The Life Cycle of a Poker Player (and my thoughts on live vs online)

[VitoT]

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Are you saying Patrick Antonius has a leak?

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No, he is perfect and you have a poster of him above your bed, which you are praying to, every single day.

[slik]

I totally can relate to the stress that is associated with poker. However, I do not understand why online poker is so much more stressful to me than live. I swear, I am much more anxious, nervous etc in a $1 45 player online tournament than a $200 live tournament where I am at the final table. Same thing with playing cash games that are 10x the stake live. Is this a random idiosyncrasy that I have or is there some merit to online poker being more stressful than live. For what it's worth, I have been profitable at both online poker and live poker for all sorts of stakes. Anyone else have similar feelings?

[kickpushcoast]

i think its absolutely hilarious that some people on here actually think someone is on the decline mentally by age 30. you guys are looking at the wrong reasons for young players' success if you think its because mentally they are superior.

it has far more to do with the amount of free time and willingness to take risk because of lack of responsibilty for anyone other than yourself and also being much more computer savvy than older people, basically alot of you were in the right place at the right time of your life, and not because of some inherent superiority of having a young mind that gives you an edge over someone a little older. i also think the top young players will easily get better through their 30s and 40s as long as they continue to apply themselves and dont burn out or lose interest.

new and better players will always come along, because they will take knowledge thats available and improve on it. the best players will also be leaving the game when they realize there are far better ways to make money once you have a decent amount of capital

[Idiotex]

Great read Brandon, and I enjoyed everyone's comments. I would venture to say that there will one day be a poker player that is the Kasparov, Tiger Woods or Roger Federer of poker.

I don't think any of us could have ever concieved that a sportsman would come along like Tiger Woods. He may only have as much pure talent as Federer or Kasparov, but it's his mental endurance over such a long period competing. It seems like he is not going to to slow down and may end up essentially being the best golfer in the world over twenty years plus. He seems to always give 100%.

For those that believe downswings would not allow anyone to reach this level, I disagree. All great players in all sports lose form at some point in their careers. For example, Tiger has had swing changes and struggled for as much as 24 months at a time. But mentally he was equipped to still compete mentally at 100%, and from what I as a member of the public can tell he never waivered in his preparation despite going so long without winning.

What am I saying? I guess, just because something is inconceivable, it is not impossible. A poker player may come along that is beyond anything we can imagine at this point in time. If we don't blow ourselves up in the next few thousand years, I'm sure someone will come along that could beat a high limit for a winrate that we would consider impossible at present.

Anyway I'm ranting. Nice article Brandon.

p.s. I do disagree that online players would lose in deep stacked live games, unless Kenny Tran really can tell to 100% certainty whether or someone is bluffing or not. And I just can't imagine that someone with great experience could not train themselves not to give off that kind of non-verbal information.

[Idiotex]

Oh and as an aside, I think marriage would be key to long-term sustainable success for most (but not all), poker players over 20 year + career. I would need a few thousand words to say why, so I won't bother trying. I think girlfriends / marriages may have some short term downsides that will be far outweighed by the long-term emotional stability of a healty relationship.

[WJL]

Lots of good posts in this thread. Hope this one can add something to the discussion. I'm no great poker player, but I am learning, and I have played most of the games mentioned in this thread at an advanced level.

Something nobody has really mentioned in this thread is that unlike chess and tennis, poker is generally played against multiple opponents. I think this is why there will never been a Kasparov/Federer sort of dominance for anyone in poker, no matter how good they become. Golf is a much better analogy, and that's one of the reasons I think poker players seem to like golf.

Golf and Tennis are both very high skill-level games, requiring a fairly long practice regime to even become competitive at low levels. But golf has never seen anyone who had a year like, say, Jimmy Connors had in Professional Tennis in 1974, when he won 98 of 104 professional matches. If a golfer wins 6 or 7 tournaments in a year, he had a phenomenal year; it is much the same in Poker. One reason is that there is a lot more varience in golf; every course is different, and weather conditions can completely change the character of any one of them from day to day. Sometimes you hit a wicked slice off the fairway, hit a tree, and end up sitting in front of the green. Sometimes you hit a great shot and land on a sprinkler cover and end up in the rough. Major tournaments have responded to the increasing skill and improving equipment of today's golfers by adding even more varience to the game in the form of narrower fairways, larger sand traps and very difficult green topologies, leading some players to compare certain courses to a putt-putt course. Tennis has much lower varience, and with today's equipment, the game is played pretty much the same on all surfaces, unlike the pre-composite days.

I'd agree with Brandon that online poker can have a high stress component, and what he says about stress chemicals in the body is quite true. The massive number of hands played by many online players can generate great skill, but may tend to burn out many of them before their games can fully mature. Live players, while experiencing periods of high stress, have time to recover due to the slower pace of the game, and have more time to observe their opponents. It is also very difficult for someone playing 12 tables to take any decent notes on their opponents, while live players often have volumes of notes on various hands they played and against whom. Online players 12-tabling are competing against 70-120 opponents at the same time, while the live player is only competing with 6-10; an online player and a live player with similar mental/emotional/physical attributes are equally focused on the games they are playing, but they are focused on different things, and the live player is observing more and making fewer decisions based on a broader range of variables. In the end, I think Brandon is more right about the possible results of prolonged high stress in relation to online players, but live players, not so much.

Now, let's address the math issue. I think most of us can agree that the math involved in NLHE ain't rocket science, folks. Not many people can do an ICM in their heads live at the table, but it doesn't take a genius to figure it out on paper. Figuring out the pot odds in a given hand is about all the math you really need at the table in this game. You can do some Structured Hand Analysis away from the table to analyze tight situations, but at the table itself, there's a lot more to the game than the math

I'd also argue that starting poker young is not really required for the development of a great poker talent, but a game-playing mentality is. Many game skills transfer across disciplines; Harrington was a great chess player before he was a great backgammon player before he was a great poker player. Stu Ungar was a gin rummy player, and didn't pick up hold'em until much later. Brandon seems to be saying that a player will rise from the current milieu that will be superior in character to any of these, but I'm not so sure. The variance that exists in poker by design seems to be enough to absorb any future improvements in precision that more in-depth training can deliver.

There are some qualities of great players that Brandon doesn't mention. Courage, resilience, self-awareness, dogged competitiveness and empathy are qualities most great players have or must develop over time to have long-term success. I say this, and I think of Phil Hellmuth, and you know, maybe I'm wrong . . .

[Poker Clif]

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This seems to fit well into the Sklansky discussion. It's a short column I wrote for Bluff (in the past I've previewed those columns here).

I told Kenny that Nick Schulman is the most obvious exception to his argument. As I discuss below, there aren't that many live players who are deeply, deeply talented. Kenny is one; it is hard to bring others to mind. It is true that the best live players would torture the best online players in deep live NL. The online players are analytically superior, allowing them to play early streets better, but these advantages will be buried by their inferior play on the later streets, especially the river. No NL player puts their money in better on the river than Kenny Tran. His reads are staggering. I've heard the same thing about Ivey, but I only have fifteen hours of play with him, so I can't confirm it.

As I discuss below, most of live NL is about game selection and life management.

The Life Cycle of a Poker Player
Brandon Adams

I was talking with a friend of mine who’s one of the best no-limit players in the world. He told me that in two years, the crop of top no-limit players would be scary, much better than those at the top of the game today. I agree with him. Perhaps these players are already out there, but don’t yet have the bankroll to play in the big games (an unfortunate requisite for being considered a top player). Or maybe they’ve yet to turn twenty-one.
My friend’s view was that he should maximize his win while he’s at the top of the game, and then move out of the way a bit when the new crop takes over. This is smart, forward-looking bankroll management. No telling how many top players in times past failed to recognize when their time was up.
I’ve seen a lot of the high stakes poker landscape over the last couple of years. My observation is that poker has really yet to see a full package of talents. There’s no Roger Federer of poker. Usually the top players excel in one or two aspects of the game, and then are merely very good in the other aspects. You will see analytical brilliance in Brian Townsend or Phil Galfond; you will see incredible instincts in Phil Ivey or Kenny Tran; you will see unmatched poker knowledge and speed of thought in Barry Greenstein. But you will not see all of these things in the same person. It’s inevitable that people who put together these talents will rise. There is a new level of money and status in the game right now attracting potential comers, and the talent pool is increasingly international.
Let me take a giant leap and compare skill levels across two entirely different games, poker and chess. It seems to me that in poker, no one has ever reached the level of mastery reached by the top chess players. The level of skill that Gary Kasparov in his prime exhibited on a chess table has never been matched by anyone on the green felt. This is open to argument, but I believe it to be obviously true and I think there is a deep reason for it. Poker wears people down.
Forget for a moment the degeneracy that surrounds poker. The poker world is rife with addiction, drug and alcohol use, depression, and sleep deprivation, but we will ignore for a moment the effect of these things on one’s abilities over time. I believe that there is something inherent in the game of poker that makes it difficult for one to steadily increase one’s ability over time. Namely, I think that the chief attraction of the game- it’s ability to kick up adrenaline and other stress chemicals- actually subtly damages the brains of poker players, making it difficult for them to study their game and improve over time. There are mounds of evidence suggesting that even relatively mild stress can damage the brain’s frontal lobes and impair learning and memory.
It’s well known that brain function (especially the ability to learn new skills) declines with age, starting at about age nineteen. I’m speculating that poker accelerates this process, but we should expect strong life cycle tendencies even if this is not the case. In the academic realm, specialists in different disciplines peak at different ages, depending on the relative importance in their particular field sheer processing power (IQ) versus accumulated knowledge. In fields where processing power weighs very heavily (math, for instance), academics peak very young (around 25). In fields, such as history, where accumulated knowledge weighs heavily, the peak occurs at age fifty or later.
I think that online poker is much more processing-intensive than live poker and depends much less on accumulated knowledge (about behavioral tendencies, for example). It’s not surprising that the top online players tend to be much younger than the top live players. My guess is that the expected peak for a serious online player would be 24 or so, and the expected peak for a live player would be around 33. I would further expect the skills of the live player to fall off more slowly after the peak than the skills of the online player.
I don’t think it’s too hard to paint the picture of the perfect poker player. First and foremost, he (or she) has to be born with an instinct for the game. There are some people who simply have the game in their blood. Everyone develops their hand-reading and people-reading skill over time, but only people with strong innate talents are capable of developing these skills to a world-class level. Second, he must be very smart, with an excellent memory and high quantitative and analytical aptitude. Third, he must protect his talent and smarts with good life management. I agree with Patrik Antonius’ view that top players of the future will also need to be extremely fit.
The fourth and fifth attributes of the perfect poker player are not consistent with the attributes of a well-rounded person. The perfect poker player must use the years when he peaks intellectually (around age nineteen) to study the game as deeply as possible. This includes the study of the tools, such as game theory and probability theory, that one can apply in poker. The final attribute is that, in one’s twenties, one must be focused on gaining as much poker experience as possible. As long as we are exploring the antisocial: a possible sixth attribute of the perfect player is that he is unmarried.
Poker is not yet sick enough that people consciously set out on paths such as the one suggested above. By chess and tennis standards, the path outlined above would be picture of restraint. This surely is one of the reasons those worlds produce talents of the Federer-Kasparov caliber. It is only a matter of time before poker training takes on this level of intensity.
The online world has an additional complication related to the existence of hand-analyzing software. People who don’t have facility with the newest and best tools will lose out to those who do. Failure to keep up technologically can lead to one’s demise.
On a practical level, a poker player should always try to keep his ego in check and rationally assess his relative skill level. Further, the concept of bankroll management should be expanded to a consideration of how one’s relative skill level is likely to evolve over time.

Brandon Adams

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FWIW, here is the perspective and strategic poker plan of a 53-year-old "young gun". I started out in April 2007 with a few months of play money, a few months playing mostly $1 SNG, and I moved up to $5 SNG this month.

First, I agree that the top chess players have it all over the top poker players. I was a mediocre tournament chess player for a while, and I quickly figured out that I didn't have what it takes to any more than maybe the best player in my city.

It goes without saying that chess players have to have great strategic and analytical skills, and I do pretty well there. I have the brains (IQ 154) and the strategic mindset for chess.

However, besides the strategic abilities, the amount of memorization needed is staggering. An aspiring top chess player doesn't study Encyclopedia of Chess Openings, he memorizes it. If you don't know a whole bunch of openings at least 10-15 moves deep (we're talking about many thousands of possible combinations), you're at a severe disadvantage to any of the world's top 1,000 players.

You probably all know about Havad Kahn playing 26 simultaneous SNG on PokerStars. Well, top chess players will take on that many players or more at the same time, and sometimes play blindfolded (having to memorize the position of all of the pieces on every board) against multiple players as well.

So, no, poker isn't there yet, not by a longshot.

My memorization skills are below average, perhaps because having Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) makes it difficult to concentrate on such a boring task for long periods of time. But I can keep working at it, and I believe that the acquired skill set is extremely important.

I'm always making and studying sets of flash cards. That could be odds/outs/percentages, different starting hand systems, and just about any kind of chart (comparative hand strengths, odds of flopping/turning/rivering certain kinds of hands, odds of being best with x hand against y opponents, etc, etc.

A lot of the above can be done somewhat by "feel" (as Jennifer Harmon has said), but just like a good musician is always working on the fundamentals (Yo-Yo Ma has been known to practice scales for six hours at a time), a grounding in the fundamentals is a necessary grounding for just about anything. (It has been said that football is a simple game, all about running and tackling, throwing and catching).

Besides all the memorized information, I am forcing myself out of my comfort zone, and methodically, one skill at a time, working on things that go against my conservative nature. This includes stealing, bluffing, and randomization of raises and calls.

Despite five college math courses, I was overwhelmed by The Mathematics of Poker, so at some point I'll probably take a game theory class to add to my skills in those areas.

Of course I am always reading and studying the literarture. The next two books on my poker reading list are Moshman's SNG book, and HOH Vol 2.

I also agree that physical conditioning is absolutely necessary. I ran a marathon once, and I plan to get in that kind of shape again. Also, it will become harder to be successful and drink alcohol and play, and to play without enough sleep--as players get better it will get harder to have an edge, and everything will matter.

I don't drink alcohol and I have a running and military background, so the discipline of training is right up my alley.

I believe that you have to play for about 12 hours to win the PokerStars Sunday Millions, and of course a live tournament of any size will have very long sessions. You can't do that without being physically and mentally prepared.

On top of that, I'm going to carefully observe all of the bankroll and moving up strategies. I will concentrate on moving up as soon as I'm ready (but not before), as playing more than two tables isn't comfortable for me.

Also, I like to take very detailed notes, sometimes a couple paragraphs on what moves one player did in one tournament. You just can't do that while mutitabling.

The above wasn't exactly flowing writing, but it gives you an idea how this old/new player approaches the game.

I'll probably never play in the WSOP Main Event, and if I do, my grandchildren will almost certainly not see me on TV at the final table. But in any competitive endeavor, there are only so many that are willing to do the work to be good-to-great, and as long as I'm one of those, I'll do just fine and make a nice chunk of change.