Should you only learn from elite players?
If you wanted to crush 100NL, should you learn from a nosebleed player or a 200NL regular?
A common joke that comes up when talking about education and expertise is - If you can't do, teach.
Daniel Negreanu is the most recent person to fuel this perception. As always whenever he shares an opinion it splits the poker world, and in a recent blog post he suggested that a great deal of poker authors and coaches were shelling out bad advice. He also inferred that the people we should take poker advice from were probably never going to share it.
Poker isn't like real sports. While there may be plenty of genius football or golf coaches that never reached the elite level as a player, only the elite players themselves can write the best poker books and provide the best training videos. It's not really possible to be a mediocre, or losing poker player, but also be an elite poker coach.
How should you pick a mentor?
It's a debate that comes up frequently in poker. If you want to learn to beat 100NL, should you take your advice from a high stakes pro who crushes the biggest games, or should you learn from a 200NL crusher who has more recent experience of that level?
The common sense answer seems to be to take the advice from the guy who understands the current state of 100NL. The higher stakes coach has most likely forgot what it took to beat 100NL, and more importantly, 100NL has almost certainly changed since they were last there. The advice they give could easily be too advanced for the student to understand.
However, to dismiss entirely the idea looking to elite players for lower stakes advice would be a mistake. That 200NL player who is helping you beat 100NL might have the tools to get you to the next level, but they are currently unable to get to 400NL. If all you want to do is beat 100NL then that is fine, but if you have designs to progress beyond that, you may in fact be learning bad habits.
This is not a criticism of non-elite coaches, this is the same in every form of education and academia. You should always be aware that with every mentor there will be a ceiling to what they can teach you, just as they should be aware that their goal is to give you the tools you need to go beyond what they currently are capable of. It is when you follow their word dogmatically that you will take big steps backward.
Expert Induced Amnesia
Negreanu rightly points out that the best poker books will never be written, because why would an elite player give his or her opponents free information? There is another reason why this will never happen, and that is because being very good at poker does not necessarily mean that you will also be a good teacher.
Poker is a skill. Teaching is also a skill, a soft skill in fact and not necessarily one which some of the more talented analytical players have. This often creates a paradox where the best players can't articulate why they do what they do, and where less talented players can actually do a better job.
There is a lot of research that shows that experts use a different part of the brain when performing, which is the more responsive and instinctual part. This is why a lot of top players seemingly just know what the correct move is, as if they can read your soul. This is also why it is hard for some to explain their actions, a phenomena which is called Expert Induced Amnesia.
Learn to learn for yourself
This is why there is room for non-elite players to coach certain aspects of the game. Negreanu already alluded to this when he said that mental game coaches don't need to be top players to be effective. The same is probably true of the mathematical side of the game where it may be better to learn from a mathematician than a high stakes poker pro.
Likewise, because there are so many variations of poker these days, you are probably going to learn more about specialised formats like hyper turbos or Zoom from one of the regulars that frequents those games, than an all around elite player.
The most important thing to note, and again Negreanu picked up on this, is to recognise that you can only go so far with any one teacher or method for learning. That includes if you learn from elite players. Once you get past a certain point, the training materials dry up and the players who make it are the ones who are able to introspectively learn. In that regard the most important thing to learn from any teacher is not so much what to learn, but how to learn for yourself.
Should you only learn from elite players? Let us know in the comments.
