Neuropsychology of Poker (5) - The Working Student
Introduction
In this article
- The expected value of studying
- The importance of time management
- Why you should respect your brain
“Study vigorously to forget eating, enjoy life to forget worrying, and neglect the coming of old age.” A bit extreme, but the point is well made; mastering your art, while maintaining a healthy and joyous sense of wonder at the world will lead to a long, happy life.
Confucius continues, “isn’t it also delightful to study a thing and review it frequently?” You may not think so now, but hopefully this article will convince you that the poker-life away from the tables can be just as fun, exciting, and above all rewarding as playing poker itself.
Before you begin, you will need to make a decision. The decision is whether or not to incorporate poker study into your schedule as a recurring and important event. If you don’t have a schedule, hopefully this article can convince you to create one, more on that later. First, let’s take a look at the EV of studying; studying definitely has an Expected Value.
The EV of studying
When you sit down at the tables for a session, the amount you earn is the accumulated Expected Value of each hand outcome, which itself is the summed EV of every street. This is pretty basic information for you. Of course, when actually on the tables (and off the tables for that matter), you probably find it difficult to actually feel this reality. If your hourly rate for that session is $100/hour and you play for 2 hours, regardless of the outcome, you just generated $200, nothing more, nothing less.
However if you are actually up $2000 or down $2000 after those 2 hours, you likely find it difficult to separate yourself from that outcome. The result is that you are either extremely happy or drastically depressed. Prior articles have addressed the physiology behind those feelings. However experience and reminding yourself of the realities of making money as a poker player will dull those feelings over time.
The reality is that you sit down, play hands, and the amount of profit you generate is actually a long-term average amount. Well, studying contributes to your bottom line in much the same way.
Suppose you make the decision to study one hour every day for a month. That is a total of 30 hours of study time for month x. Your EV hourly rate for this month was $100/hour. In the next month, your EV hourly rate is now $150/hour. The extra $50/hour is a result of the time you spent away from the tables, studying and strategising, further mastering your play.
Those 30 hours spent in month x can now be deemed as having a monetary value. They contributed to your EV on the tables and thus to your overall profits. It would be difficult to try to ascertain the EV of each one of those hours spent studying, but it makes sense.
The increased profits you gain from those hours spent away from the tables will stay with you through time. The theoretical hourly rate of your study time rises retroactively the more you implement the learned principles. This is an oversimplified example, but the point should be pretty clear.
Any time you spend mastering your skills away from the tables will contribute to your EV on the tables, so the study time has an EV comparable to, and possibly even more significant than the play itself (when applied retroactively and within reason).
In the previous article you learned why studying away from the tables is more important, especially for beginners, than playing. Hippocampal memory is activated when you read and study away from the tables, allowing you to form memory based on hopefully accurate representations of the correct decision.
The corollary was forming memory of plays based on results, which of course can lead you astray from the real positive play. Repetition is essential for hippocampal memory to have the greatest influence on your bottom line.
You are more likely to remember a piece of information the more you are exposed to it. For example if you meet someone once, and then see them again 2 weeks later, their name may have disappeared from your memory. However if you see that same person every day for a week, chances are you will remember their name for quite some time. The same is true for the poker principles you learn off the tables. You can learn more about this from the practical examples in the video.
You can study while playing at the tables as well. It might help to envision primary and secondary goals for your sessions. Your primary goal when sitting down at the tables is to test your skills. After all, you have spent many hours studying and preparing, now is your chance to implement your revised and improved poker prowess.
The secondary goal is to study and watch how other people play. By capping at 4 tables, there should be plenty of time for you to focus on hands that you are not involved in. Not only will this help you establish reads on your opponents, but also acquire new food for thought that you can analyse during your study time away from the tables. The learning never stops and you essentially get paid to study and master this game.
All of these recommendations are easier said than done, especially if you have never been in the habit of putting in time off the tables. This is where scheduling your time comes in and becomes an essential part of your poker growth and success. In fact it is almost crucial for your continued improvement as a human being.
Scheduling time
Why schedule your time? Your brain likes to be very efficient. As such, it tries to repel novelty (especially in the context of work) and adapt to what it is used to. Like most endeavours, going to the gym for example, starting can feel like a chore, but after some repetition, you begin to look forward to the exercise. The same thing happens with mental workouts. If your poker career up to this point has primarily consisted of playing sessions without much study time, you might find it difficult to start spending several hours a week just to study.
Of course, after reading this article and realising that study time has a long-term realisable EV, it should get easier. The first little bit might be difficult as you change your habits, but once you get the ball rolling you will start to enjoy studying and actually look forward to it. Not just in the act itself, but because you realise how the concepts you are learning benefit your decision-making every day on the tables.
Before you can prepare your schedule, you have to set some goals. There will be more on this in the video, but suffice it to say short and long-term goals are crucial to your success.
You might remember that envisioning the outcome of your hard work by utilising your frontal lobes can help make your goals a reality. Once broken down, you are left with applicable practices which you can then schedule. For example, if your goal is to log 20 hours of study in the month, you can then prioritise one hour each day Monday-Friday to working off the tables. 20 hours is actually a little low, especially if you are still a beginner but it is fine as a starting point.
Scheduling your time will help you break down your goals into measurable units of activity. Time management is also crucial for organised repetition. The more you repeat a practice, the more likely your brain is to accept this activity as a necessary act, and thus will begin to prime itself for the successful completion of that task. Also, when you conduct the task at the same time, and in the same place, your brain adapts and is at a heightened level of concentration and focus for the task. So you can see repetition is pretty much essential for the successful realisation of your goals.
With all this advocacy to work hard to achieve your goals and scheduling your time to optimise success, it should not be forgotten that it is also crucial to have time to play, and to schedule in leisure time. The more efficient you are, the easier it will be to save time for yourself and those activities that you really enjoy. After all, as Aristotle pointed out, “we work in order to have leisure.”
To do a job well, it is not only important to be well suited to it and to like it, but also to ensure you do not do so much of it that you forget what it is all for. Poker as a career can be very stressful. The reasons as to why that is have already been mentioned many times by myself and others. If your poker-life is not conducted properly, your work will most certainly suffer.
As a poker player, you have freedom and managerial oversight of your time and activity. Of course, this should not result in laziness, in fact it requires a more resilient level of discipline to rise above the freedom and ensure productivity. By scheduling your time and maintaining a balanced life, you will not only reap huge financial rewards, but also lead a healthy, happy, free life. Not a bad deal at all. Still not convinced? Read on for more reasons why leisure is so important.
Fatigue and overstimulation can inhibit objectivity, perspective and the ability to make reasoned, logical decisions. All of these characteristics are important to your success and happiness in every facet of life, but especially integral to your poker profits.
You may have had months where you felt burnt out because you had an obscene hand volume or rake race goal. To stay at its optimal levels, your brain needs a certain type of balance, not only of diversity in activity, but in stress levels as well. It can only handle so much at once; and for certain periods of time.
Overworking can harm your brain in more ways than one. Not only will your profits suffer (and your happiness to boot), in the long run it can also degrade your fluid intelligence. This refers to short term memory, abstract thinking, creativity and problem solving.
These are pretty important characteristics for a happy, successful life. The reason this happens is that overworking makes it difficult to lead that balanced, active, healthy lifestyle necessary to optimise your physical and mental condition. The result is a negative spiral that is difficult to break out of.
Starting something beneficial and healthy is generally much more difficult than having it fizzle away because of stress and laziness. Your A-game is not just important at the tables, it’s important off the tables as well. Respect your brain, treat it with maturity, respect, diligence and discipline and it will treat you in kind.
Al Gini puts it:
“We have made a fetish out of work. It’s now part of our character and culture. We have become addicted to the promise of work. Work promises we will get ahead. Work promises power, money, and influence. Work promises we will be accepted, respected, successful. And so, we work. We work because we want to, because we need to. We work out of habit and desire. We work to occupy time. We work to establish our place in the pecking order, to guarantee status and prestige. And, too often, we work because we simply don’t know what else to do with ourselves, because we think we must and should.”
This last sentence is particularly interesting and relevant to the poker world. As poker players, it is far too easy to lose yourself as days blur into weeks and time becomes virtually meaningless. Without a barometer for your responsibilities, it is very difficult to maintain a productive, healthy lifestyle and output. By making the decision to get the most out of your poker play, and your life in general, you begin on the path to meeting your potential.
Conclusion
When you set goals and envision their existence in your future, you come closer to realising their existence. By creating your schedule, the possible then becomes simply a matter of time, as it becomes ever easier to snowball into success. Just make sure to leave time for play.
Works Cited: Gini, Al. Importance of Being Lazy: In Praise of Play, Leisure, and Vacations. New York: Routledge, 2003. Questia.Web. 23 Mar. 2011.