#Holdem manager 2 on parallels professional#

For those that know something about poker, take for example this spot: you are out of position in early position at a six handed table with ace-queen offsuit and you get re-raised by the button (an expert level player). You can’t simply look up an ELO-ranking and determine someones skill level, and if you are not an expert level poker player evaluating how good the advice is that you get isn’t trivial.

But this is easier said than done, because how do you find a good coach? There are plenty of mediocre players that aren’t very good at poker, but good at marketing themselves (disclosure: I also offer poker coaching and I like to think I’m bad at marketing and good at poker). Figuring everything out on your own isn’t doable, so hiring someone more knowledgeable to speed up your development as a player makes sense.

Poker is a complicated and evolving game: what you read in books is either outdated, never correct to begin with, or theoretically correct, but very general and not directly usable. In poker there is a vibrant market place for coaching. When you add a significant random element to the game the evaluation of skill becomes a lot harder, and it becomes easier for mediocre players to pretend that they are better than they are. I understand that Magnus Carlsen knows what he’s doing. The amount of luck involved in chess is relative low, and you can simply check ELO-ratings to see how good someone is. I basically know nothing about chess besides the rules of the game, but I think that it isn’t hard for a novice to figure out who’s a good chess player and who isn’t.

#Holdem manager 2 on parallels professional#

So as a poker professional I thought it would be a nice idea to explain some of the more subtle differences, and tell you some of the lessons that I learned from poker. But most of the parallels are drawn by investment professionals that try to project wisdom from a field they understand to a game they don’t know a whole lot about. For example risk taking, risk management and being process oriented all play a crucial roll in both. In the investing world people love to draw parallels between poker and investing, and rightly so since there is a strong link between the two activities.