Steady as she goes..
I’m watching videos, Skelm is playing at my stake to get a feel for it to assist me, and I’ve been getting a few hands in, so far with Skelms help it’s been break even, but still a pretty small sample size, but I’ve been learning. I’ve also been lurking in the 2+2 small stakes forums a lot more, havn’t made a post on the site yet, will do eventually when I have something of significance to crontibute. Significance from me is a rare thing, hell, it might not even exist.
The good thing about poker is there’s not always a right thing and a wrong thing to do, it’s all painted in greyscale and you can take artistic liberties wherever you want, a lot of those choices aren’t profitable, and in this quest for knowledge, you really want to find profit wherever you can, maximising opportunities for your opponent to make mistakes while minimising your own. I was watching an Ed Miller video showing how using information obtained through training videos and the like can be misused and it struck me, there’s really never going to be the same situation twice. This game is both infinite and evolving, as you will never get the same hand, position, opponents, opponent stats, opponent histories and sample sizes twice. The average player is slowly becoming better at this game, and since the average player is a fish, it’s quite scary to think that skill is only relative to your opponents. Poker becomes a race against other players for who can comprehend the most study material within the shortest timeframe, with those who have tossed aside their 9-5 for the poker life having the most to gain through 24/7 access to study materials while playing online, but also the most to lose with the threat of ‘Mr Average’ slowly creeping toward their skill level at an increasing rate.
Sorry if I’m getting too deep with this line of thought, but I find it interesting. I guess it’s our responsibility as proffessional, semi-proffessional and One-day-I-wanna-be-a proffessional (me) poker players to help polarise the average players skill to the average proffessional skill, and there’s only two ways of doing that, making an effort to decrease the skill level of the fish somehow, or to motivate people with 0 skill to get into poker through promotion. The latter is much more realistic, it could also deviate on a ‘don’t tap the tank’ tangent, but I think just having a positive attitude towards the game, tolerating silly questions from friends and relatives, and generally spreading the word that ‘poker is fun’ is the best way to achieve this.
