Coaching is a big business in the world. Most professions, sports and hobbies have specialist coaches helping their clients succeed. Poker is no different. Since the poker boom, thousands of poker players invest in poker coaching services to take their game up a level.
In this article, we will detail seven reasons why poker coaching works well.
1) Learn Advanced Plays
Poker coaching is a quick, sure-fire way to learn how to execute advanced poker plays. There are millions of poker players that play ABC standard poker and don’t know any advanced moves. If you’re a standard TAG micro-stakes player with no ambition to move up stakes, that’s fine. You won’t need to learn advanced poker plays to earn lots of money.
On the other hand, if you want to become an expert and be competitive with professional players, you will need to learn advanced plays. By having more weapons and plays in your arsenal, you are more prepared for tougher games and will also detect these moves from stronger players.
2) Mental Toughness
One of the biggest stumbling blocks many players have is being mentally strong. This comes in different forms. Perhaps you tilt easy, lose patience, or can’t handle bad beats. A poker coach won’t just focus on your technical poker. They will offer practical solutions to help your mental game too.
Poker is a mental game just as much as it’s mathematical. You need both to be a long-term winner. It’s no use knowing the right odds and choosing the right hands to play if you get nervous or are prone to blow-ups. This is where a poker coach will provide support and feedback to ensure you stay on the right path and gain mental toughness.
3) Honest Feedback
Friends, colleagues and peers are great, aren’t they? But what they say to you doesn’t always help you. When you bust out of a tournament or lose a few buy-ins, they may say “GG” or “unlucky” without giving constructive criticism. You can’t blame them. They want to be sympathetic if you’ve lost. This is where having a poker coach is invaluable. A poker coach will give you honest feedback on how you’re playing. This is critical to self-improvement in poker.
Once you know what you’re doing wrong, you can seek to fix it. They may tell you things you don’t want to hear but trust me, it’s for your own good. A little honesty can go a long way. You may learn things about your game you never knew. There are players that have been making the same mistakes for years, costing them thousands e.g. limping in. If they had a poker coach for a few hours, they could potentially eradicate a leak much quicker.
4) Access to More Resources
Availability is a big deal. The more information and tools you have access to, the better you can become. There’s a lot of material on the internet. A lot of it is bad and not worth the time. Your poker coach is well aware of this and will point you in the right direction. He may even have access to private resources not readily available. Often, they will provide you with these resources free of charge as part of being one of their students.
If you ever have a question about poker software or which sites to play on, ask your poker coach. They will give you tips on anything you need to know.
5) Experience Matters
When it comes to poker playing, experience goes a long way. Sure, there are people who play for decades and still lose, but the ones who win, have millions of hands of experience. This experience is imperative. Deep in their subconscious, they can recall countless scenarios that they can refer to, intuitively, that will help their student. It could take years to learn this by playing.
There is a saying “you must lose first to win”. In the modern age, this is truer than ever. A new player is handicapped when he sits with more experienced players. They know things, he can’t even comprehend. Investing in a poker coach is like tapping into millions of hands of experience that would literally take you years to learn yourself. Why not take a short-cut and get a poker coach instead? Obviously, you must play, but take a short-cut to winning is a better plan than investing time and money for ages.
6) Learning Maths
Maths is more important in poker than most people care to think. I don’t just mean calculating outs or knowing your pre-flop showdowns in a tournament. Maths is far more than that. It’s about hand selection, continuation bet strategy, pre-flop raise sizing, value bet sizing, bluffing effectively, pot odds and implied odds.
Quite a lot isn’t it? Not to a poker coach, they can help you grasp and implement all the important parts of poker maths. Once you know the maths, you are well on your way to earning a lot of money. All these tweaks to your game will help you win rate immensely.
7) Money, Money, Money
The most important reason poker coaching works is money. A poker coach will help you win money from poker. That’s the biggest reason of all, isn’t it? There’s a simple reason why poker coaching is a profession, it works and there is a demand for it.
This means they are doing something right, retaining students and acquiring new students. To do this, they need to be delivering a high standard of coaching. They are getting people to win at poker. This is why you invest in a poker coach. It’s the most important reason of all.
How long you invest in poker coaching is entirely up to you. The first step is the most important of all. The decision to spend money on poker coaching may seem like a big one. However, once you learn new things, implement them into your game and see your earnings increase, you will wonder how did you ever live without a poker coach.
So, are you ready to make the right investment in your poker education?
