I'm Conciously Incompetent

Kirsty call George

I'm not setting goals just yet...

2 reasons. 1 is that I'm not feeling up to the grind right now. Secondly, I really feel like sorting something out after watching a Jared Tendler video. The video was his first I think, and I think he qualified by the end not to play thinking about what he said, and I agree, so I'll blog it out of my system, and see if I want to play afterwards.

So the idea was an old golf lesson I learned. Easy enough to understand, it's the 4 levels of skills, unconcious incompetence, concious incompetence, concious competence and inconcious competence. Now the idea is at first you totally don't have a skill, but don't know it, like spelling unconcious (yes I used a spell checker). You'd so far be unconcious incompetent. Next you are told it's spelt wrong, so you know you are wrong, but you know you aren't good at it. That is concious incompetent, you are aware, but know you aren't good. Next you get to concious competent, meaning you've studied, practiced and now you feel confident. In this case it's checking the spell checker and now understanding the spelling, but still having to think about it when typing. Finally, you don't even have to think about it. You are typing unconcious into a sentance and do so without thinking about the spelling at all.

Now obviously the above has one great place to be, and 3 terrible places for different reasons. Inconcious incompetent is bad because you won't even know you have an issue, however in certain circumstances, like a lot of poker skills, it's not dangerous to not know. Like not knowing about blind stealing isn't dangerous. Concious incompetent is dangerous because you know you should occasionally steal blinds but don't know when. So you can cost yourself more money trial and erroring this. However, it's also good, because you know it's something you need to learn more about. Concious competent is OK, but at high emotional times you really need things to just happen, and if they aren't inconcious yet, you may fall into trouble under pressures. So you may think you know something very well, but still fall to the negatives behind not knowing it sometimes.

Now Jared said not to apply this directly to your play. I think he's aiming to come back to this in later videos, but there is one really interesting point about this concept and poker. Now you don't know about stealing blinds, but now find an article or forum post about stealing blinds, and suddenly know it :) So you try it a lot, and wonder why you are no good at it after a while. So you finally decide it's a leak, and come back to learning more about blind stealing. Suddenly a few concepts about blind stealing click into place. So you go back to a "concious competent" phase now, knowing your blind stealing is good. It eventually becomes unconcious, only you still may not know it properly. So it becomes obvious that doing anything without understanding it first is vitally dangerous. This is so true of so many things in life, yet people love to just get stuck in and do something rather than learning first, then applying. Wow, it's so obvious, yet so me!!!

Because of the dangers of consious incompetent, I want to do Jareds idea of writing a list of what I think my 4 skill sets are in poker. Unconcious incompetent will obviously be hard, but I'm sure I can think of plenty for the other categories. I figure this list to almost be a long term goal list, but we'll see how good it is first. The idea being to have a lot in the concious incompetent (only has to be partially incompetent) list and working hard to understand what I don't already.

I'm actually getting a bit poker hungry so will come back to this, but this list will likely be kept locally anyway, and I'll see if I want to publish it to the blog or not.