Masterclass.com is a marvelous collection of world authorities talking about what they know best. I am very impressed with their teachers.\u00a0 I had heard about a 2-for-1 sale they were offering in early April, so I signed up. Usually it\u2019s $180 per year for full access to thousands of hours of instruction, but the recent sale allowed two people to sign up for the same $180. The combination of the sale and lots of extra time due to the stay-at-home rules was enough to seal the deal for me. I sent an email out to a number of people I thought might be interested in partnering with me on this, and several responded with interest. The ones I couldn\u2019t use, I hooked up with each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My primary interests are writing, comedy, and games of skill — and they have several courses in each of those categories. I\u2019ll eventually get to classes further down my list of interests, but the courses on cooking and interior decorating will probably never make the cut for me.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
So, I found myself in a poker class hosted by Daniel Negreanu. He\u2019s very knowledgeable. When I finish his course, I\u2019ll take another by Phil Ivey.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I believe most players consider Ivey a better player than Negreanu. (I\u2019m not qualified to judge.) The biggest difference between them to me is that Negreanu has written a lot and regularly does interviews. Up until now, Ivey has kept his knowledge to himself, but now he\u2019s sharing it. That\u2019s pretty exciting to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I absolutely am not changing from video poker to regular poker at this time of my life. There are several reasons for this, but the one showstopper I can\u2019t get around is that it\u2019s very difficult to see the cards in the center of a standard poker table unless I\u2019m sitting directly next to or across from the dealer. And it\u2019s fair to predict than in a few more years, my eyes will be worse than they are today. That\u2019s just part of the aging process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But I\u2019m taking the classes because when smart, knowledgeable people discuss playing strategically, sometimes the lessons translate over to my life as a video poker player. What I recently listened to Negreanu say wasn\u2019t that, but it was something that translates over to my life as a video poker teacher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And that was Negreanu discussing moving up in stakes.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What Negreanu said was that once you move up in stakes, you don\u2019t have to stay there. That was it. No big deal. Except I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever thought to say that as a video poker teacher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Keeping in mind the caveat of never playing a game unless you have the advantage, let\u2019s assume you normally play for quarters but come across a juicy dollar game.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You\u2019re nervous about it, of course, because if things go badly you can lose four times as fast. So, much of the value of that game is wrapped up in rare hands — like 40,000-to-one royal flushes, or maybe 16,000-to-one aces with a kicker.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s not that rare to get buried quickly at the higher stakes. Here\u2019s the important lesson:\u00a0 If things go badly at the start, drop back down to quarters until you build up your bankroll again.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The good dollar games will probably be there in six months or a year or whenever you\u2019re ready to move up again. But you must maintain a bankroll to stay in the game. Don\u2019t lose enough at the dollar game that you no longer have the wherewithal to play the quarter game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Your ego can get involved in this. Once you\u2019re playing the higher stakes successfully, \u201cwith the big boys\u201d as it were, it\u2019s psychologically difficult to admit you aren\u2019t good enough to stay there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But that isn\u2019t the point. It\u2019s not that you aren\u2019t good enough, it\u2019s that you aren\u2019t rich enough! Losing streaks are a fact of life in video poker and other gambling games. If one pops up just when you move up in stakes, that\u2019s unfortunate. But don\u2019t turn misfortune into a disaster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you want to think of this as not being lucky enough to stay in the bigger game, go ahead. It\u2019s quite possibly true that you just weren\u2019t lucky enough at that particular time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The vast majority of losing players insist they are simply not lucky enough to win at the game. For many players, however, luck has very little to do with it. Those players simply are not skillful enough or perhaps not disciplined enough to succeed.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But if you\u2019re good enough, you\u2019ll drop down to the lower stakes and end up succeeding well enough to move back up.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I knew this principle and have applied it to my own career, but I\u2019ve never seen it articulated before quite like this. Thank you, Daniel Negreanu.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Masterclass.com is a marvelous collection of world authorities talking about what they know best. I am very impressed with their teachers.\u00a0 I had heard about a 2-for-1 sale they were offering in early April, so I signed up. Usually it\u2019s $180 per year for full access to thousands of hours of instruction, but the recent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15763,"featured_media":6498,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"A Lesson from Daniel Negreanu by Bob Dancer","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[601,558,842,557],"tags":[561,1020,841,585],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120922"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15763"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120922\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}