Odd Question - How Come Some Players Cannot Improve?
As I have been doing a bunch of sit and gos lately on Stars I have seen some really bad play, which is not too shocking. In the good old days, it would be easy to assume a player was new at the game.
However, with all of the tracking programs available, I am noticing that many of these bad players are permanently bad.
I am not talking, bad in one tournament, or tilting for a couple days, but maintaining extremely high losing rates over very, very large sample sizes, often several thousand sit and gos and tournaments.
These are people who play every day, usually several tournaments or sit and gos a day and yet, they still lose at a rate that would seem to actually take skill and effort to lose (ie: above a -50% ROI).
I can understand if a person is screwing around at a small er stake level for fun, I can understand tilt, I can certainly understand a player being horrible when they start ( I shudder at the thought of watching how I played way back when). Still, I just do not see how a player cannot improve if they expose themselves to the game for hours a day over years.
This would be like the scene in the movie Groundhog Day where Bill Murray relives the same day and decides to take piano lessons, yet replace the final scene of this story with him still not being able to play chopsticks after thousands of lessons. While he may not become world class, he should at least improve.
I am more baffled by this as I see it often lately, and it seems contrary to what I hope is a basic human ability to learn at least a little through long term exposure.
Is it that some humans just cannot learn?
However, with all of the tracking programs available, I am noticing that many of these bad players are permanently bad.
I am not talking, bad in one tournament, or tilting for a couple days, but maintaining extremely high losing rates over very, very large sample sizes, often several thousand sit and gos and tournaments.
These are people who play every day, usually several tournaments or sit and gos a day and yet, they still lose at a rate that would seem to actually take skill and effort to lose (ie: above a -50% ROI).
I can understand if a person is screwing around at a small er stake level for fun, I can understand tilt, I can certainly understand a player being horrible when they start ( I shudder at the thought of watching how I played way back when). Still, I just do not see how a player cannot improve if they expose themselves to the game for hours a day over years.
This would be like the scene in the movie Groundhog Day where Bill Murray relives the same day and decides to take piano lessons, yet replace the final scene of this story with him still not being able to play chopsticks after thousands of lessons. While he may not become world class, he should at least improve.
I am more baffled by this as I see it often lately, and it seems contrary to what I hope is a basic human ability to learn at least a little through long term exposure.
Is it that some humans just cannot learn?
Comments
Some WILL NOT learn
Some are TOO STUPID to learn
Please be nice to them. Compliment them on their aggression when they bet bottom pair. Praise them for confusing you with their play when they catch their three-outer on the river. Then take their chips and find some more fishies.
Some/most people play poker for entertainment -- losing 4-5k over a year isn't that much for most people, so let them enjoy it.
Some people have an addiction and, yes, some are morons. Have you taken a gander ant the general populous lately? Just sit that at the poker table and there you have it.
I am not talking about people who play once in a while, I totally get why they can be bad and not really learn. That's like me and golf, I play maybe once a year, and I don't care what my score is. I am not good, nor will I ever be good with that pattern.
However, if I played golf every day for 2 hours for years, I would have to get better, wouldn't I? Certainly not world class, but better.
See that's what puzzles me. I'm talking about basically hard core players, who play for hours every day for years and yet they do not get better. Isn't that kind of contrary to being human?
No, but it is puzzling. People in the situation you describe have, IMO, a mental issue that makes losing preferrable to improving. Whether it is done to prove their own negative self-image (I suck at life, so losing at poker just proves my point), or because they are addicted to the "action" of the game, I feel that this sort of person could benefit from some sort of counselling.
hah great thread
Brandon
Poker in the GTA, Poker Online...Poker, Poker, Poker.: April 2006
Some basic assumptions:
- The player is actually not developmentally challenged or insane.
- The player still prefers winning (ie: even if they have insane self image issues they wont fold AA preflop). Thus, true degenerates do not count as they will lose all they have regardless, and I understand why they do not improve since winning is not one of their needs. They basically play to lose (like the FGator guy).
Guys who have played 3000 sit and gos with an average stake of $5 do not strike me as degenerates in that sense.
Action Junkie:
Yes, I see these at times, the loose aggro maniacs. However, in theory these guys should eventually improve so while they are still action junkies they make more plays that have better EV (even if overall the EV is still negative).
The guy who prefers losing to improving:
Yeah, I can see how this type of mentality can cause players to make bad plays (I will lose anyways so fold post flop type thinking), but still wouldn't they just eventually play better long term by playing fewer bad hands preflop, even if they continue making bad choices based on an assumption of losing.
Also, because a player thinks he will lose every coin flip, the laws of math will not let that happen (assuming no cheating involved), so as much as people whine that their aces always get cracked, in the long term thats just not possible
Just to make it a bit more clear, I understand why some live players do not really improve as most bad ones (who are not complete degenerates) cannot get to a truly long term situation in terms of games played.
Online, however, it is much easier to reach a huge sample size. Thousands of sit and gos (so tens of thousands of hands), so just by exposure to the game so much a person should get relatively better, shouldn't they?
let's consider it a different way. instead of cards and chips, i hand you a scapel and a mask. go ahead and perform a surgical procedure again and again, thousands and thousands of times. are you going to eventually do it right (or somewhat well, or competent)? hell no, because you were never properly taught how to do it in the first place, and therefore you just do it constantly wrong.
simply said, some bad players stay bad because no matter how many times they play, they are lacking (in some capacity) - be it the basics or in understanding some general concepts which are prevalent in poker (EV for example, or BR management, variance, etc.).
i can swing my golf club a million times, but if i take my eye off the ball every time, i'm never going to improve as a golfer.
like my old basketball coach always used to say, "practice does not make perfect. perfect practice makes perfect."
Is this directed at me?
Why don't you write an award winning poem or play sports in a major league? Everyone has thier talents and limits, some (most?) people don't realise when they've peaked and can no longer improve.
lazy methinks -- I may start again once I move out to Calgary
and BBC said
"Why don't you write an award winning poem or play sports in a major league? Everyone has thier talents and limits, some (most?) people don't realise when they've peaked and can no longer improve."
I am not talking about a skill that requires many years to learn like surgery, that is not really an apt comparison.
However, using the golfing example, I would suggest that if I tried hitting a ball thousands of times with a driver, I would have more success per shot after the thousands of swings then before. I may never learn perfect technique, but I should get a bit better. Becoming world class is not part of the equation, just better.
I'm not saying that every player should be able to calculate pot odds, implied odds, fold equity , whatever, just that after thousands of sit and gos they should lose at a slower pace, that's all.
In golf, the better you hit the ball, the better it goes.
You can use the immediate feedback to improve your swing and get your swing better.
With poker you get feedback. But the result might not be related to your actions.
This screws up your brain, Trying to improve based on results is tough...
You need 30,000 hands just to know if you're a winning player.
How many hands do you need to know if you should call to your flush draw getting 3 to 1 if you don't understand odds and outs?
(Edited : submitted accidentally)
1) Practice
2) Being able to recognize mistakes
I think many of these "bad" players don't know what they're doing wrong so they just keep repeating their mistakes over and over.
yes, this is exactly what i was trying to get at. just because you practice and play many hands does not necessarily mean you will improve. i tried to make some analogies, but they failed poorly, i agree. however, the basic point still remains. i do not agree that simply playing a lot of hands will make you better because playing a lot of hands will not necessarily make someone learn how to play better (i.e. understand pot odds, and betting patterns, and EV, and etc. etc.). it is not a direct correlation or connection such as it seems to be suggested.
The pot odds level of play I understand some will never understand, but that wasn't the skill level I was suggesting all could achieve.
I guess to use the golf analogy a bit more, I understand why some people will still hook or slice shots after a lot of play. However, I would like to think that everyone would learn to to try to hit the ball with the club face instead of the handle of the club after thousands of tries
Thanks for the comments.
When your parents told you that you were special, they lied. Some people just take longer to realize it than others. Not everyone in the world can be an astronaut. We need shoe salesment too.
Sounds cute and clever, though misses the mark of my question a bit, so I will modify it by adding that of the shoe salespeople some apparently will still not know the difference between the left and right shoe even after years on the job
ok i see what you mean. i thought you were referring to how some players are losing players and will always be losing players. i was explaining how this is so. however, if all you are saying is that even such losing players should be able to learn some things after playing thousands of hands (i.e. to fold 8 2 preflop to reraises), then i agree with you. however, "learning" this seemingly "important" piece of information (which i agree "should" be eventually learned over many hands played) does not make a player a winning player. therefore, again i agree with your point (per se) that losing players will "learn" some things through many hands, but they will never necessarily learn to be a winning player.
and to complete the circle, that is why I get baffled when I see players who have played in thousands of sit and gos and are still able to lose at the same rate even after all of that exposure. Note, I am not suggesting they should be winning players, just that eventually they should lose at a slower rate through basic experience. Some manage to break this assumption and in a way they will continue to baffle me.
If you think about that line, you'll realize it implies both ends of the spectrum, i.e. you need to know when you have a reached your point where you can't get better but you also have to realize when are not yet at that point and challenge yourself.
Getting back to the original post, there are potentially lots of different answers for different players as to why they are not improving, all the way from they don't want to to they can't. An interesting book I have read that sheds some light on the motivation of players is this one: Amazon.ca: Beyond Tells: James Mckenna: Books
The guy is a doctor of psychology and a poker player. His basic description is Dr Phil-like in that he says most people subconciously run their "life scripts". This basically means if you are a loser, then you will likely stay a loser because that is your life script and that is what you are comfortable doing.
I'm sure you are all aware of examples where someone becomes famous and/or rich and their lifestyle changes and people want to be with them, etc. For a loser, this can be so uncomfortable that they will actually shun the good fortune because they can't handle it.
I'll bet this might surprise you but some people can't handle winning.
P.S.: With regards to the golf analogy. Yes, some players can swing thousands of times and they will improve their golf. However, without instruction or an effort to achieve greater results, these players will develop an off-balance, awkward swing. They can live with it because if they always slice, they simply aim left. This type of golfer can stay fairly consistent with somewhat decent scores (depending on how off-balance they are) but they will never get better. And as a matter of fact, as time rolls on and they continue, it will be more difficult to break the bad habits and develop a proper golf swing.
Hopefully this applies to poker too and assuming it does, it's something I am trying to avoid at all costs by continuously being critical of my play.
Edit: James McKenna actually has a triology of psychology books. These are the other two. I have read them all and their is some crossover stuff.
Amazon.ca: Beyond Bluffs: James Mckenna: Books
Amazon.ca: Beyond Traps: James Mckenna: Books
The required trait being an ability to run a brutally honest self-assessment, which most people are incapable of. Combine that with a game with ridiculous variance, and you have a sea of people who think they're winning, but aren't.
That's probably why No Limit will be the downfall of the new poker as we know it. Getting stacked repeatedly is more memorable then grinding away a stack over a few hours.
And you absolutely correct about being "brutally honest". Again most players blame poor results on bad luck and good results on good play. The only reality check for these players is their bankroll although if they are capable, most will replenish their roll and chaulk it up to extended bad luck.
I think the mental aspect of this game is overlooked on many different levels.
Poker's not unique in that sense. Blackjack, craps all have the same 'variantial' model. What's unique about poker is that you put the player vs other players and not the house. The general setup of a blackjack table re-enforces the US vs THEM stereotype. With Poker, it's a big circle with everyone (include the 'house dealer') sitting in equivalent spots.
Given that you see the same behaviours in the poker world as the pure craps gamblers, I'd say you are probably right. Combine a poor feedback loop with the "I only remember large wins and forget small loses" bias and you've got yourself ppl who lose and won't stop.
I think of it like this:
in golf, if you hit the same shot the same way 1000's of times and the first ball shanks left, then every subsequent ball hit the same way shanks the same direction. (barring environmental conditions) At some point the player will realize that shanking the ball is not the right play which won't help improve his score. He will look for other ways to hit the ball and continue making adjustments to try to improve this score.
In poker, if you play each hand the same way 1000's of times you can get very different results. Sometimes you'll shank the ball hard, sometimes it will go right and others it will be a perfect drive down the fairway. This leads a player to the illusion that their play is optimum even when it's clearly not. Combined with the fact poker is one of the few things (maybe the only thing) that you can play perfectly and still be unsuccessful, and how searching for assistance can often lead to conflicting opinions where players feel things should have been played differently.
As well, the number of times a given player sees a specific scenerio varies significantly. For an example, you have 88's UTG in a 6 handed game where blinds are low vs. having 88's in the CO late in a MTT. Both situations have the same cards but would likely be played very differently. Going back to our golf example it's like you rotate through the courses and pin positions and only see a hole you've played with a pin placement you recognize very infrequently.
In closing, poker has so many nuances (I never bothered starting to cover the psychological aspects of the game) that without continued effort and work for improvement the average player won't improve and will continue to make mistakes that they didn't learn from the last time they were in a situation.