A5s in blind battle.

[auc hincloss]

[ QUOTE ]


What I'm saying is more complex though. Part of the problem is this communication problem.


[/ QUOTE ]

[registrar]

OK. I've finally got what Baltostar is saying. I would make a few points:

1. Baltostar: whatever your previous experience and qualifications to coach, you really do not explain yourself very well. These are difficult concepts to articulate and I have failed myself on a fair few occasions. I actually respect the fact that this has not dimmed your confidence in the ideas themselves. OTOH, whatever my merits as a poker player, I'm a pretty bright guy and a lot of my work involves the evaluation of written communication - you simply don't communicate very well through prose.

2. I would also commend you for taking a stance and defending it on these boards. A lot of the analysis that takes place on these boards is somewhat simplistic, indicative of a herd menatlity and places way too much stress of what you call dynamic hand reading and cEV in a given hand. MTTs, I am pretty sure you are correct, do not reward this approach as highly as they do others. Or, at least, this should definetly not be the only approach.

3. Braodly speaking, I agree with what you are saying. However, specific hand posts must always be considered with the proviso that, on these boards, what we can generally establish is the specific chip expectation for a particular play. It is often difficult to include enough information about the other relevant factors to indicate which play has a higher $EV. These other factors are legion - our position relative to weak spots of the table and the chances that we can exploit these more profitably and with less risk than this one (which may offer are higher cEV with more risk), the relative values of stack sizes at differing stages of the tournament, the advantages of creating and manipulating a specific image, when the table will break, how well we are playing tonight, how well we know our opponents, a gut feeling (often based on valid information but information that is not deteriminable at a concious level) etc. etc. The concept of 'risk' in MTTs is generally not discussed enough and this is why I am happy for you to post. All too often, concern over risk management is dismissed with jokes like "ZOMG tournament life on the line".

4. The good players here already 'get' what you are saying. This hand is a good example. Hero has played enough poker and plays poker well enough, to have established for the reasons that he has outlined, that playing a rag ace from the SB offers a higher expectation when limped (for him). He's also good enough to get the maximum value from the hand as played, when he concludes, through dynamic hand reading that he is ahead. A weaker player, posting on SSMTT forum, might be well-advised to raise pf for the reasons that you outline.


In conclusion, keep posting. Post more concisely and more cogently. Post specific examples from your own play which illustrate your points. Understand the limitations of public hand posting as a way of discussing and refining strategy. Never forget that the best 'players' in any pursuit (perhaps less so with poker than tennis but I believe that the assertion still holds) are the best because they do things which cannot be coached and do not rely soley on formulas.

Off all the advice I have listed, posting cogently and concisely is the most important, IMO.

[Soulman]

baltostar's posts in this thread might be the best he's written (that I've read anyway, haven't read all of them obv) in HSMTT.

I'd like to add to registrar's list that communicating with way less arrogance is paramount if you actually want people to pay attention. Newcomers on these boards are often ridiculed, as is pretty standard anywhere there is a group of respected regulars and tons of (mostly clueless) newcomers that drop by. I find it very unsurprising that you've been dissed relentlessly with the attitude you have, and with ideas that are less than coherent.

On another note, your ideas are probably incoherent partly due to the fact that your knowledge is largely theoretical, and thus you have problems being concrete and provide examples - which is largely the best way to communicate with groups not sharing a common language and to express theoretical, often tacit, ideas.

[Soulman]

[ QUOTE ]
Never forget that the best 'players' in any pursuit (perhaps less so with poker than tennis but I believe that the assertion still holds) are the best because they do things which cannot be coached and do not rely soley on formulas.


[/ QUOTE ]
I disagree with this, but agree that these 'things' are hard to express on a forum and is better suited to an apprentice/master-type learning situation (ghosting, discussing live, HH video reviews etc).

[registrar]

Just to be clear, I'm not saying that the best players cannot benefit from coaching, but that often the best things they do cannot be coached. At present, I can't think of an example from a sport that would be recognised by the whole forum so I'll use one that no one understands. Ronnie O'Sullivan is the greatest snooker player to have walked the Earth. I would suggest that coaching helps him in some ways (temperament and concentration on particular) but it has nothing to do with the fact that, on his game, he can pull off any shot (using either hand) and that he will just beat everyone else if he's playing his best game. There's not much use telling him that he should hold his cue differently or whatever.

[baltostar]

My intention wasn't to coach anyone, per se.

What I am good at is standing on the periphery of something and spotting self-reinforcing patterns that have become an objective unto themselves even as their benefit to the real goals have become marginal or even negative.

It does seem that on these boards the following pattern have pervasively embedded itself:

When directions a hand could go become murky, there is this total concentration of effort on figuring out how play the hand optimally **in the context of that hand only**.

Perhaps it is better in certain hands in which uncertainty regarding how it might play out and associated risk have both suddenly widened well beyond initial expectations to switch gears and play the hand with risk mitigation as the sole objective ?

In most cases, doing so would be EV-, and apparently that's taboo on these boards.

An analogy from trading:

Sometimes a setup looks very solid but once you put the trade on you become aware of small but significant risks that could cause the trade to go wildly wrong.

There is one camp of very good traders who will choose to dynamically respond to the situation as it unfolds, and they are very good at this. But the approach often involves scaling their trade size.

However, there is another camp of very good traders who prefer to immediately hedge out the extreme scenarios they just became aware of, and not touch the trade after that until targets are met. In doing so, they give up a good part of their anticipated profit, but they also avoid outsized risks.

And by doing so in many cases the trade does become relative EV- for them in the sense that its return on capital becomes less than some super-low-risk bread-and-butter trade they can put on at any time.

These tradres know that most likely in the very near future will come comparable setups that very likely will not become an ugly hydra as soon as they put them on. And they know their capital is better utilized on those trades.

[Eagles]

Baltostar,
Risk management is borderline irrelevant in MTTs.

[MLG]

Balt,
I kind of thought thats where this was going. The idea of turning down risky high EV situations in order to allow yourself to profit from later high EV situations that to entail that level of riskiness in the arena of a poker tournament is generally a bad idea. There is a lot of literature in the archives about it. While you are right that you should be considering exactly how much ev you are gaining my upping your varience, you should very very rarely (especially early in a tournament) be passing up ev to reduce risk.

[PrayingMantis]

[ QUOTE ]
Baltostar,
Risk management is borderline irrelevant in MTTs.

[/ QUOTE ]

You are replying to a poster that in a recent thread wrote: "If you don't assign goals to hands, you run the risk of letting a single hand take control of your tournament".

I'm really not interested in the old and rather boring discussion of "ZOMG putting your tourney life on the line!", and of course you should have "goals", or better: "plans" for a hand, but general statements like the above, which baltostar is making again and again and in different ways, are really wrong and misleading, as most of good players know. You cannot, simply cannot, be a significant winner in MTTs if you don't, rather occasionally, "run the risk of letting a single hand take control of your tournament". OF course, strong players know how to pick these hands and spots, bad players don't.

Baltostar's "risk ideas" with regrard to MTTs are much much more relevant to MTT bankroll management than to any specific MTT hand in some random mid-stage spot in a tournament. Taking ideas from trading and artificially implementing them into MTT-poker situations is usually absurd (and again, it's not the first time I'm seeing this phenomenon, which is actually very interesting. "Smart" trading theoreticians who become rather weak-tight poker players, who have tons of "risk management" rationalizations for their play).

Anyway, I wouldn't like balto to stop posting or anything, not at all. If people find his vaguely articulated "ideas" interesting or stimulating, well, great.

[Ship Ship McGipp]

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