[AKQJ10]

Upon reflection, I should probably try harder to articulate why this view, though not without merit, is in my opinion a suboptimal approach to learning NLHE:

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<font color="blue">Flaw #2: Short-stack strategy stunts your growth as a poker player.</font>

...In summary, playing short-stacked poker is a crutch that may make you some bucks in the immediate future but will cost you much in the long run. You play uNL poker to learn; don't subvert that learning process by eliminating the most challenging -- and most profitable! -- part of the poker game.

[/ QUOTE ]

First, to reiterate, no one's saying that beginners should aim to spend the next 20 years and 500 thousand hands playing short stacks. It is indeed a crutch, and wise people use a crutch to support themselves until they've built up the ability to walk on their own.

Now, I'm not a trained educator, so I have to fall back on comparisons with poker to other more established disciplines with a similarly large body of knowledge. So let's look at how you might choose to go about learning Spanish, or how you'd learn to play piano.

Perhaps your goal is to become an expert in the language of Cervantes and Neruda. You might decide that the way to appreciate its beauties is to dive right into Don Quijote or at least into a daily newspaper. So you'd get a nice thick dictionary and possibly hire a tutor to explain some grammatical nuances, and if you didn't give up out of frustration eventually you'd get pretty good at reading written Spanish. Likewise, you could dive right into conversations or watching TV, and slowly you'd improve your listening comprehension.

But that's not what you find in an introductory Spanish class. Instead you find a controlled vocabulary and grammar, maybe 500 words and the present tense in a college semester. Although no one would argue that 500 words will make you a near-native speaker, it's enough to give you some benefit. Then if you're motivated, you'll move on to more advanced courses. You could certainly take on the whole language from the start, but most human beings learn from taking a smaller body of knowledge, reinforcing it, and then building it out incrementally.

Likewise, if you want to learn piano, you could pick up a score for the Rach 3 and pluck it out, note by note. With practice you might get pretty good. But a trained piano teacher isn't going to teach you that way; instead you're going to learn the basics like scales (thanks NLHE:TAP!) and simple songs. You won't be the life of the party playing "My Clever Pup" or "Yankee Doodle Drum", but the idea is that reinforcing the fundamentals will put you in great position should you decide to move forward.

<font color="brown">So in other areas we accept that human beings don't thrive by attacking an entire body of knowledge from the beginning. But for some reason, in poker gradualism will "subvert [the] learning process" and "cost you much in the long run." This isn't some minority opinion held by Pokey; this is the established consensus of the 2+2 NLHE forums!</font>

Think about it: start with "Una Coca-Cola por favor, y uno, dos, tres cafés," and once you've experienced some success, you'll likely be motivated to press on to the Quijote.