Wednesday 15 February 2012

Mental Game of Poker

I'm reading this and love it. I'll write more about it as time goes on, but something that's stuck with me already is the Adult Learning thingy, where the 4 stages of learning are:

Unconscious Incompetence - where fish are
Conscious Incompetence - where we were when we started learning poker
Conscious Competence - those skills we have to think long and hard about, middle pair in 3bet pot etc
Unconscious Competence - things like PF hand selection, knowing what boards to cbet etc

So the holy grail of learning anything is to get it to the 4th stage. Importantly, when you get tilted you still have all the skills of the Unconscious Competence, however those skills of conscious competence disappear entirely.

You can 'learn' mental game stuff too. So for example, my thought process in a hand is currently a conscious competence. Ie if I remember, I say to myself

'ok this reg raised from the co with an aggro 3bettor on the button so his range is possibly narrower than usual, he's cbet this QJTss board into my SB flat in a spot where my range is pretty strong, and he's usually pretty polarised with his cbetting. What are my options with KQo in this spot?'


So I need to practice to get this kind of thought process constant on all hands. I'm playing 4 tables at the moment so this is my goal for this upcoming session.

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