Coaching As Learning

Just a few years ago, I was helping out at a boot camp for a major poker tour. They had a well-known headliner with me joining in as a secondary instructor. In between lectures, we all broke out into small groups and did hand analysis. We would set up scenarios that mimicked common tournament situations and deal out cards for the students to play. After each hand, all of the players would hold on to their mucked cards and we would all discuss what we thought of how everyone played each hand. There would always be lively discussion and people would do their best to defend their position (people can always find ways to justify questionable actions at the poker table). The ultimate defense was always “Well, I thought he had xyz so that’s why I did that,” where xyz is the hand the opponent had or a reasonable facsimile thereof. A close runner-up was “I was trying to make things interesting to discuss.” Many excuses were made. Logic almost always won out. When logic didn’t run out, time did. I’ve had lots of people come up to me years later to recount those hand studies and mark them as a turning point in their poker career.

Most of the people who attend these boot camps are lifetime break-even or small losing players who are trying to become winning players. They’re not entertaining dreams of becoming Phil Ivey or Daniel Negreanu, just looking to make a few bucks a year while they do something they enjoy. A few of them have aspirations to become professional players and it was one of those who approached me after a camp to ask me if I’d be interested in coaching him one-on-one. It took me a while to come around to it and find the right fit, but I eventually worked out a time and place with one of the people who was interested. I’m sure I wasn’t a great coach at the beginning and I’m still working on improving right now, but I owe a fair bit of gratitude to the people who were willing to have me as a coach early on even though I’m sure I made many mistakes.

I have one very dedicated student and a couple who pop in here and there for a session and they all seem happy, so I guess that’s a good sign of my progression as a coach. I have certainly had students that didn’t work out for a myriad of reasons, and I think they’ve actually been the ones that have done the most towards making me a better coach. Most recently, I’ve dealt with problems ranging from communication issues to time zone problems to plain old differences in philosophy.

Being on the same mental plane as your student is a great thing and can lead to some very productive sessions, but it might be even better to find yourselves on different settings. From sessions like these, I’ve grown quite a bit. I have had to either find better ways to explain the concepts we’re talking about or question those concepts deeper when the session was over. This led to me having some good insights into the facets of the game we were studying or a breakthrough on how to express it better to other students. As a result, I feel like I’ve become a better poker player, a better poker teacher, and a better communicator.

Even a student that I jive well with on a regular basis can challenge me in new ways from session to session by discussing books and software that we haven’t used before and keeping my math and logic on point. As anyone who has two young kids can attest, it’s sometimes hard to keep your mind sharp at night after a long day of taking care of them, and it’s certainly caused me to make some math errors that students have caught. It was a good sign of progress that the students who have learned much of their poker math from me were confident enough in their abilities to point out the errors I was making.

Coaching has been a great way for me to monetize some of the hours I have put into studying and thinking about the game without the added burden of variance, a fact that has not gone unnoticed by my wife and two kids. It has also been a surprisingly rich mine from which I gather more and more resources to build my game and that of my students. I’m glad I’ve had the opportunity so far and I look forward to more chances to share in the future. ♠

Gavin Griffin was the first poker player to capture a World Series of Poker, European Poker Tour and World Poker Tour title and has amassed nearly $5 million in lifetime tournament winnings. Griffin is sponsored by HeroPoker.com. You can follow him on Twitter @NHGG