I teach poker lessons for a living, or should I say more accurately as a side job. I’m a professional online poker player but I won’t share my identity however I will help you select a poker coach. For any Online Poker Client who is interested in coaching I supply data and results of my last two years as a winning poker player. If a coach won’t share this information with you, don’t share your money with him. I can’t claim to have won every month but I’ve had very few losing months and my stats support that fact. Any coach who makes big claims but can’t back them up is again a coach you don’t need.
Being on call for an online poker client is part of my services. I refuse to help them during specific hands but I will sweat them and then tell them how I would have played a hand differently after a session. If a coach is willing to “help” you during your hands you should question his ethics and wonder if he’s the guy for you. Some people pick apart hand histories, and while there is value in that, I think actually watching the hands take place has far more value. Sometimes there is pacing to a session and things like timing tells influence a decision that a hand history might not properly reflect.
Being an instructor for an online poker client is a controversial business. For whatever reason there are some out there that think if you are really a winning player you wouldn’t share your secrets. Simply not true, let’s face it, the information is out there, I’m not the first to discover how to play, and though my game has nuances I’m not afraid of sharing my rationales or philosophies behind the game to help out a paying customer.
Teaching poker, like teaching anything is a profession all its own. Just because you know how to do something doesn’t mean you can teach it. Michael Jordan would probably be a pretty lousy coach, because as he’s discovering in the front office and in ownership he can’t just fill a team with Michael Jordans. They say that those that can, do, and those that can’t, teach. Not really true.
Anybody that has had a mentor or guidance from an experienced hand knows there are some that can, that do and teach. Doyle Brunson said that writing Super System cost him more money than it earned him. He’s overstating things. If he didn’t write it somebody else would. We’d be naive to think Doyle would have been alone in coming to successful conclusions about poker. He may have been first, but once the poker boom hit there were literally hundreds of thinkers reaching even better conclusions.
Top pros charge top dollar to teach. It make sense from an opportunity cost perspective. The time that they spend teaching an online poker client might be more profitable or better used playing for themselves. Course, there are a lot of top pros that teach now. The benefit is that t is guaranteed money. There is no gamble, no risk, and to a degree no thrill. The first two are positives and to many the third is a negative.
The benefit about guaranteed money is just that it’s guaranteed. Teaching represents an income stream that is always there. You got bills to pay, you don’t have to worry about one bad month of variance and not being able to pay your month. The only thing a teacher needs is a stream of online poker clients. Good teachers get referrals bad teachers don’t.
If you are looking for a teacher, my first suggestion is to consider the ones that are reaching out to you. Again, good teachers get referrals bad teachers don’t. Now, a guy has to start out somewhere, to a degree, but if guys are going out of their way to sell their services you should be wary. Consider this parallel, you’ve seen two players on the tour for a couple of years.
Who would you rather stake or back for a few tournaments, the guy asking you to put him in a $60 Sit ‘n go or the guy who isn’t asking but playing 10k events. The answer is simple, the first guy has a serious leak somewhere in his life to have fallen on hard times and quite possibly the leak is poker. The second guy, for the moment at least, doesn’t appear to have one. Selecting a good teacher is half finding one that has to find time to teach you.
