How to Search for Information the Right Way

Globalization, AI development, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies – all these contribute to the Internet being oversaturated. For the most part, with duplicated and poorly written information. Everything we just said applies to the poker industry too, especially when it comes to educational materials and answers to FAQs that were written just to be listed and tracked by search engines.

In this article we going to give you a few lifehacks about searching for poker information “the right way”.

The Problems With Internet Searches

In January 2024, YouTube channel Triggernometry uploaded a jaw-dropping episode of podcast with a guest-starring Igor Kurganov, famous poker player and philanthropist. The episode took on a few hot topics, including the potential dangers of rapid AI development.

While we’re going to give you a bit of recap, we still recommend you watch the entire episode, at least as some food for thought.

For instance, Igor talked about the influence of developers opinions and different agendas on the content of AI generated texts and answers:

A language model, like GPT 2, 3, 4, will in the end be very good at deception. It actually is trained at deception because it’s fed with satisfying the user rather than seeking truth. There were these tests that people did where they initially said: “I’m like a 30-year-old woman with liberal worldviews (whatever) — tell me about this” and she would receive very different answers to someone who’s like a 50-year-old republican.

So it’s made to kind of not discover the truth but really like to satisfy the user presently it is a bit. That wasn’t the goal at all but yet it ended up doing it. […]

In the video, Igor also briefly touched on his worries about the quality of information online:

A lot of people individually get extra power to edit Wikipedia in like biased ways or making up fake papers that justify their fake articles.

All of that, I think, will unfortunately happen and that will kind of erode general trust into the Internet potentially as well. I don’t know yet what we’re going to do about that. That seems pretty bad to me. I mean, already Google has become a bit worse. The answers that you get are just not as useful I find anymore as they were like within five years ago really. 

When you watch the entire video, you see that problems with online information boil down to the

1. Decrease in information quality.
2. Objective information and fact checkers for AI platforms
3. Automated tools for cross-checking sources, so
4. Overuse of SEO strategies

For poker players, all these problems above are quadrupled because of the specificity related to the game. It is even harder to fact-check, especially if we’re talking about educational materials for a smaller part of the community, like limit players.

So, if it wasn’t clear from the get go, you need a lot more that a few random words to get the right (poker) information online. For this, we’ve prepared five simple tricks on how to (just about) bend search engines to your will! Let’s go!

#1: Keywords Are Your Superpower

When SEO managers choose keywords, they tend to go for the most popular and common words and phrases. As a player, you can use this logic to optimize your own searching as well.

Firstly, you need to say yes to simple terminology and no to any unusual or out there synonyms. Take this for example, people are more likely to use word when trying to find a term than linguistic notions such as noun, verb, pronoun, adjective.

In terms of poker, this translates to using established phrases, such as battles of the blinds instead of war of the blinds, or limping instead of calling big blind.

Tip #2: Phrasing and Emphasizing

Don’t stingy with words; but then again, don’t overdo it. You need to choose the right amount of words and precise phrasing to make your search effective.

Google and other search engines try to find the closest answer to your question by hitting every part of it. So, when you use too many words, Google will come back with too many answers, each referencing a different part of the question. On the contrary, if you write too few words, search engines will completely overlook all possibilities and give you back a curt answer.

So, for an ideal search, just follow these three simple guidelines:

1. Use descriptive words: strategic tips Omaha will come back with a lot more hits than just searching for PLO tips.
2. Balance stop words: don’t overuse conjunctions and articles but don’t ignore them either — they can help with more precise answers. For instance, how to use poker solver would be more effective than use poker solver.
3. Shuffle phrasing: In some cases one search query can be formulated differently and will yield different results. So sometimes you should experiment with phrasing to find what is the most effective.

Moreover, don’t forget to use tools for emphasizing specific phrases. Search engines already employ advanced search functionality where you can specify what the results should include. At the moment, Google accepts vertical quotes to highlight exact words or phrases to search.

Tip #3: Choose the Right Search Engine

Specific information demands a specific search engine — this rule applies to almost every sphere of life.

Let’s suppose, you want to find scientific studies about emotional control and its influence on your work performance. Google will come back with results whichever way you search, but for effectiveness you should check out specialized websites like National Library of Medicine or ScienceDirect.

Another example, would of course be for poker related information. For most of these topics Google isn’t much help — it messes up with poker slang, sticks to SEO articles with a lot of marketing texts and offers outdated articles just because they have a lot of views.

So you need to make a habit of searching for poker information on poker news websites like PokerListings, forums like TwoPlusTwo or poker schools platforms like Upswing Poker.

Tip #4: Fact-Check AI

As you may know, artificial intelligence, AI for short, is trained on given information and doesn’t go through detailed fact-checking. So, while AI can be helpful with checking fundamental facts and knowledge, it is almost completely useless and potentially harmful for dynamic topics.

If you asked ChatGPT 3.5 about the most popular online poker sites in the world, it comes back with this:

If you check poker websites, such as Pokerscout who track traffic, you’ll get a different picture:

 

Other poker examples have to do with ongoing promotions and poker room bonuses. Since AI platforms don’t have access to daily information databases and developers don’t train them on these poker topics, platforms like ChatGPT simply don’t have up-to-date data.

Tip #5: Ask the Right People

While introverts and Gen Z may consider this controversial — sometimes asking a real person is the fastest way to get information fact-checked.

Of course, this applies only to three kinds of information, which can almost never be googled:

• Objective mathematical data such as poker calculations or statistics from poker websites;
• Someone’s diet or routine schedule;
• Someone’s opinion.

So if you need to find some of this information — just use social media with suitable players or specialists.