I've spent a lot of time practicing chess, backgammon and
poker over the years. Now I finally understand
why I only got good at backgammon!

Continued from 'The Master Plan'.

To make you understand how important I think my new understanding of learning is, I need to take you back in time and meet me when I was a kid.

The early years
The story started back in grammar school. I was very good with numbers but I really couldn't get the idea of letters and words. Of course this resulted in an overly interest for science subjects such as math, physics and chemistry. At 5th grade I was unable to read books at 2nd grade level and I really didn't care. Hey, what was I supposed to do? A kid taking responsibility for his own education... no way.

When we started to have subjects such as English and German I fell even more behind. It's kind of hard to learn foreign languages when you're struggling with your native language. My spoken language were really good but those darn letters. As an adult I can't help to think why nobody at school never picked up on this. Maybe because I was doing well in general and I was kind of good getting out of written assignments along with just denying to read aloud. To hell with my grades. Who needs them anyway?

At the age of 16 I started high school and at the time I had learned to read danish very slow and my spelling skills were below average. Never learned a word of German even though I had it for 3 years. My level of English were well below average but I understood some of it. The science subjects were very easy and bored me for many years.

Why is all this important? At this point my understanding was that I had a talent for numbers and I obviously didn't have it for language. I had no way to know how wrong I was, really!

The teenage years
Through high school I spent maybe 2-3 hours every day playing chess. That's a lot of hours over a period of three years. Still I sucked big time compared to many of the other kid who played chess and worked as hard as I did on it. But why?

I had participated in an IQ test administered by Mensa and I did very well. The only catch was that the test had a maximum and couldn't place you higher than in the top 5%, which is also great of course. I really don't want to get into a discussion of weather IQ tests are useful or not and what they can or can't tell you. Let us go with that I did really well on that test. How could it be that I still couldn't keep up with the other kids with less IQ and same work effort?

The university years
Right after I graduated from high school I started attending math at the University of Copenhagen. Yay! A dream come true. Now I could make my potential flourish and become the greatest mathematician in the world. Okay, maybe not exactly like that but I still thought math was the way. This was the first time I got some real life clues to that talent and IQ is not that important as you would believe. There were three groups of math students.
1) The extremely talented/high IQ students
2) The talented/high IQ students
3) The fairly talented/above average IQ students
Group one and three did well and okay. A really high percentage of group two dropped out. I was in that group and I dropped out eventually (after many years never to finish).

Why did group three make it? Looking back it's kind of obvious. They were used to study and work with the subjects they were given. They had a good work ethic and combined with an above average IQ they had the appropriate tools to make it. Today I know I didn't make it because I was a lazy and expected success to be handed to the people with high IQ in the academic world. I certainly know better now.

You might think that if this is true I should have become good at chess because I did put in the hours and hard work. Don't worry. I'll get back to that later.

Another problem I encountered was that all the books were in English. That sucked when I hardly knew the language. I learned it the hard way. Looked up every single word in the dictionary and spent countless hours trying to make sense of the books. To my big surprise I caught on pretty fast and after six month there were no need for the dictionary anymore. This time hard work paid off.

My spoken English could be alot better but I learned it through playing World of Warcraft. I was on teamspeak (skype for gamers) talking to players from all over Europe every day while playing WoW. Talking for 3-4 hours every day for a year where it is rather important that people can understand you will indeed make you better.

At the early university years I gave up on chess and took on backgammon instead. Liked it better because of the luck element and the fact that you could play it for money. Totally opposite chess I got good at backgammon very fast. That was a surprise to me but who cares about that when it suddenly is a fact. I never gave it much thought until now.

After 5 years of having a normal job as a UNIX system administrator I decided to give it a go and finish my master in Computer Science. I changed major a couple of times without success during my time at the university. The plan was to take the last two years of my education over a four year period, working half time to support myself. It worked out perfectly for two years. I passed all my courses with good to excellent grades. What had changed? It was simple. Work hard on the assignments and read the books and prepare for the exams. That's it.

The early poker years
Due to some changes at the university made by the government I decided to end my study prematurely not achieving my masters degree. I decided I had to do something totally different. The choice landed on poker. It was possible to make much more money from poker than backgammon and I obviously had a talent for games with variance... I thought.

After almost two years of full time hard work at poker I still suck. Well maybe I don't suck but I'm not making enough money at NL200 5-max to support myself. Where did the talent go? Suddenly all the bad memories from learning chess came back to me. There had to be an explanation.

The eureka moment
I read 'Talent Is Overrated' by Geoff Colvin and it was the last piece of the puzzle. Basically what it says is that excellent achievements comes from extensive deliberate practice. Let me explain.

It is good to have talent but it is not enough to make you achieve at the highest levels. What in fact all excellent achievers do have in common is that they have done huge amount of practice before they got to where they are now. None of them woke up and were excellent swimmers or had an idea that would revolutionize an entire area.

The key point is that deliberate practice and practice are two different things. Most none high achievers do practice but they don't do it effectively enough to become great. They miss the deliberate part of it.

What is deliberate practice? Simply put it is a training situation you can evaluate and repeat many times. You have access to a coach that can do an external evaluation of your performance and guide you in the right direction and give you feedback on your work. You are constantly put in situations that are just outside your comfort zone to make you evolve and progress. Deliberate practice hurts. That what makes it so hard and that's why most people wont do it.

Now, looking back at my chess days. I was playing a lot and I was playing with better players most of the time. Good. What I was missing was a trainer to tell me what exactly to practice to become better and give feedback on my games.

During the first year of my backgammon career I had access to extremely good players who would train me and tell me exactly what to do to push myself and get better. I got all the feedback I needed and any doubts I had would be wiped away by my coaches. I did the work myself but my coaches made it effective.

The reason why I had success during my last two year period at the university was that I simply just did the work I was told to. The education system is very intune with the thoughts of deliberate practice.

Getting better at English falls beautifully within the concept. I had myself as trainer and the feedback end constant evaluation came from understanding my textbooks and having my fellow WoW players understand me.

Poker for the rest of 2010
I've been playing a lot of poker, reading books discussing hands with friends. That's just not enough. I haven't spend enough time analyzing hands in depths where I put up ranges on each street and make calculations on different line. I also spent most of the time playing in games dictated by my bankroll more than my skill level.

I want to apply the deliberate practice concept on my poker game but I need to have a more concrete plan.

To commit myself to this project I will put up some goals that are easily verifiable. I have divided my goals into subgroups.

Coaching and feedback
Luckily I have a lot of good players sitting around me at the poker office and I will watch them play and identify spots where they take lines I would never have thought of. These lines will be the my subjects of learning. To get feedback I can just ask those people if I identified and put the ideas correctly into actual play.

When I play

  • Never play more tables than I can handle. Have enough tables to be able to still think and analyze. At the moment that limit is exactly 3 tables. If I have to practice using new concepts and new lines I need to have enough time to identify the spots where they apply.
  • When I'm feeling tilted sit out. I'm not learning anything when tilted anyway.


How much practice

  • 400 hands a day for 25 days a month. It doesn't seem like much but it's very important to have time to do the analysis of hands which is at the heart of the deliberate practice idea. It's even more important than to make money here and now. Could very easily add up to four hours of intensive work with poker a day.
  • Identify and analyze at least one spot every day that belongs to a non standard line.
  • Read three chapters in Easy Game 2 each week. When the book is done start over.


Processing the new knowledge
I will find some of the interesting hands and make posts on Coinflip with my thoughts. By doing this in written form I force myself to have all the arguments thought through which is easy to skip when you only report back to yourself. This way you will be a part of my personal coaching team and provide me with questions, feedback and insight.

Let's go!