View: highly winning players don't make good poker coahes

I don’t agree with this at all.

For example, when you get to such a level where the edges are so thin you have a couple options, play lower or achieve that same hourly in a relaxed environment that keeps your skill set sharp.

Haha ya it’s a saying to insult teachers I think not accurate. I think it’s definitely accurate that those that are most successful in a field are often the worst teachers though. They often don’t communicate well and they have difficulties conveying complex principles to students because they can’t understand why they have difficulties because it’s so simple to them.

I think teaching the way most people see it rarely works. A teacher should always try to find the concepts that a student doesn’t understand well and try to focus on improving their understanding. Teachers/coaches often try to just find the mistakes the person makes and try to get the person to memorize the right answer in those situations and it has poor results.

As someone who had never hired a poker coach, so take with a grain of salt...

I think it is possible that there can be good coaches who aren't crushers. The problem is, how does a person know if the advice that the coach gives is good? It may sound brilliant, but it may be wrong. Or it may focus on things thst aren't important. How would we know? The best way imo is if there are some sort of results that they post and they can verify that they follow their own advice.

Before I go watch someone's YouTube video that says I need to be doing these things to crush, I better have some evidence this guy knows what he is talking about before I potentially learn something the wrong way. I certainly would want to see something before I paid this person for coaching.

I think crushers don't necessarily make good coaches. Why? Because teaching is hard. You have ideas in your head that enable you to take actions. But it can be really hard to transfer those ideas to someone else and enable them to perform. This is true of any game, study, or line of work. People have different learning styles, and not everyone is very good about picking up on how to best reach someone.

It's necessary but not sufficient.

You can be the best player and a bad coach if you suck at communication/soft skills but this will become obvious quickly to the student.

Results are the best metric because they demonstrate you have a certain level of understanding and ability in the game to pass on. If you don’t have a good winrate at a certain level or haven’t even played and got experience of what games are like at that level it limits how effective the coach can be

A coach needs to have a certain minimum level, and needs to be a certain level above the student (at least in particular aspects of the game). The level the coach needs really depends on the student - Blackrain can coach brand new beginners and struggling micros players, but couldn't coach 200z winners.

After the super basic level, it's clear that coaches should have a winning sample in some variant to coach that variant, generally to players at lower levels than the demonstrated success. Beyond that, success at higher levels can be a positive, generally correlated to stronger understanding of the game and poker decisionmaking. But there are plenty of other skills that go into effective coaching and teaching which will be as important if not more important than the raw skill level or success of the coach.

Probably the best thing when evaluating coaches is looking for testimonials from players who have worked with the coach and found success.

Good players can sometimes make bad coaches but **** players can never make good coaches.

So which one was exactly the argument? Crushing doesn't automatically make you a good coach (agree), or that crushing automatically makes you bad (disagree)?

OP is trying to say being a “highly winning player” automatically makes you a good coach. He is trying to get everyone to disagree with his enemy who said he isn’t qualified to be a coach even though he wins

It's both, I just wanted to open it up for debate.

My view is that winning is the most important quality as you need to know how to win before you are able to help others win, followed by ability to transmit winning strategies to others (whether orally, written, ...). Being able to break things down in easy to digest principles helps a lot. Any teaching experience is definitely a plus.

It was posited earlier that winning well over a statistically significant sample is largely irrelevant, and I couldn't disagree more.

Being good at something doesn't mean you're good at teaching it.
Being able to teach something doesn't mean you're the best ever at it, but if you're a good teacher, know your ceiling and know when to say "OK, you've transcended what I can teach here, you need to move up a level because you're basically where I am, or better", that's worth its weight in gold.
They're very rare, though, a lot of teachers have massive ego problems once their students level up on them but some don't and those guys are very valuable for people trying to learn.

As someone who has hired numerous coaches I will say of course there's a minimum skill requirement.

If you don't understand what a winning strategy is then what do you have to teach a person?

Assuming that bar is met you're not going to be able to say one way or the other who would be a better to coach based on who plays slightly higher stakes or who has a higher win rate.

Some people are savants at the table, but really crap at explaining things to others not as smart as them.

Being able to understand the level your student is at, identify where they are struggling, why they are struggling and making a coherent plan to help them improve are not things that every winning player can do well.

Being a highly winning player doesn't automatically translate into good coaching skills. However, I'm probably not going to pay for coaching from a player who is losing long term.

At least theres chance the highly winning player will be a good choice, theres 0 with a non winning player.

In a world of imperfect information, proof of results may be your only reasonable choice in judging someone. It's a vetting process, just like a business who will never even consider a job application from someone who wasn't recommended by an insider before. Asking for your academic history even if it doesn't impact your real job performance.

But yes, being a winner doesn't automatically make you a good coach, it's just a prerequisite. Being a loser or breakeven automatically disqualifies you tho.

*Edit: it depends on the game, you being breakeven at NL40K online and offering coach is completely different than you being breakeven at NL100 (or live 2-5NL 😃 ).

The best teacher out there IMO is Uri Peleg. The guy is a genius. I suspect he is a "high winning player".

The solution is to have around 3-5 different levels of explanation and use explanation compression/decompression after classifying how much they know. That's basically what I do anyway.

You can be both a good teacher and good player if you spent many hours a week on both and have no life.

Being a teacher is one of the best ways of learning as well.

Generally if your coaching someone you should know about 4-10x as much as your student. So if your coaching nl50 reg then maybe you should be a nl200 at least. It's probably best that the gap isn't over 10x in most cases as well, imo.

There is a story, lion king hired a cat to teach his son everything. Little lion grew up and became more strong and skilled as the cat taught him everything.

One day little lion decided to eat his teacher, the cat climbed to the tree but the lion couldn't climb

Then, out of anger little lion shouted "Why you didn't teach me how to climb the tree!?" and the cat answered: "I would be dead now if i did"

Moral of the story: who knows how to climb the tree will never teach you

IMHO coaches are good but to become a crusher you will need little more than that, you need to learn by yourself how to climb the tree

Being able to explain your reasoning about a hand or poker concepts is not analagous to being a good coach. Yes, it stands to reason barring some language barrier, most (if not all) HS / high level poker players would be able to explain and breakdown their thought processes when going through a hand.

That is fundamentally separate from being able to distill that down to coaching someone or explaining concepts like someone is five years old in a way that is digestable.

Someone who does research in physics and has a PhD can surely explain every concept in physics but distilling it down to a format where a layperson can understand is completely different.

A good coach understand where their students are coming from and where the knowledge gaps lie.

yeah because **** Gordon Ramsay and Khabib Nurmagomedov and Franz Liszt and Carl Sagan and literally dozens of others throughout history lmfao

I don't disagree with your stance but there's no way Carl Sagan kept up with young physicists when he's off making tv shows.

I like Carl Sagan he's a G, but you might wanna look at the last year at which these jagoffs like Neill DeGrasse Tyson and Michio Kaku last published a paper. Those are celebrities.

In any case almost all research physicists have to teach at least a few hours a week. So the point still stands but u bring up these **** celebrities as if they are the ****. Its like when ****s outside of poker tell you that dnegs and doyle brunson and phil hellmuth are the best in the biz and have no idea who linus loeliger is. Get my point?

lol great

Teaching in itself if a skill. Just because you're highly informed/skilled with a particular skill/topic, it doesn't mean you're guaranteed to be a good coach.

There have been countless sports players who were hall of fame level players that failed miserably when they attempted to coach. Same thing applies with poker, or anything really.

The problem is poker skill is relative.

If the 9th worst player in the world regularly plays with the 8 players worse than him, he will be a winning player.

However he is unqualified to teach anyone else in the world other than those 8 worse players.

It is the reason poker will always be a juicy endeavor. There are always players who think they are good because they beat crappy players.