What was your turning point?

by Bill Rini on April 23, 2004

Most things that take skill and mastery often come with an “Aha!” type moment where one can look back and point to an event, piece of knowledge, or lesson that marked a major turning point for them. I think of it as that moment where all of a sudden everything makes sense. You still may not have mastered the skill but some connector in your brain pulls together a million different random facts and you can finally see the entire picture. Some might even say that it’s that point at which you realize exactly how much you don’t know.

Have you had, or what was your “Aha!” moment in poker? What it when you mastered calculating pot odds? Was it when you began to read other players? Was it a certain piece of advice that didn’t make sense at first but one day became so clear to you that you felt like Neo waking up in the Matrix? Is there even an “Aha!” moment or is mastering poker more like driving a car where the mastery comes so incrementally that it’s difficult or impossible to point to a single event?

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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

1 mep April 23, 2004 at 10:09 am: 0) when you can truely master selected agression
1) when you learn to lay down KK preflop in NL and watch the other morons play against AA for all their chips. same thing with laying down trips post flop
2) when you learn how and when to shift gears
3) when you master mixing it up so much that people just scratch their heads trying to put you on a hand
4) knowing when not to use fancy moves against weak players
5) when you sometimes don’t even look at your cards in NL, your reading faces and sensing fear
6) when you know why you need to play back with 56s against master players raises preflop.
7) when you understand why you can’t limp with AA preflop in NL against too many players (the schooling thing)
8) when you can sense go time
9) when you would rather have AKs than AA or KK in NL
A) getting head under the table by that cute little Asian cocktail waitress
2 hdouble April 25, 2004 at 11:45 am: I’ve been thinking about this– whether or not there are “epiphanies” in poker. For me it was much more incremental. But a big milestone was one day just accepting a terrible session because I finally “knew” I was a winning player, and that I’d just been the victim of variance. Until that point, I’d always blamed my play for the bad results, but one day this just seemed to change. I’m not sure why, either.