Sigh

Casey (Bones) and I did a review of my play at a 1-table shorthanded high buy in sng on Deucescracked. I won't go into the same length of a rant I went on on the forums there (here), but my philosophy on videos, why I make them or what I do in them really doesn't have to do with my actual decisions so much as the analysis behind why it's good or bad.

In fact, sometimes I make the mistakes on purpose because I believe it to be a more effective way of providing the viewers with the quality content, both on an introductory and a more advanced level. And in most cases, elaborating on these decisions (and the unintentional or more debatable plays, of course) in the threads after the videos are posted so members have a chance to speak to the coaches about it on a more interactive scale (sometimes, as in this thread actually, this is where some talk of the more advanced concepts come out moreso that just don't come up in any type of game-play video or in-game type of analysis setting or context).

Anyways, apparently a lot of the viewers do not share any aspect of this sentiment, because the small-sample (aka meaningless?) star rating seems to be average at best, where the analysis we put into the video + thread seems to be pretty thorough and reasonable especially given the context of the video and its relative boringness (to some of the awesome non sng content, or non live play content of SNGs, what have you) of content I've gotten good feedback on or think another coach did well in the past etc.

I guess the reason why I have such a hard time with it is their actual presentation of evidence (hell, the one guy said it was the worst video he'd seen)- they use the mistakes I make in a video to exemplify why it's a bad video, when, combining the video with the thread, I think it makes for the most effective learning tool, assuming their goal is to watch it and think about the spots, similar spots, how things connect and the nuances to the plays (and mistakes) made or when it might become the right play. It's just really tough to combat that when it takes me fighting against a 'you're terrible' with nothing constructive added, or when the 'something constructive' is what you fundamentally believe is constructively the argument for the opposite. Or something like that. And even moreso upsetting because I don't feel that this person intended to 'troll' or be an idiot with his comments (who knows though, so many of them, right?), but rather to try and say that I did something bad and analyzed it badly, the bad analysis part due to bad mouse-clicking on mine/Bones' end of this instance being something I'm having trouble wrapping my head around. Since when has anything in this world been 'black and white', especially as it relates to poker, and even *more* specifically, short stack poker where your edges (and mistakes) come in decimal increments under 1% a lot of the time? The irony of it all being that, with the aforementioned revelations on my philosophies here, plenty of my videos where people find and discuss mistakes made for reasons unbeknown st to them, people have reviewed as 'very good' or 'really valuable' in various ways.

Will someone just tell me I'm a bad speaker or writer already? In my entire life, I've felt that there are 3(ish) teachers that I've respected in terms of their profession and how they treat it on every level basically. But I can't count the number of times I've received a "B" on a paper that says "Great job!" with no other comments or criticisms, leaving me only to ask one question: "Where's the A, bitch?" Or when a criticism makes no sense, some unwillingness to change the grade because they already gave it and it seems subjective to them and you're the student and they're the teacher.

I'm honestly not real sure what the motive is and I guess I'm trying to figure it out now because I'm in this 'teacher role', and have been in videos for many months now, and among a lot of positive, constructive feedback, I s'pose one can't help but realize that they can't be perfect at what they do, and perhaps someone telling me something I should do differently that made sense would go a long way (and for me, admittedly 'stop caring' should be the answer it seems, especially in my profession). Perhaps I can't figure out their angle because I was never allowed to tell a teacher in school that they sucked, and why I thought so.

I guess this rant is done. As always, thanks for reading.


-A