(Separately from my sibling comment,) I think agree that the richest source of insight from poker is to be had in evaluating other players’ off-equilibrium behavior and determining how to respond with off-equilibrium behavior of your own.
I think that it is easy to dramatically over-estimate how much of this the typical student(*) will actually do in their first several-hundred hours of playing the game. At a minimum, I think (I think common?) idea that the idea that GTO post-flop play is an intermediate-level technique and exploitative play is an advanced-level technique is correctly ordered if you’re trying to reduce your $ losses at a strong social table, but backwards if you’re trying to use the game as mental weightlifting. And the fact that it took me a decade after starting to casually learn the game to understand the preceding sentence is, at a minimum, a critique of how pedagogy-through-poker is nearly always done in practice.
(*) and I mean the term “student” broadly, to include professionals-in-training and adult learners looking to re-train
In fact, it wasn’t until my conversation with Max that I appreciated that I had spent far too much time working on playing more GTO—which I am still very far from—and that I should probably have started trying to understand and exploit my opponents’ play while I was still definitely bleeding money to my own exploitability. This is the largest thing that I’ve updated on since writing the post, and the thing I’d most want to cover in a part-2 follow-up.
(Separately from my sibling comment,) I think agree that the richest source of insight from poker is to be had in evaluating other players’ off-equilibrium behavior and determining how to respond with off-equilibrium behavior of your own.
I think that it is easy to dramatically over-estimate how much of this the typical student(*) will actually do in their first several-hundred hours of playing the game. At a minimum, I think (I think common?) idea that the idea that GTO post-flop play is an intermediate-level technique and exploitative play is an advanced-level technique is correctly ordered if you’re trying to reduce your $ losses at a strong social table, but backwards if you’re trying to use the game as mental weightlifting. And the fact that it took me a decade after starting to casually learn the game to understand the preceding sentence is, at a minimum, a critique of how pedagogy-through-poker is nearly always done in practice.
(*) and I mean the term “student” broadly, to include professionals-in-training and adult learners looking to re-train
In fact, it wasn’t until my conversation with Max that I appreciated that I had spent far too much time working on playing more GTO—which I am still very far from—and that I should probably have started trying to understand and exploit my opponents’ play while I was still definitely bleeding money to my own exploitability. This is the largest thing that I’ve updated on since writing the post, and the thing I’d most want to cover in a part-2 follow-up.