I totally agree that poker (and I’ll restrict to no-limit holdem especially) far surpasses nearly any other game at the broader cluster of goals. And I agree that there is a lot of value in the total of all the lessons you learn by fully mining out poker for insights.
My issue is really one of relative advantage / disadvantage, and of the ratio of grinding to insight across different parts of the learning curve. Together with some amount of, I think it’s significantly more efficient to learn certain components separately and then to put them together than to approach them as one combined package. When I taught new traders, I thought it helpful to expose them to the emotional feeling of risk tolerance separately from the intuitive sense of adverse selection, separately from level-N efficiency / level-N+1 marginal, and separately from the skills of quantitative research. Then we’d work on putting the concepts together into increasingly complete exercises, building up to the scale of deploying research-derived algorithmic trading strategies to miniaturized stock markets (and then to real markets, though at some point that left my purview...).
I don’t mean that it was a strict waterfall model—it’s sometimes extremely helpful to jump ahead temporarily to understand how things come together before going back to focus more on the fundamental components—but as a matter of pedagogical design I feel reasonably confident that jumping straight into an environment with all of the concepts active is suboptimal, especially if having one under-developed makes it actively harder for you to learn another at the same time.
So yes, I think if you have nearly all of the right skills except for an impatience and a bias towards action, then playing in-person poker and practicing folding 80% of your hands can be just the prescription the doctor ordered. Or if you’re trying to calibrate over-updating versus under-updating on limited information. Or if you’re at a reasonable level at most of the things and are trying to stay sharp. But if you’re early on the learning curve of four different things, then I want to claim it’s not optimal to throw yourself at a game that wraps all of them up in interconnected ways, especially if they’ll be harder to disentangle if you don’t have a solid place to stand—so to speak—in the first place.
I totally agree that poker (and I’ll restrict to no-limit holdem especially) far surpasses nearly any other game at the broader cluster of goals. And I agree that there is a lot of value in the total of all the lessons you learn by fully mining out poker for insights.
My issue is really one of relative advantage / disadvantage, and of the ratio of grinding to insight across different parts of the learning curve. Together with some amount of, I think it’s significantly more efficient to learn certain components separately and then to put them together than to approach them as one combined package. When I taught new traders, I thought it helpful to expose them to the emotional feeling of risk tolerance separately from the intuitive sense of adverse selection, separately from level-N efficiency / level-N+1 marginal, and separately from the skills of quantitative research. Then we’d work on putting the concepts together into increasingly complete exercises, building up to the scale of deploying research-derived algorithmic trading strategies to miniaturized stock markets (and then to real markets, though at some point that left my purview...).
I don’t mean that it was a strict waterfall model—it’s sometimes extremely helpful to jump ahead temporarily to understand how things come together before going back to focus more on the fundamental components—but as a matter of pedagogical design I feel reasonably confident that jumping straight into an environment with all of the concepts active is suboptimal, especially if having one under-developed makes it actively harder for you to learn another at the same time.
So yes, I think if you have nearly all of the right skills except for an impatience and a bias towards action, then playing in-person poker and practicing folding 80% of your hands can be just the prescription the doctor ordered. Or if you’re trying to calibrate over-updating versus under-updating on limited information. Or if you’re at a reasonable level at most of the things and are trying to stay sharp. But if you’re early on the learning curve of four different things, then I want to claim it’s not optimal to throw yourself at a game that wraps all of them up in interconnected ways, especially if they’ll be harder to disentangle if you don’t have a solid place to stand—so to speak—in the first place.