very hot, and then suddenly this song popped out, made me tilt, and made my 8 hour grind be break even, because it tilted me so hard, and i realised a bit too late. Like waking up swetting all over because of it:

If ur ears bleed after the first 2 mins, try skip forward to 19 min, and hear the last part. I remember it was like i was watching myself from behind swetting, and my brain hurt and i couldnt think and it actually made me start to go on a downswing. Funny how theese things come up just because of the talk of music ♠_biggrin:

Mr Alfred Schnittke owe me 300$ + the downswing it created afterwards. But hey, i could have discovered myself doing bad much quicker.
Just do urself a favor, if u are going to hear classical, search for beethoven, mozart, chopin (fantasie impromptu, play this on piano, or is a project im working on, only around 15% done, still need 7.5 pages of piano notes ♦). Modern classic music is useless, idiotic, hopeless, and created my lesser people.
Chopin, just like beethoven and mozart was the einsteins of music. They not only understanded it 100%, the LIVED it. Chopin could not be teached more by his teacher when he was 9. He made big composes for orchestres. He started playing instruments when he was 2 or 3. He could lock himself in the room for 4 days, because a play he was working on for a year, needed to be tweaked to perfection, because something just didnt sounded "right".
1810-1849 rip
Beethoven had a almost similiar growth, he however understanded music so much, that when he was 30 and his hearing started to get worse, until he was total deaf before he died as 57, he could still compose and write plays without even hearing them.
1770-1827 rip
Not to mention mozart that is maybe one of the popular classical componists of all time.
1756-1791

The thing theese have i common is they somehow die way way waay to young. chopin 39, beethoven 57 and mozart 35. Dont listen to classical music if it is from 1900+
These caliber just dont come around much anymore. Now its mostly destroying music that is just a big laugh, or even worse, destroys ur mind.

Training this once in a while to play it perfect ;D

Played this once to perfection, but once i learned it, it got boring because it was too easy to play.

Playing this once in a while, dont have to warm up to play this, can play it with closed eyes, and play it to perfection every time without errors. Maybe because i learned this when i was 11-14 (first short version, than the full)

This is supposed to be 6 hour study music, to enhance concentration:

My fav is still chopin though, youtube his name, and u'll find some very nice relaxing songs.

wealthybrainer

binaural beats to me is like drugs... better don't use it because you will have at first better mindfulness but you would need to increase binaural beat frequency to sustain that effect that you had at first and without it your mindfulness will decrease, that is just my experience

Never heard about beats that is supposed to increase mindfulness. And, that it is even doing something to you subconciously if its around 500hz, because you cant really hear it, but you can if the sound is delayed in one of the ears.

Do you have any experience in this, beyond what u have wrote? Like how long it seems to work, before the feeling seems to fade away, and u need to increase hz.
And what was the max hz u stopped at?

Tried to made the post smaller by putting it in a spoiler, but then it got hard to read because of the spaces in bw and the videos that fucked up the layout of the post, sorry ♦

btw, did u know music is like poker. Its math, and that is i guess why beethoven could compose while he was deaf.
Also did u, that if all musician got together, and made 1 song every 9 second, it would only take around 92 years to create all the possible melodies there is? And that todays popmusic, countrymusic and so on, is based on previous succesfull melodies that has been tweaked/changed the tempo. Not hole parts, just popular choruses, and ex some of elvis presleys popular melodies is to be found in many diff music numbers in bits and pieces?

Sorry, this post is getting too long ;D

Theese 2 songs also makes it very easy to understand that music is math.
This song cant be played by 1 human. It can ofc be simplified, and played by 1. And maybe 3 pianist got together they could perform the song in its full potential:

Hey Krach-Bumm-Ente,

I understand your view as a psychologist and I agree with you that psychology is super important, I am actually really interested in behavioural psychology myself.

However, I believe that some parts of your post miss the point as they're based on an assumption that "everyone knows what's best for them". I mentioned in the webinar that everybody should TEST different options and find the one that works best for them. That's a huge difference.

In this case, I think that it makes sense for people to test for themselves how different types of music affect their performance AND also test how they perform without the music.

So it's not that much about knowing what works for you intuitively but actually going and testing different options, writing down results and finding something that works for you.

Psychological studies are very helpful here because they usually give you an idea of what is most likely to work for you, which is awesome because you know where to start. Nevertheless, you generally still don't want to blindly believe in the studies alone as (as you've already mentioned) they can be biased and also you still can be in the 1% of people that perform better differently.

In fact, it might very well be true that people should be able to perform better without music than with music. BUT this probably also depends on their goals a lot. Like you've mentioned, if your primary goal is to grind a lot of hours and you realize through testing that you are able to concentrate better for longer amounts of time with music, you should use it.

However, if you don't grind long hours and you find out through testing that over short term playing without music allows you to concentrate better, you should go with that.

The message that I was trying to get across during the coaching was that you should be OPEN to testing out different options, which allows you to improve your performance.

I really appreciate your post, but I think it was more of a misunderstanding than anything else ;).

And I do have to say that I did get one huge takeaway from it. As you've said, people likely get used to something (listening to music) and take it for granted that "it works well for them", where there might be a better option. So it might make sense for them to read you post and try playing without music, and see if that works better - again testing :).

To conceptualize this and apply it to other areas of our lives, if we are doing the same thing over and over again, we might want to test a different approach from time to time to allow us to improve.

Regards,

-SF

Schnitzelfisch,

I appreciate your response. I guess there was a misunderstanding and we seem to agree on most points, such as being careful about results and considering goals (long hours vs winrate).

However, there are a few problems with people testing for themselves what works best. I know from my experience as a psychologist how biased people are and how subjective assumptions can be VERY far from empirical evidence.
I think especially in poker it is very hard to tell what works best for you. How do you measure? Money won is obviously no way to measure what works (unless you test over huge samples which is not possible in practice). So should we rate by how we feel? In experiments where a person's physiological measures (heart rate, P3-component and alpha activity in electroencephalogram, skin conductance response etc.) and subjective ratings are recorded you can find significant differences. You can still argue over whether it is more important to feel good or to function good. Even if you are happy with the fact that you might not objectively be at your best, but feel like you are, there is still the problem of confounding factors. How much sleep did you get, what did you do before the session, what did you eat, are you hydrated enough, room temperature, air quality etc. Experiments control all these factors, people at home most likely don't.

But yes I think it's safe to say that people should question their habits and have an open mind to change them if they feel like they can benefit from it.

am loving this discussion guys

I think music entirely depends on the person, test it out and you will get an idea if it gets you in a good state or distracts you.

Listening to the radio or worse, a podcast, is a terrible idea though. Anything where someone is talking really diverts your attention away.

My productivity skyrocketed when I stopped listening to the radio and started both working and playing in silence. I won't lie, it did suck a little at first and I found myself seeking out distraction, but I got used to it.

I think Barry here is a perfect example why I believe testing works so well. Yes it might be biased, but to be honest it doesn't matter that much because at least you're taking action and not just reading studies and books.

I also believe that even though you might not be able to find an optimal solution on your own, you will be able to identify what doesn't work for you. For example, like Barry mentioned, listening to podcasts and radio really affected him negatively and by getting rid of that, his productivity skyrocketed.

Can he find an optimal solution on his own? Probably not. But he largely improved his performance by identifying and avoiding the things that don't work for him through testing.

There are so many people that just get stuck with reading hundreds of books and studies and finding the optimal solutions and are never satisfied with anything.

What I have found throughout the last couple of years is that you don't need an optimal solution. You need to focus on the big wins and even 80% solutions work just fine in most cases.

I think it's more valuable for a person to test just ONE thing on their own and find something that works for them (even if it's biased and not optimal, it usually still is a big improvement than to read 10 studies and never apply the advice from any of them.

I think that for the majority of people reading this it makes no sense to go and read studies and tons of books. The majority of the information that they need is in my productivity guide, and even if it's not perfect and optimal, the people who have actually applied stuff from it have had great results.

So I don't think that not having accurate information is the issue, I think that by far the biggest issues are:

1) Not taking action and applying things
2) Focusing on small details instead of big wins

Let me elaborate on that. You can give a person a thousand studies and reasons why eating healthy food is good and helpful. But until they actually go and try it out and see how much better they feel when they eat a chicken salad compared to a burger and fries, they won't be fully convinced.

And as for the music, to be honest I don't think that researching or thoroughly testing it is one of the big wins for the people reading this. Why? Because they probably have other issues that they should focus on first.

I've had great results with my students when they applied the 80% solutions to fields like nutrition, exercise and sleep. Once they have that down, they can of course choose to go research and optimize things fully if they wish to, but actually taking action and applying the 80% solutions in the first place was super important and helped them make great progress.

Now someone reading this might just say "ohh, so music is very important, I must read all the studies and research on it..." and then it won't really make much of a difference.

If you eat junk food, don't get enough sleep, have a lot of distractions around you etc., you'll most likely perform very badly at poker regardless of whether you listen to music or not.

To sum up, it might make sense to research this subject for about 1% of the people reading this, who already have the basics down. For a beginner, it makes completely no sense to waste time on such small details where they could be taking action and finding the 80% solutions on their own.

Regards,

-SF

P.S. As I am a coach myself, I do actually read quite a lot of psychological books and studies, as well as discuss subjects with other psychologistsy so my advice is based on the studies most of the time. But I also make sure to test things out extensively alone and with my other students, and it has worked great for us. I just don't think it makes sense for an average forum user to go into these things as they can find the most of the information they need on these forums.

Personally if im one tabling hu I NEED music to stop me from getting bored and losing focus on my table, I know its counter intuitive but it helps me keep the focus. However when I'm 4 yabling hu it's the exact opposite now I need no music to allow my full brain power and focus.

I play alone in the quiet but honestly not sure that helps or not. In any live situation your going to be faced with allot of noise and distractions but that can work in your favour against others if your used to it. imo

I agree 100% with Barry about the "talking" area.

Youtube video, Poker Video, Podcast, Game Walkthrough, Radio. All these thngs utterly crashed my ability to play when I experimented with "background" items when playing. Even if you just want to have it as a background item you can't help but try and pay attention to it and it will ultimately distract you from being as productive as can be.

Music's been an odd one for me:

I find that complete relax style stuff can actually detract from my play.

Although what I will say is if you're going to have music on, play something that's familiar to you. There are a load of great playlists on Spotify but so many of them are huge and there's nothing worse than somethign you've never heard coming on, you like it and then check what it is and suddenly you're out of the zone

For me really it's all about getting in the zone and staying there and if certain music allows you to do that that's great

Also turn off your phone and Skype but that's a totally different sidetrack

Music, for me, helps me lock in. I do tend to do a few other things while I have 12 tables up though so I'm sure I'm the odd on out. I totally agree that letting things distracting you is -EV. But trying too hard and not allowing yourself to have fun with what you're doing is just as bad.

I have a browser with, OPR, SS, Pokerhand, Nash and Youtube open and now this forum too. I have Pandora and Rhapsody on, with Skype and AIM going too. Along with the old calculator app and then obv there's my phone too. I don't pay attention to all of those together but they are all running. It's just what I'm used to, and I think that's the key. Just finding what you're comfortable with and staying in that groove.