I hired a coach...and I hate him.
This is a short story of my coaching experience from the perspective of the client.
I wanted to hire a coach to help me accelerating my poker training and to give me a honest look on my level. It was in the midst of a pretty rough period so my confidence was low but my belief in my ability was pretty good.
So he did what I hired him to do and then he told me .
You suck.
I what?
You're a fish!
Sorry?
You're lucky you didn't lose more
.
.
.
.
My first reaction was anger, indignation, fury! HOW DARE HE?
Fuck that guy and his abusive language, what does he know anyway?
I took a deep breath, walked around and thought it over. I gave myself time to adjust. And that's the thing here, your mind will default to rejecting criticism, attacking whoever is it that delivers and protects your ego. That's dangerous to default to.
Was he right?
"Tell me more. let's look at specifics".
We spent hours looking over spots and situations. I wasn't convinced but we ran the numbers, we comapred ranges it was clear. I was bleeding money.
Damn it...I was a fish.
On the course of the next month we talked about a lot of poker stuff and got eviscerated about once every 2 3 days. It was hard, I knew I maybe deserve it but damn it, it hurt. I wanted to punch him, delete skype and be done with this guy.
I remember sitting in front of my computer, waiting our session with agitation. I don't want to. I was looking for reasons to quit.
But quitting makes me feel even worse. That's what saved me. I hate quitting more than I hate him.
There's a silver lining, at the end of the month we looked over stats again and he said a rare: " This looks good! ".
It felt good, earned and I craved more.
We still do sessions time to time and I still don't want to do every one of them. But that's the road.
Don't give in the ego.
Poker coaching? Had no idea such a thing existed! On Steemit you learn something new every day.
Your story reminds me of high school volleyball practices. I noticed that the coaches were always affirming and positive towards me, but often hard on the other players. Then came game time and the other players the coaches were hard on started the game and played for most of it. I sat on the bench and was lucky to get put in for a few minutes at the end. It seemed to be there was an inverse relationship between how much the coach complemented you and how much he put you in the game. You're right about looking beyond the ego.
lol that's crazy. What did you do?
I'm not sure if abusing someone is the only or the best way to make that person better..but i think there's a place and time for hard truths and yeah, they will hurt! but what can you do? that's how you learn and grow.
I just wasn't very athletic :)
I think there are better ways to motivate people to improve... but being hard on people seems to be the way of sports and apparently, poker :)
and yeah..poker coaching is a thing and it can be rather expensive nowadays. A good coach can get from 100 to 1000$/hour. [ I got a huge discount because I know the guy, could never afford him otherwise...]
You should've told him "you suck", at the end of the coaching.
Explain me something he tought u!! Can u go into detail in one hand as an example?
Hmm. Well a lot of it was noticing irrational behavior and emotional play.
There were a lot of hands vs regs where I let my ego do the playing: " This guy calls every timeI raise, I'll keep raising bigger! " type of thinking instead of focusing on better strategies to beat him in the long run [ sometimes, it's better to go tighter for example instead of playing in their game out of position ]
But a lot of the actual things we talk about are about ranges and how different boards connect with different ranges. One cool observation is that people can be very sticky on the flop, but very fold-happy on the river. So sometimes you want to make the pot grow on flop and take it back on the river with the right cards.
It's really a lot of small things, which is how it is when you're at an ok-level, you don't do huge mistakes, but small and costly in the long run!
I understand. Yes emotions need to be out of the game completely
applause.
Oh did your "coach"/"teacher" cut off your legs and hide your children too?
Did he tell you that if you can't spot the fish you are the fish?
Thanks for the honest laugh at my face, I like how you write. You have a new follower.