March 2010

Learning from scratch

Mar 31st by Peter Hallberg at Coinflip.com

Back in my early teens I started playing chess. In my early 20's I
started playing backgammon and in my early 30's I started playing poker.
Now, what have I learned about learning?

Learning is hard. You have probably heard a billion times that learning should be fun but it rarely turns out to be. On the other hand it is lots of fun knowing and using things you've learned. Most important of all it's extremely hard to unlearn things you already learned by heart.

Let's take a few steps back in time and look at some of the things I learned about learning by failing.

Chess in my early teens
Chess was this amazing game with fairly simple rules but very hard to learn. Soon after taking up the game I started in a chess club nearby with some of my friends from school. Pretty fast some of them lost interest of the game and stopped playing. We were still a couple of guys playing. Even though I spent almost my entire time studying chess it seemed like I couldn't keep up.

Everyday was spend on reading books, playing and analyzing games and playing friends and even though I did well compared to most players I just couldn't keep up with my friends - particularly one.

I retired from chess with roughly half of the active tournament players better and worse than me.

Did something go wrong?

Backgammon in my early 20's
One day this chess friend from my earlier years showed up at my apartment in Copenhagen and told me he learned this fabulous game called backgammon. At the time I was studying mathematics at the University of Copenhagen meaning that I had the opportunity to skip class and play backgammon day in and day out for a week.

I then entered the Copenhagen Open in the beginners division and won it. From there I learned a lot and learned it fast. After a couple of years I was quite strong and ended up winning the World Championship in 2004. Mind you that you do not have to be the best player in the world to win the world championship, but you have to be a very good one.

Even after this achievement I was still trailing my old chess friend backgammon skillwise! Omg wtf!!11!

Did something go wrong (more or less rhetorical)?

Poker in my early 30's
This Chris Moneymaker guy turned everything upside down again. Everybody started playing cards which I at the time thought was quite uninteresting but eventually it got to me and I started playing. My old chess friend was well on his way in the poker world with some really big online tournament wins.

As many times before I went to him for coaching. This was the obvious choice. Why shouldn't he be able to teach me this apparently easy card game? I spent a few years not understanding and being able to put his words into practice and finally gave up.

Did something go wrong?

Putting it all together
In 2007 I finally finished my BSc in Computer Science and dropped out of my graduate studies. Now in early 2008 I decided to go for a career in poker. This time it had to be different. This time I wanted to understand what had worked for me earlier and what didn't. To fund this project I needed to sell the idea of me being able to make it in the poker world but I had already shown that I couldn't make it before. Then I did the following analysis.

Chess
Sometime a few years ago I played a little chess for fun and did much better that I ever did before not having moved as much a one chess piece in 15 years. The reason was that I was looking at the game from a whole new perspective. When I tried to learn it back in the old days it was all about calculating variations but now I was only looking at structures and plans/ideas.

None of my old chess trainers and friends realized that I suck at remembering things and being precise in variation calculation. They also failed to realize that I perform very well when it comes to seeing general ideas and understanding structures. Basically I was trained all wrong. That went wrong.

On the other hand my chess friend was extremely good at remembering things and learning by repetition and of course a natural gift for playing games.

Backgammon
Making calculations in backgammon is limited to things most can learn close to perfection in a couple of years which was a big help for me. Looking at structures, understanding plans and weighing different concepts up against each other is what backgammon is all about. That's pretty much what I do.

I believe that my view on backgammon is the reason why I can't seem to be able to take the last steps into the absolute top of the world. There just need to be a put in a lot of hard work to learn certain details and intricacies that only the best players understand.

My old chess friend is also very good at seeing a lot of examples at just learn to react correctly without consciously understanding why it is correct.

Generalist vs. specialist
Slowly I realized that if I'm going to classify myself as a learner it has to be as a generalist. I don't care about detail and I only see general concepts, plans and ideas. I don't learn much from playing and maybe 90%+ of my knowledge comes from working with the games off the board.

My friend is just the opposite - a true specialist. He rarely cares for a general discussion with me, but he would much rather discuss certain situations and just propose which moves or plays he prefer. 90%+ of his knowledge comes from playing a vast amount of games.

Plan for learning poker
It seemed hopeless for me to start learning all kind of starting hands from different positions and remembering which hands to 3B from which positions and so on. No, I needed to focus on what the goal of the game was and understanding that the streets have a lot to do with each other. Then get an idea of general concepts and finally play some hands to try it all out. That way I would ensure that I didn't learn (conclude) a lot of thing that were wrong and then later on had to work my butt of to unlearn them.

It sounds very good on paper but it suck in practice. Learning all at once just isn't practical. There are just too many parameters that change over and over which you don't have any understanding of as a mere beginner. Anyway, that was how I started my first year in the hunt of a poker career.

Now, more than a year into the process I've learned that there might be an even better way to teach poker to completely new players of my 'learning type'. They need to learn concepts. They won't have to unlearn anything on the way up through the stakes. They need to play to experience the concepts in practice.

To be continued after easter...

You can post comments below and I also encourage you to go to this thread for a more in detailed discussion of the topic.

Good to be here

Mar 26th by Peter Hallberg at Coinflip.com

Most poker players have a gaming background. Many have played classic board
games like chess and backgammon. Others have played card games like bridge and
magic and yet others come from computer games like StarCraft and Counter Strike.
I have a backgammon background.

Hello CoinFlippers!

Formal presentation
My name is Peter Hallberg and I'm a backgammon world champion and also a full time mid-stake poker pro. Currently I'm living with my wife in Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark. As you might have noticed on my picture I'm of Korean origin, but I've lived my whole life in Denmark.

I spent most of my 20's trying to get my undergraduate degree in computer science, which I finally did back in 2007. Working as a UNIX-nerd put food on the table during all those years but that was not what I wanted to do with my life - so I quit!
 
Blogging at CoinFlip
CoinFlip could very well be the new big thing - gaining momentum by reaching out to other gaming communities. I am sure it will be valuable for everybody to get some perspective on how to go about one of the things we like the most: Playing poker.
 
The perspective I offer is the one of a backgammon player who recently turned his attention towards poker. It is incredible how many things poker and backgammon have in common but its just as incredible how difficult it can be to transform from one to the other.

After becoming the backgammon world champion I'm ready to take on another challenge. Through this blog I invite you to join me on a journey through the poker world to the big games. There's no gps or maps. We are just saddling up and ringing into the sun.

Just chillin' at the forum
I will try to be active on the forum where I'll be willing to discuss just about anything.

Poker: At the time of writing my skill level in poker is as a slightly winning player at NL200 5-max. My approach to the game is very analytical and I started playing NL50 in 2009. Surely you will be seeing me frequent the small-stake and mid-stake forums. Everyday is a battle for achieving the skill (and bankroll) for my next challenge - NL400.

Backgammon: I'm up for talking about anything related to backgammon especially if it has some relevance for poker players.

Future blogs
This Easter is no different from any other Easter for me. One of the biggest backgammon tournaments are held in Denmark about 5 minutes by car from my home. There's no way I'm going to miss that. This year I'll try to bring all you guys (and gals) along through my blog. If you are lucky I might introduce you to Gus Hansen or Sander Lylloff (EPT winner and the best backgammon player in the world). Those guys and some other big names like Mads Andersen (EPT winner and backgammon world champion) have challenged the world to a three day event of different backgammon disciplines. Each team has put up $200.000. The backgammon world is thrilled to see the old giants back on the stage performing the art of backgammon once again.

Some future blogs will be centered around my own poker development where I'll try to pass along some of the difficult things I had to learn the hard way. As we are all humans our daily lives may offer some surprising stories and I'll be standing by to tell you all about it.
 
Team Double Edge
When I think backgammon can offer a perspective on poker, chess has obviously something to offer too. I asked my friend Sune Berg Hansen if he wanted to join me in this endeavor to broaden the view on poker and of poker players. Sune is a chess grandmaster and mid-stake cash game player. He accepted my invitation and here we are. Please, go ahead and read his introductory blog here.

Our main goal is to offer our insight and perspective to communities like the one here at CoinFlip.