Okay, if you’re reading this, it’s 2021 and our newest book Probability and Statistics for 12‑ Year‑Olds (and Maybe You): Plain English Simply Explained, Lessons and Ideas for Students, Gamblers, and Decision Makersby David Sklansky is now available on Amazon. Well, at the time of this writing, only the kindle is up, but we do expect to have the paperback version up in early January.
Also, as most of you know, we encourage vigorous debate on 2+2, and that includes this magazine. If you look at the article list, you’ll see an article by Robert Samuels titled “Debating Malmuth’s Real Poker Psychology.” Now for those who don’t know, not only is Robert a poker player, but he has a Ph.D. in psychology, so I certainly will have my work cut out to successfully debate him. What I plan to do is put a link to his article on our Psychology Forum and take it from there. Of course, everyone is welcome to participate.
For those of you who have now read the article, I do want to address one point that Dr. Samuels makes. He states and the bolding is mine:
“While Malmuth stresses learning and playing the proper GTO strategy instead of focusing on mental issues like concentration, emotional control, and healthy habits, the problem with his argument is that the only way to learn a comprehensive GTO strategy is to commit yourself to studying with a high degree of concentration and effort.”
One of the points I make in Real Poker Psychology is that there seems to be an overemphasis among some of these people who I’m negative towards to study hand histories to an extreme. In fact, seeing statements that encourage you to write down all hands that you play is common, and in my opinion will simply drive you crazy.
But this doesn’t mean that I don’t encourage someone “to commit yourself to studying with a high degree of concentration and effort.” In fact, I’ve done this all my life and still do it today when working on a new project. But the argument I make is that your effort should go towards a finite but manageable number of concepts that you use to govern your strategy as opposed to attempting to memorize a huge and unmanageable number of specific plays.
