8/26/2010--Time management

I'm constantly learning things about how best to manage my time. When I started out, I knew that I wanted to get my time in, and that to be honest with myself (and to have a record) I planned to track all of my time by category (administrative, study, and playing) in 15 minute intervals. That was fine as far as it went.

Beyond that, I didn't really have a plan. I would play for a while, study for a while, keep up with my admin work, and just generally keep an eye on my hours, and it would all work out. I'm finding out that it's not that simple. The main reason for that is my study time.

I always thought that studying was just something I would just work in around my playing time . After all, I can read a poker book anytime and anywhere, 15 minutes at a time, or an hour at a time. But some study doesn't work that way.

Not all study is something as straightforward as reading a poker book, or using flash cards to memorize odds and outs in different situations. Some of it is complicated, and it reminds me of my computer science classes in the 1980s. It takes deep thought, and understanding the flow of what's going on to get on top of the problem--not something that can be done in a spare 15 minutes.

The blue text that follows is from a section on how to approach analyzing a hand, and is taken from The Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide: Tournament Edition, edited by Michael Crane, pages 145-146. You don't have to read and understand the whole thing, the point is that there is a lot more that goes into hand analysis than, "I play good cards and he plays crap, so until I have a reason to think otherwise, I probably have a better hand than he does." Here is a portion of the example analysis:

This is how I make that kind of estimate during a hand. There are four cards that beat me and he has two shots to hit them--his two hole cards. If he is playing a random hand, he might have a 20 percent chance to beat me. If it is raised, it is pretty unlikely he has a hand with a jack. Maybe he has a 12 percent chance of having a three or a jack. You also have to add in the chance that he has A-A, K-K, or Q-Q. If he raised in early position and you think he is raising about 15 percent of the time, 10 percent of his raises are with these three hands. Boost the 12 percent to 14 percent.

If the flop was A-3-3 and I had a pocket pair, I have to worry about three aces and two threes. Now he has two shots at five cards (instead of four) and if he raised, the chances of him having an ace are much greater than random. These are very rough approximations but I don't need any better than that.

Understanding and solving a problem in this manner very much reminds me of writing the code for a computer program. To write code I had to understand the big picture and fit all the details into that picture: what numbers to add, what to do with the totals, what to print out and how, and how the computer should handle out-of-range entries by users (entering someone's age as 175, for example). I had to completely understand each part, and how it all fit into the big picture, or nothing would work.

Regarding the example in blue, I don't think like that. I understand the big picture. I know that a player's actions tell a lot about what kind of hand he has, and I can do a decent job of putting most players on a range of hands that they might be playing.

What I don't do is go that kind of detail, examining all of the possible options and assigning them weighted probabilities, as in the Full Tilt example. I know that good players do that, and I know I should. I've decided that it's one of the things I want to tackle soon.

This completely changes my approach to study. It isn't something I can do 15 or 30 minutes at a time. I have to look at this example and really understand how the author of this chapter is thinking. Just as with coding a computer program, I'll have to break the problem into component parts, then put it all together.

I'll probably get a deck of cards out and go through it, step by step, until I understand the method of the author's analysis. I'll have to work through the math on paper, to make sure I understand how he came up with the probabilites, and/or memorize those probabilites so that I can do it at the table. Both of those parts of the task, learning the method and understanding the math, will take several sessions of a half-hour of more before I really start to get it.

Then I'll probably pick one of my hand histories and make sure I can do the process from beginning to end, probably at least partially still on paper. The next step will be to keep working on it until it's fast enough, and natural enough, to do in real time at the poker table, where online I will have about 15 seconds to make a decision.

All of this will take intense concentration and nearly absolute quiet. I have ADD, and that level of immersion in a task isn't possible for me if a TV is on, the phone is ringing, and other things are going on.

When I take this study project on, I will need blocks of time when I can deeply concentrate. If that means wearing earplugs, going someplace quiet, or only working on this at certain times, then that's what I'll have to do. In a situation like this, playing will have to work around my study hours, unlike the usual situation when it's the other way around.

The bottom line is that I'll have to be much more flexible about how I spend my time. There might be weeks when I spend more time studying than playing. Then, to make up for my lack of playing time, there will be other weeks when I study very little and spend almost all of my time playing. The amount of administrative time that I need is pretty constant at around 2-3 hours a week, so that won't change very much.

Sometimes playing poker is mostly about, well, playing poker. But other times, it's about being self-employed, and finding a better way to manage my time and my business.