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Hello everyone. My name is Alexey Exan13 Lebedev - and yes, I am… a tournament poker coach. Today will not be the most usual format of the article. I will speculate and give recommendations on how to find a good poker mentor. This will be useful material for those poker players who are thinking of starting to practice with a mentor.
1. Why you need a poker coach
This is a topical issue not only for beginners who are just about to register a new account in the poker room or go to the first offline series, but also for players who play plus absolutely any limits, especially microlimits. Usually it is at this time that you get the feeling that you will be able to move mountains and very soon win your first million. I recommend to be less emotional and act wisely: to spend part of the money won on poker training with the help of professional mentors.
There are many ways to get a poker education:
- Self-study - not effective for 95% of people;
- Independent study, but with the support of a professional trainer -
the loyalty program of my site is just aimed at this; - Viewing paid video courses;
- Individual lessons with a mentor.
If it is important for you to achieve a result in poker in the near future, then there is no better way to improve your game than training with a personal mentor.
The fact is that self-study requires high skills of personal effectiveness in the field of education. And even with them, it is sometimes difficult to separate the really important and useful from the secondary, which ultimately leads to a great expenditure of time and effort with a loss of motivation to develop further in poker. This is due to the insufficiency of the financial result in comparison with the invested forces. The coach is an additional expenditure item, but the result can become quickly tangible: there will be inspiration and motivation to play and develop, and on these wings it is much easier for the player to achieve a significant result, which will become an occasion for him to develop further in this profession.
It also happens on the contrary that after training with the coach, the player understands that poker is not his habitat. A good coach dispels various illusions of the student and guides him to the path of disciplined work on the game. If a person is not ready for this, he simply quits poker or leaves it as a hobby, thus releasing a lot of energy to other areas of activity, energy that could be wasted on poker during many years of ineffective self-learning.
2. Where to find a poker coach
There are three traditional ways to find a coach:
- Trainer's own website;
- Poker forums;
- "Word of mouth".
With the third option, everything is clear, these are the recommendations of your friends / acquaintances. Let's break down the first two.
School and Coach Websites
I already have big experience in poker training. Of course, I do not know all my colleagues, but I have heard a lot about the work of most of them from my students. I will not hide a pleasant fact for me: my training was praised by students who took even more expensive training from top coaches.
Still, as I like to say, the coaching skill is a separate skill that develops in parallel with the game skill. Without a lot of experience, even a very good player can bring little benefit to a student with low and middle limits.
Why are there so few coaching sites?
It is difficult to keep a resource with an up-to-date set of information. It requires attention every day: creating content, uploading videos, announcing streams, etc. Not everyone is ready to go for such time costs. Basically, only those who are really close to the topic of education, and for whom training is not just a way to reduce the variance in the poker field.
Poker Forums
A good way to find a coach, but it will take a lot of your free time. But here in one place you will find real player reviews and training examples. It will also be possible to ask a question to the coach in his topic or in a personal message. The disadvantage of this method of finding a coach is that usually the forums have their own moderation system.
Resources promote schools and mentors with whom they are on good terms. Often, it is not even possible to create a topic for a famous poker player from the outside, since it contradicts the interests of the resource. But personally, I have no problems with this. On Gypsy, my coaching topic has been the most popular in the MTT field for 8 years and the honorary owner of the largest number of likes from students. How the reputation on GypsyTeam was reduced. On PokerStrategy, I am the head coach of the MTT resource and also have the most popular topic on individual training.
Poker schools (not foundations)
Separately, I will take out such educational projects as poker schools. In its classic form, when students pay for tuition, they are already morally obsolete. Personally, several dozen students from the Poker Academy came to me, who, after our training, literally swore at them and shouted that they had been deceived at the Academy, that it was fake and fraud. I would be wary of writing about it so openly if it weren't for so many people who told me the same thing.
- There are no guarantees;
- Group classes are ineffective;
- The level of coaches is usually low, because good coaches are not required to support the school to provide themselves with students:
- Individual lessons with a school coach will be noticeably more expensive than a mentor of the same level in free swimming due to the fact that the school has a large commission.
3. What you will get by working with an MTT coach
What does the trainer give during individual lessons?
Most importantly, the entire workout is dedicated to you. This means that you can ask any questions, to which you will immediately receive answers, without waiting for a queue of the same 10 people.
As well as:
- Obtain up-to-date knowledge;
- Fill in all available gaps in the mathematical aspects of the game;
- Correctly prioritize gaming skills;
- Develop discipline and a responsible approach to the game;
- Structure the accumulated knowledge;
- Correctly adjust the game grid;
- Understand the methodology of effective self-education;
- Properly organize working hours;
- Learn quick ways to introduce new strategic skills;
- Identify psychological factors that reduce the quality of your game;
- Get information on how to work through these factors and take psychology to a new level.
It is difficult for me to tell how the trainings of other mentors take place, so I will give some examples of trainings from my programs.
Individual Poker Class Formats
Introductory base debriefing
- We analyze in detail the base of the student's hands
- I ask a lot of homework with useful free materials
- We find deviations in statistics from the optimal preflop strategy. I make detailed explanations
- We find deviations in post-flop statistics through a large number of stats. I explain how to fix them
- We check the indicators of winrates in ev\bb in the early, middle and late stages, as well as for different positions and stack
- We find the weak parts of the ranges through the XM3 filters. I clearly show negative actions
Tournament debrief
- I ask a lot of homework with useful free materials
- We analyze the game and search for strategic faces and deviations in the player's playable ranges
- Find faces in sizing
- We find gaps in the mathematical components of the game
- I explain how to use statistics correctly and optimally
- Find faces in the lines of the game on the post-flop
- I explain how to correctly set the range for opponents
- I show faces in building logical chains of game situation analysis
- Find the faces of the game in different stack sizes and tournament stages
Disassembly of marked giveaways
- Preliminary, I show how to mark the hands during the game
- The player collects a base of hands with questions on strategy
- We pinpoint weaknesses in the student's strategy
- I also draw conclusions from the questions on the handouts about the weak points of the student's thinking and fill in these gaps
In-depth base analysis through professional Popap H2N
- Uploading your database to H2N
- Reviewing the preflop and postflop strategy in depth
- Game SB vs BB and BB vs SB
- Playing through prob bet, donk bet and different bet-check-bet lines, etc.
- Resistance to prob, donk, raise river and other complex stats
- Used sizing in paylines
- And much more
Analysis of relegations from tournaments
- A very useful workout
- We find important faces in the preflop of putting on the stack and postflop game for large pots
- We check the level of discipline of the student: we find distributions on emotions and in tilt (the student is often stunned by what he saw)
Analysis of the final stages
- We analyze your final tables, the quality of the game in which greatly affects the profit
- How to play the final stage with a chip leader, as well as with a short or medium stack
- ICM adjustments in the game on the pre-final and on the final table
- Playing at a table with 3-4-5-6 players
- Psychological faces at the final table
Heads-Up MTT
- The logical conclusion of the tournament is Heads-Up
- Many people do not think about the quality of the game at this stage, and a lot of money is played here
- Having advantages in the skill over the opponent, in the game 1-1 you can make a lot of additional profit in the the long run
Mental Coach
- We partially talk about this in all training sessions, if necessary
- Organization of the optimal workflow
- Analyze the psychological aspects of your game. I help to figure out how to get out of a state of stress, resentment, anger, depression, despair, and so on
- Analysis of emotions arising during the game, explanation of the reasons for their occurrence. How to remove the cause?
- Motivation and Discipline Level Analysis
- Setting up a professional attitude to the game. Etc.
Working on poker psychology
I am sure that everyone can win at poker. Some lack the technical basis for a positive result, while others lack the psychological barriers. Work on psychology, in my opinion, is one of the underestimated stages, since you will eliminate most of the problems at the stage of their origin. In my training, I notice signs of certain markers that indicate a suboptimal perception of events at the table by the player. And I send him to watch or read my free text and video materials on a particular topic, designed to create armor in certain psychologically vulnerable places of the student.
In addition, on issues of personal and family psychology, you can contact a specially selected psychologist for the site - Sofia Okhrimenko.
How will they help you?
- Understand yourself and learn to control your actions and actions in various emotional states
- Find the psychological causes of failures and problems in your life
- Accelerate the maturation and maturation of the psyche by working through the burdened areas
- Resolve internal conflicts
- Motivation and energy will reach a new level
- The quality of life, psychological stability and harmony will improve
Improvement in the psychological component will necessarily lead to an overall improvement in your condition, which will be appreciated by others. I know this from personal experience. Periodic consultations with a good psychologist in the period from 28 years to 31 years, I consider an important milestone in my life, which helped me get rid of a whole heap of problems that have been following me since my youth.
Educational poker content
The independent part of the work on the game includes not only the analysis and analysis of hands, but also the study of various training materials:
Creating such content is a colossal work (those who do this will agree with me). Each text or video that appears in the “Articles and Videos” section requires a large amount of time. Each article is the author's and takes at least 2 hours to write. All of them contain only the latest relevant information presented in a structural training format through the prism of my coaching experience.
If you really care about your poker career, and you are not here for the sake of entertainment, I recommend that you take the time to familiarize yourself with all the content I post, both on the psychology of poker and on the strategy of the game. Apart from the streams, the other formats I use, even in free training, have a high density of useful information. Especially if you use the loyalty program to receive a free education from my website.
