A naming issue

For as long as I’ve played poker, pros have struggled to agree what to call non pros.

In Doyle Brunson’s day, they were just called fish (or whales if they were big fish), but once the term caught on it was deemed offensive. The same cycle was repeated with alternative monikers: fun players, amateurs, recreationals. No sooner had a new term been coined to replace the now offensive older one than it itself was deemed offensive, and the search for another replacement started.

It’s not even a good player/bad player divide any more

We seem to have settled to some degree on recreational: a term that simply implies that the players in question play for recreation rather than mere profit. It’s not even a good player/bad player divide any more: many recreational players I know work harder on their game and are better at it than many live pros. More on that later.

Tapping the tank

When I started in the game, pros were a weird blend of sole traders and a loose cartel. They guarded their strategic secrets jealously from each other, but above all from the fish. Even talking strategy in front of fish was frowned upon, and referred to as tapping the tank. A lot of time and effort was put into keeping the fish in their untapped tanks.

The problem with that is the information cannot be contained indefinitely. It wants to disseminate, and always finds a way. Doyle’s “Super System” was gobbled up by non pros, much to the horror of pros who saw it as a betrayal. The same charges were thrown at every book that had any sort of impact: Caro, Sklansky, Harrington, even my own minor offering. The most common reaction I got and still get from pros to “Poker Satellite Strategy” was not “well done, great effort” but “why the hell are you teaching everyone to play satellites making them tougher for those of us who already knew how?”

any attempts to contain the flow of information was as pointless as a pinkie in a dam

Once the solvers hit the market and everyone could buy and learn to use them (and of course they had already been available before, the private preserve of a few select had working pros), any attempts to contain the flow of information was as pointless as a pinkie in a dam.  And so we are where we are: in an ocean of top notch strategy information accessible to anyone who wants it, and is willing to invest the time to find and consume it. The only problem is there’s also a lot of bad strategy out there too, and even if you have the ability to discern the difference, it can be too time consuming to do so

Time is money, so they say. For a lot of recreationals, time is not money, it’s way more important than that. It’s possible to have more money than you need, but we can’t buy time, and we are all given the same number of days every year irrespective of our wealth or status. For recreationals, short cuts and filters are vital, so they can get the most from the limited time they have to devote to their recreation. They don’t want to flounder around on YouTube wasting time watching the bad stuff trying to find the good stuff, and they don’t want to spend hundreds of hours running their own sims and peering at outputs trying to discern patterns and conceptual frameworks.

A chance meeting

And so we are here, in a place where the distinctions between pros and non pros, regs and recs, has never been more blurry. It’s not even a skill differential any more: as I said I know many recs who work harder and smarter than many pros.

I met one at the recent 10k Seniors High Roller at the World Poker Tour (WPT), when she waved at me from the next table wearing a JakaCoaching patch. At the first break, she introduced herself as Judy with the words:

I watch your videos all the time!”

My new patch buddy told me a charming story of driving her son to a target satellite and repeating the points of my webinar on JakaCoaching to him. I’d made a horror show start to the tournament having to fold a house on the river after I’d already put half my starting stack in. Judy had made an even unhappier start and had less than half a stack, but she impressed me as she both expressed a fighting spirit to turn it around, and asked for advice on what exploitative adjustments to make at a very aggressive table.

I recovered to well over starting stack before it all disappeared in an orbit after dinner. As I walked away I caught sight of Judy still hanging on grimly with a short stack. I was hopeful but not exactly optimistic for her, so I was very pleasantly surprised when I ran into her in the corridor on her way back to Day 2.

Later, as I went deep in the daily tournament in Resorts World, I was even more pleasantly surprised to hear she was on the final table. I was hoping to get across in time to see her take it down, and join her formidable rail that included Faraz himself dispensing expert final table ICM advice. Faraz tweeted she was even reviewing her own notes from training videos at breaks!

The new brand

In the event, I got there just too late to witness her coming second, for almost a quarter of a million. On her Twitter bio, Judy describes herself as a “mother, wife, attorney, bank director, adjunct college professor, poker player.”

She’s a perfect representative of the new brand of recreational, who treat the game with the same respect and due diligence as everything else they do, and reap the rewards in a game that is almost pure meritocracy over a large enough sample.

Passionate and proselytising, Judy gushed over the benefits of JakaCoaching when another recreational saw our patches and came over to enquire. In fact, Judy did a much better effort not just in trying to win the tournament, but in selling the site to the guy, than I did!