The frontiers of human understanding present a man with the greatest opportunities for extraordinary success. The opportunity to explore where others cannot or will not go takes one beyond the reach of prevailing authorities, at least for a time. Since the frontier its itself anathema to the technocratic bureaucracy- which revels in regulation, repetition, and procedure- the explorer always has a number of years to succeed spectacularly before the slouching bureaucrats can impose an appropriately punitive tax structure on the new territory.

Poker strategy started the 21st century as an open frontier, ripe for exploration as the Internet made it easier for players to compete against each other than ever before. An opponent from next door or from across an ocean, the ability to play multiple hands simultaneously, dealt near-instantaneously by digital dealers. If you could beat your opponent (and the rake) then a fortune was there for the taking. But how to win? What each player needed to beat the competition, whether he knew it or not, was an accurate map of the terrain of the game that he was sitting down to play…

In the first article in this series on poker ecology, I introduced Information Distribution Curves as a way of visualizing the level of strategic information available to members of a competing population in a given game variant. One such information distribution curve is reproduced below:

That essay detailed how a pronounced information asymmetry between yourself and your opponents facilitates extraordinary success in that game. I used these curves to illustrate the concept of an information ceiling as the theoretical limit to which it is possible to formalize any particular game variant. I’m now going to define an unmapped domain as a domain of human activity where even the person with the highest level of strategic information is known to be very far away from the information ceiling for that domain. In poker ecology, an unmapped domain would be a game variant which is very far from being solved- such as deep stack 5cPLO.

The subject of this essay is how the determinants for extraordinary success change from the moment that a novel, unmapped domain is first explored. Along the way I will describe to the reader the creation and adoption of maps as a means of organizing knowledge about a domain. The discussion will serve to throw a light on the nature of the first generation of successful poker players, demonstrate that the training sites that they built are extensions of their respective natures, and explain why their training models are inadequate at the poker frontier.

Any intelligent human who wishes to act reasonably in a complex domain needs a ‘map’ of that domain from which he can use his reason to respond to the challenges he faces as he attempts to travel towards his chosen destination. Whilst the Westernized layperson associates the meaning of the word ‘map‘ with a graphical representation emphasizing physical distance and meaningful landmarks, I use the word ‘map‘ here in a much wider sense. Indeed, all of the academic disciplines that you are familiar with are attempts to focus on some part of Reality and then design a map to represent it. A map can include significant structural features, as well as fields and forces that dominate the domain. It is important to realize that every map is drawn up with the meanings and interests of a conscious user in mind (This idea is fundamental to the Philosophy of Science and is at the heart of many contemporary metaphysical conflicts, not least of which is the interpretation of Quantum Theories).

We will address different approaches to mapping novel domains in the next article in this series but, before we do so, we need to understand why success in unmapped domains is generally more lucrative and less predictable than success in well-mapped domains.

Well-mapped domains have very clear paths to expertise with recourse to training programs, recognized qualifications and a whole host of teachers, coaches, mentors and experts ready to assist young people with promise. As a consequence all well-mapped domains are dominated by those who have very strong natural aptitude for the particular skills concerned who also accumulate a lot of deliberate practice in the discipline. This opportunity for practice typically, but not always, correlates with starting at a young age since many of the best-mapped domains of human activity have a significant physical component. It is extremely unlikely for anyone to become a world-class violinist if they start at age 30 and still less likely for a man starting soccer at the same age to become a world-class professional player. Whilst innovation in well-mapped domains still occurs, it is the sole preserve of those who have already mastered the key skills identified for that domain.

In fact one of the blights of our age is that national education systems are adept at identifying the most highly gifted people and then fashioning them into cogs for the waiting bureaucratic machine. These systems serve to divert those men who could otherwise make significant creative contributions to human civilization into the profitable but sterile worlds of finance, law, and corporate administration. It takes a a strong streak of independence, a sense of something missing, and a very strong ego for a highly gifted man to escape the comforting embrace of this global homogenizing machine.

It is important to recognize that not all well-mapped domains offer opportunities for extraordinary success. Those domains which can be sufficiently formalized and routinized to be purely technical, without any need for conceptual mastery, offer at best moderate returns. Even the world’s most accomplished supermarket shelf-stacker will still find his salary capped at a low level. Automation continues to intrude on professions which are purely technical, and the bearing that this has on the ambitious player’s approach to poker is covered in the proceeding article in this series.  For now I will simply assert that reducing yourself to rote-learning solver strategies will destroy your prospects for long-term success as a poker player and indeed as a thinking human being.

Whilst well-mapped domains are so replete with technique as to feel stifling to the energetic spirit, unmapped domains offer an ocean of possibility. If you participate in an unmapped domain at a time when it is being explored you will enjoy a sense of excitement and disorientation as everything seems to move so rapidly. This very real movement in an unmapped domain should not be confused with the obfuscatory incrementalist ‘progress’ proclaimed by many of today’s technocentric organizations.  Whether it be yet another phone or one in a stream of endless software updates, anything which has a version number is not profoundly new.

As disorienting as the exploration of a new domain can be, there is a structure to all such explorations which characterizes the types of people and approaches that succeed in novel domains. In the preceding essay I showed you how Information Distribution Curves could be used to take a snapshot of the strategic information distribution of a game across the playing population. In the graphic below, I take a dynamic view across time to demonstrate how the determinants for success change from the moment that a novel, unmapped domain is first explored, to the point (which may never arrive) where it is sufficiently well-mapped for effective action in that domain to be substantively formalized.

As the graphic illustrates, all novel, unmapped domains pass through two distinct eras, before maturing into either a well-mapped domain or a complex domain. The inherent complexity of the domain has a strong influence on the duration of the early eras. I will now address each of the key features indicated on the graphic, and use them to explain the characteristics common to those people who succeed in each phase of domain exploration. We will start with the earliest phase chronologically- the ‘Opportunist Era’.

Opportunist Era

Opportunists are the early entrants to unmapped domains, and the willingness to act without a sophisticated map in a domain- which necessarily entails a high degree of uncertainty- is the only thing that unites them. Unmapped domains present opportunities for people who may, ultimately, prove to have mediocre aptitude in the domain in question once it is mapped. Many successful people in such domains will be quite ordinary in terms of any readily identifiable capacity, but through either being extremely lucky or having the ability to recognize opportunity coupled with the courage (or recklessness) to act on it, they outshine their more gifted peers. In fact, very successful opportunists are more likely to be mediocre intellects because superlative intellects can expect to succeed through excellence in an extant well-mapped domain without taking substantial risks. Highly disagreeable personalities are so intolerant of authority and so averse to cooperation that they would rather try their luck in an unfamiliar domain where they can operate alone than compete in a well-mapped domain where they are expected to cooperate with others. So people who succeed in a domain when it is in its Opportunist Era tend to be either ordinary people with an extraordinary appetite for risk or extraordinary people with a distinct aversion to regular social interaction.

The first generation of online poker winners were largely opportunists.

Many successful modern poker players have been disappointed when, keen to find out more about past ‘legends’ of the game, they discovered unimpressive men whose main distinguishing characteristic was a particular appetite for risk. Such is the fickle nature of success in the early stages of the exploration of any unmapped domain. Most people who succeed as opportunists have done so predominantly as a consequence of being in the right place at the right time. There is little that one can learn from those for whom the winds of fate have gusted kindly for a short time. However serial opportunists– those who explore new domain after new domain and succeed repeatedly- are worthy of respect. Such men typically have special insight or, at the very least, are in tune with the rhythm of the Age.

The era of opportunist dominance will last for so long as there is a low proportion of competitors in the domain who succeed in forging rudimentary maps by which to guide their decisions. When the mass of more sophisticated competitors is sufficiently large, the Opportunist Era gives way to the Early Mapping Era.

Early Mapping Era

Opportunists don’t have any high quality maps to teach you because their success peaks before the domain in question starts to be extensively mapped. In the overwhelming majority of cases, those who are first to enter a domain are there first precisely because they lack the analytical ability to map a domain! If they were more analytically capable, then they would in all likelihood already have found success on a conventional career path in a mapped domain.

In the early mapping era, there are a diverse set of attempts to map the domain, and these maps will all be distinctly unsophisticated by comparison with later forms. The early mapping era is characterized by a lack of a clear consensus as to the answers to most questions about the domain, and often disagreement about which questions to ask! There tends to be a prevalence of empirical approaches in this period, with most cartographers preferring to synthesize their concepts from data. The lower the inherent complexity of the domain, the more successful such empirical approaches will be.

In the knowledge frontier that is poker strategy a lot of early maps consisted of ‘truths’ that only applied for a given metagame. An obvious example of such metagame-dependent truths is, “Use a large flop continuation bet on a board with a flush draw to price your opponent out”- an approach which works nicely when you exploit loose passive opponents who call large bets with their draws despite facing an opponent with an excessively strong range.  Yet even that innocuous sentence contains a deeper layer of implicit ‘truths’. Consider the phrase, “continuation bet”- is that really a meaningful strategic category or is it merely a relic from a bygone era of poker theory? Should you usually be betting the flop simply because you made the last raise preflop?

The second generation of successful poker players are remarkable for their enthusiasm and some of the video producers from this group do show flashes of insight. However the early maps of the game that these players relied on have inevitably been superseded by more coherent and useful maps. There’s a reason that you aren’t studying many poker training videos from 2010 if you want to compete today.

If a particular map of a domain rises to dominance in so pronounced a fashion that its utility is indisputable then we see the emergence of technique in that domain.

Emergence of technique

The emergence of technique is the point in time at which a particular map becomes formalized in such a way that certain actions in the domain are understood to cause particular outcomes with a degree of regularity. The reader should interpret the ‘Emergence of technique’ shown above as a boundary curve where the emergence of technique occurs earliest for simple domains, and later, or even never for highly complex domains. The emergence of technique is heralded by a proliferation of books, training videos, and teachers who all concur on a number of key points. Note that it is possible (or even likely, in complex domains) for some future paradigm shift to render early maps and their associated technique useless.

We can now understand why the arrival of solvers killed off No-Limit Hold’em cash games so quickly, and why the impact has been less severe in PLO. Lower complexity games (like NLHE) are more susceptible to procedural approaches where technique can be extensively reduced to a number of ‘IF… THEN…’ rules. That such rules can be readily programmed into bots only makes the situation more dire for the prospective human competitor. Attempting to force more complex games (like PLO) into a procedural Procrustean bed results in a bulk of the player base utilizing inferior strategies with superior confidence! Typically these players will all have learnt their oversimplified strategies from the same limited set of sources. As a consequence the opportunities for extraordinary success in Omaha and other complex poker variants will remain robust for a number of years.

If the emergence of technique in a domain is final then it matures into a well-mapped domain. If it is not, or if technique never emerges, then the domain is classified as complex.

Well-mapped domain

Once a domain becomes so well-mapped that the path to success is well-defined, that domain will be dominated by those with the best functional grasp of technique. I detailed what it takes to attain extraordinary success in well-mapped domains in the previous section, so we will not tarry on the subject now. The longer the time interval between the emergence of technique and a person’s entrance into the domain, the more that that individual’s success will depend on his execution of proper technique, as the domain starts to become filled with players with impressive levels of technical proficiency.

The third generation of successful poker players are still profitable to this day. They rely on the same familiar skill set of reasonable intelligence and capacity for hard work which works so well in other mapped domains. With No Limit Holdem maps readily available, money in the game moved out of the hands of opportunists and into the hands of more conventionally talented, ambitious people.

Here at Cardquant we are not so interested in well-mapped domains since greatness in these, such as it is, is derived from the accumulation of small edges, typically attained by working harder on technique than everyone else competing in that domain. In fact, the most important question that Cardquant addresses for our clients is,

“How do I become an elite player at a new poker game without playing millions of hands?”

So Cardquant’s research starts at the point where others have no good answers- at knowledge frontiers. And for a domain to remain a knowledge frontier for long, it needs to be complex.

Complex domain

Purely procedural approaches are not sufficient to succeed in complex domains, for an understanding of the relevance of context and of sophisticated structure is a necessary precursor to effective action. In all domains which are highly complex, any technique that emerges is inadequate at best and irrelevant at worst. Highly complex domains cannot be formalized so as to enable success by technical procedure alone.

In fact, an intriguing position is advanced by ecologist Robert Ulanowicz in his book, ‘A Third Window’, where he argues that,

“[The organic fold is] …the point at which the combinatorics of the system begin to overwhelm the capacity of laws to determine future events… Beyond this divide, one would expect that processes supplant laws as the most effective determinants of system structure and behaviour.”

Pursuing his line of inquiry into the organic fold for complex domains is beyond the scope of this essay, suffice to say that I assert that poker games are, even as formalisms, inherently quasi-complex, and the overwhelming combinatorics of the larger games makes those concept-driven approaches that are vital for complex domains in Nature more effective than the procedural approaches used in simpler domains.

The history of poker strategy, like so many other domains before it, is of the early dominance of opportunists, followed by the takeover of the early mappers. In turn those early mappers are supplanted by those with a systematic experiment-driven approach, who are themselves overcome by the long-term dominance of concept-driven approaches, provided that the game variant in question is complex enough.

Now that I have explained the phases of success in novel domains, we are well-placed to understand why continuing to study using first generation poker training sites is an exercise in futility.

As we established above, the first generation of online poker winners were largely opportunists. These erstwhile winners then designed poker training sites without any coherent organization of the knowledge required to master their chosen game.

The most common model that mainstream training sites use for training is the ‘information-drip’ model- where new videos are released on a regular basis, often from a number of different coaches. This is a great model for the business because they can retain a large subscriber base with the promise of an endless supply of poker infotainment for those who prefer to be entertained than to win. But this model is horrible for mastering a poker game because each video does not fit into a larger coherent conceptual structure leaving the student with some understanding of a situation or set of situations but without generally applicable principles. Notice that the plethora of different teaching voices, usually marketed a strength, is actually inimical to efficient learning. As you will discover in the next article, poker games are quasi-complex which means that the optimal strategy for a given situation is the same today as it was when the game was first created and will be the same in 200 years. So a strategic ‘update’ video is necessarily either a correction on a previously inaccurate video, or a reiteration of a previous video with some new examples. Far from being additive, the collection of videos on a training site that uses the information-drip model manage to be contradictory, repetitive, and wrong all at the same time!

Once again, we have discovered a conflict of interest between mainstream training sites and their customers. In the first article in this series we observed that mainstream poker training sites thrive on the commodification of knowledge- at the cost of the profitability and lifetime of any game variant which they sell material for. In this article, we observe that the incentives of information-drip, content-marketing companies are oriented around a steady stream of content-  efficient-learning is bad for the business model!

Content marketing business environments are antagonistic to high quality research. They are built around generating attention and mass distribution. These ways of operating lead inevitably to the merging of such an organization with mass culture. I entered the poker strategy domain in large part as a way of separating myself from mass culture and I will introduce you to my principled opposition to it in a later article in this series.

The insistence on pushing out a steady stream of content results in a puddle of bloated, inefficient, poorly-structured knowledge. Such an approach is necessarily antagonistic to the kind of conceptual leaps necessary to make breakthroughs in research. Nothing elegant can be derived from such frantic, mindless activity.

At Cardquant, I conduct groundbreaking research at knowledge frontiers, and I fund this research by teaching the novel domain maps that I generate to my students and building spin-off products and services that utilize these maps.

Cardquant recognizes that the real pedagogical challenge is one of knowledge organization. We aim to teach only what is essential, teaching as little as possible, but as much as is necessary to master the game variant. The courses at Cardquant are intended to be a complete, structured set of lessons on the subject matter. They are designed to give you a coherent understanding of the structure of the game and how that structure causally determines the fundamental principles that govern strong strategic play.

In the next article in this series, we will compare the experiment-driven approach with the concept-driven approach to mapping poker games, and learn how the effectiveness of each approach is related to the complexity of the game variant.

The Cardquant Identity series continues in part 3…