What Skill Did You Have to Un-Learn Before You Got Better?

[oli_sussex]

Question: what did you have to un-learn before you got better? Not a bad habit. A skill you were good at that was costing you money.

 

[FadeThePublic]

Here's what nobody wants to hear: my best skill was my worst habit, and I was proud of it.
Four years of online poker taught me to read people. Timing tells, bet sizing, the guy who goes quiet when he's strong. I was good at it, genuinely. I brought it straight into betting and spent about three years looking for the person across the table.
There isn't one. The market isn't bluffing. Nobody is trying to make me fold. A line would move an hour before kickoff and I'd think "what are they trying to tell me." (Nothing. They don't know I'm there.)
It took the longest to un-learn because it was the thing I was proudest of. RIP public money was never me reading anybody. It was me reading a number. Vegas knows, but Vegas isn't looking at me.

 

[TaffyTipster]

Mine's the electrician in me.
When a circuit trips there's a fault. Always. Something's shorted or loose or burnt. You don't leave till you find it. That's the job mun.
So when I lost a run of rugby bets I went looking.
Was it the referee. Was it the weather. Was it me three pints in.
Had a whole notebook of reasons.
Took me years to see it.
Sometimes there's no fault butt.
It's just variance.
A loss isn't a loose wire.
Nothing to fix.

 

[ParlayPrincess_88]

Okay so mine is kind of embarrassing lol. I thought I had a skill. My skill was finding good cappers on Twitter. I followed like 23 accounts and I was SO good at telling which ones were hot. I'd copy the hot ones and drop the cold ones. I thought that was a strategy!!
Then I looked at it properly and I was just always copying whoever had just won. Every single one posted their wins and I never saw the losses I'm down to 3 accounts now and honestly I think I'm dropping those too.
The weird part is the skill was real. I really could tell who was hot. It just wasn't worth anything.

 

[SharpEddie47]

Let me be clear about which skill, since I suspect most people here will answer with a habit. Mine is a skill I was paid for. I was an accountant for many years, and an accountant's discipline is closing the period. At month end the books balance. The week ends, the numbers are final, and you do not carry an open item into the next one.
I imported this directly into my betting. For roughly my first four years, if a week was running red on a Sunday evening, I found a bet. Not a bad bet, I told myself, a bet that met my criteria, though the criteria had a way of loosening at about seven o'clock. I wanted to close the week green. My poker years reinforced it, because a session has an end and you want to leave the table ahead.
The error is that a bankroll has no period end. Week, month and year are boundaries I drew. The edge does not know about them. Every bet taken to close a period was taken for a reason that has nothing to do with value.
I audited it later. The Sunday evening bets in red weeks returned minus 6.2%. I stopped closing weeks. I still find it uncomfortable to leave a red week open. That discomfort is the skill, and I have not so much unlearned it as learned to disobey it.
Trust the process, not your gut.

 

[Klaus]

The skill I had to unlearn was keeping the process fixed.
In corporate finance this is a virtue. A forecasting method is not changed in the middle of a year because one quarter surprised you. I carried this into the Bundesliga model and was proud that it did not move.
The calibration exercise showed the cost. The model had been overconfident at the top of its range for years, and I had never adjusted it, because adjusting it felt like abandoning the system. A fixed process is not the same thing as a correct process.
I now treat the model as a hypothesis with an audit date. The top bins are shrunk by 18%. Genau, it took me many seasons to be willing to be inconsistent in order to be right.

 

[CoachTony_Bets]

As a coach, the skill I had to unlearn is the eye test. I played D2 ball and I've coached for a long time, and I can watch a team for ten minutes and tell you things the numbers can't. Some of that is real. I can see a lineman playing hurt before the injury report does. I can see a scheme that's been figured out.
But I mixed that up with something else. I'd also watch a team and decide they "wanted it more." I'd decide they'd "quit on their coach." I'd see "heart." Those aren't things I was seeing. They were things I was telling myself, and I coach teenagers, so I'm very good at telling convincing stories about heart.
The un-learning wasn't throwing out the eye test. I think there's a middle ground. I try to write down what I actually observed (a limp, a missed assignment, a formation change) separately from what I concluded. If I can point to it on film, it stays. If it's something I felt, it goes in a different column and doesn't get stake.
That second column is bigger than I'd like.

 

[DublinDegen]

lads the skill i had to unlearn is the one i was proudest of and im not sure ive unlearned it...
getting back to even... i got really good at it... down a few hundred on a saturday and id know exactly what to do... double up in play... find the late goals market... i could do it three or four times in a row...
and it worked often enough that i thought it was a skill... it was the thing that made me feel like i knew what i was doing...
its also the thing that took me from a few hundred to a few thousand... the best thing i was ever good at is the thing that cost me the most...
i havent got better... i just stopped believing the part about coming back... that part is gone... the urge to do it isnt...

 

[ThePuntingProf]

The skill I had to unlearn is the one I was paid to teach, which is that a question has an answer and that sufficient diligence will find it, one must consider that for twenty-eight years I set examination papers in which every problem had a correct solution that a competent student could derive in the time allowed, and I carried that conviction into the punting for a great many years without noticing it, I treated each match as a problem with a right answer, the true probability, and believed that if I built the Poisson model with enough care I should arrive at it, and that when I was wrong it was because I had made an error in the working, a loose digit, a mis-specified parameter, and not because there was no single answer to be found, a match is not an examination question, it has a distribution and not a solution, and the diligence I prized could narrow my uncertainty but could never remove it, the consequence was that I kept refining a model after the evidence for further refinement had run out, because to stop would have been to admit that the remaining error was irreducible, and I did not care to say that of my own work, I now write my estimates in tens, which is a form of confession that the third digit is decoration, and I find it a more honest way to teach probability than the one I used in the lecture theatre, where I am afraid I let several thousand students believe that if they were careful the number would come out.

 

[oli_sussex]

Trading out. I greened up every position the moment it moved my way. Small certain profits, and it cut the long-run edge to almost nothing.

 

[FadeThePublic]

Eddie, you and I both did the poker thing. Leave the table up, close the week green. (Different cause, same disease.) The difference is you had a form for it.

 

[SharpEddie47]

The form made it worse. A closed period feels like a fact. It is a convention. Line shopping is worth two to three percent a season, and closing red weeks gave most of that back.
Trust the process, not your gut.

 

[TaffyTipster]

Klaus mate.
Same model for ten years.
Never touched it.
I'd have fiddled with it every weekend.

 

[Klaus]

That is the difference between us, and at the top of the range it was also the problem.

 

[ParlayPrincess_88]

Wait what's trading out? Is that the cash out button?? I use that constantly lol

 

[oli_sussex]

Yes. It is a hedge. The price offered is usually worse than fair.

 

[ParlayPrincess_88]

Okay so I've been paying for the button

 

[CoachTony_Bets]

Fade, I think reading people is real in my world. A defensive coordinator has habits and I can read them. The difference is he knows I'm there and adjusts. The market doesn't. So the skill works on someone reacting to you, and it doesn't work on a price.

 

[FadeThePublic]

That's the best version of it I've heard. (Annoyingly.) The skill wasn't wrong. It was aimed at the wrong thing.

 

[SharpEddie47]

Princess, your skill was real. You were measuring popularity, not accuracy. The two correlate for a while, and then they do not.
Trust the process, not your gut.