We're in the throes of 2021 and isn't it about time you developed a strong poker study habit?

Too many of us go willy-nilly from one video to the next, or binge listen to dozens of podcasts without even putting one piece of poker strategy to use.  Well, no more!

This is your Ultimate Poker Study Guide for turning yourself into the player you want to be in 2021 and beyond.

The Ultimate Poker Study Guide for 2021

Poker Study Technique #1: Just Get Started

The more you do, the more you can do.

This is one of my favorite quotes and it's applicable to anything in life you want to get better at, poker study included.

Listen to episode #260:  A Simple Poker Study Plan as you follow along below:

Maybe you've never studied or don’t feel your poker study time is productive. You don't know how to review a database now how to find and plug your leaks. You don't know how to get the most out of every poker book you read and you don't know how to practice the strategies you read about.

Well, the only way to make your poker study time effective is by actually “hitting the books” and doing it.  Every new thing you study and new technique you use adds to your poker study repertoire and you begin building intuition for the best ways to approach poker learning.

Example: Poker Study Progression

Your goal is to improve 3bet bluffing skills, so you watch a video. You take notes on what you learn to help you remember it all.  You also know that practice makes perfect so you take action on making better 3bet bluffs in your next session.  So far, you’ve used 3 study techniques: watching a video, taking notes and purposeful play.

But, you encountered 3 tough spots where your bluffs failed.  You open your PokerTracker 4 database and find those 3 hands. You replay the hands and discover that there's no way they were folding to your bluff 3bets because you made them too small. So, you record in your journal these 3bet sizing mistakes and you decide to practice more 3bet bluffs. Bam!  You just used 3 more techniques of reviewing hands, recording mistakes and going back to the felt for more action.

The next session, you make more bluff and value 3bets.  Some are successful and some are not. So, you have the idea to go to your database and filter for 3bets with different hand strengths. You don’t know how to filter for this, so you read an article for help.  You do what they do in order to learn from your different 3betting hands. Bam!  You used 2 more study techniques of learning via repetition and filtering through your hands.

You just utilized 8 different study techniques for one strategy!

Begin building poker study skills by choosing one strategy to improve.

Find one video or article or podcast to study and take notes.

Put what you learn into practice then let your intuition take over and continue your studies however feels most natural (or, scroll down on this page for more useful poker study techniques).

Now, I challenge you to take action!

Poker Study Technique #2: Use the ‘No Time for Study' Plan

This plan is designed to be printed and written on. Treat it like your poker journal and store them for future reference.

1. Choose a Topic to Study

Write your study topic for the week at the top. It could be as broad as “3bets”, or as narrow as “3bet bluffing from the BB versus the BTN”.

The intent of choosing a topic of study is to help you avoid overwhelm by keeping you focused on one strategy at a time for an entire week.

2. Record the Top 12 Stats

You can only improve what you measure.

I’m a firm believer in this, so I’ve listed the top 12 most beneficial stats to keep track of.  These give you insight into how your poker study is affecting your game.  As you study and improve your skills and knowledge, your statistics will naturally change to reflect this.

For example, if you’re a crazy aggressive 3bettor, a week of 3bet studies might see your 3bet stat go from 12% to 7% because now you’re picking better opportunities to 3bet.

The top 12 statistics are:

1. # of hands played
2. Total Win Rate
3. VPIP
4. PFR
5. Raise First In
6. Call 2bet
7. 3bet Preflop
8. Call 3bet
9. Cbet Flop
10. Cbet Turn
11. Fold to Flop Cbet
12. Fold to Turn Cbet

Write down the numbers from last week in the first column, then write your end-of-week stats in the second column. Record the variance in column 3 (the difference between the 2 numbers, positive or negative).

3. Choose 2 Items to Study

Take a few minutes to run a Google or YouTube search for 2 items to study.  Choose one for the first 3 days of the week (Monday through Wednesday), and the other for Thursday through Saturday. It could be a video, article, podcast or a chapter in a book.  Whatever you choose, it’s something that you think will help you become better at the strategy you’re studying.

Write the name of the item down so that you can easily find it again in the future.

The Plan has a small note-taking section, but that's intentional. The idea is that you record the most important things that you want to take with you into the future.

Within the notes area, there’s a spot to write down the #1 takeaway from the item you studied and just below that, there’s a “Take Action” section to write down the action you’re going to take to practice what you learned.

Action is your greatest teacher, so you must create one of your own action steps. If you don't step into action and put to use what you learned, you just wasted your time studying it. The action step you create is what you'll focus on over your next 3 play sessions. This is how you’ll make your off-the-felt studies a part of your on-the-felt game.

4. Daily Checklist for Study and Play

On Monday and Thursday, check the box after you've studied your chosen item. Your study time can be done right before your play session as a warm-up if you’d like.

On Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday you'll spend 10 minutes reviewing hands from the day before (scroll below for instruction on hand history reviews).  This is also your session warm-up. Check the box after you do your 10-minute review.

When it comes to playing poker, Monday through Saturday are all considered focused play. You're going to play with purpose and practice the action you chose from the content you studied.  Check the box afterwards.

And Sunday is your grind day.  This is the day you can play or study however you want.

Utilize the ‘No Time for Study' Plan for your studies this week (download and print).

Choose your study topic for the week and record your Top 12 Statistics as they stand right now.

Find 2 items to study, take notes then practice what you learn on the felt!

Now, I challenge you to take action!

Poker Study Technique #3: Game Tape

Game Tape is recording yourself perform so you can analyze it later to improve your performance.

Listen to Podcast #261: Game Tape: My Favorite Poker Play and Study Strategy Combination

As poker players, this means we record our play session and speak through each decision we make, saying the logic that led us to the play we chose.  After the session, probably the next day, we watch the game tape to find mistakes made and also look for mistakes other players made.

You've probably heard game tape used mostly by sports players, namely football players.  But presentation speakers, stand-up comedians and actors use it as well. Joe Rogan says he records every set he does and listens back to them occasionally to help him fine-tune his performances.

These performers take their skills and growth seriously and game tape helps them spot areas of opportunity. This helps them improve performance, and who wouldn't want to be better at that thing they love or get paid to do, right?

There's no hiding

Game tape shines a spotlight on your mistakes.  If you do a database review and find a mistake of calling the river when it's obvious you're beat, you might rationalize this mistake.  You could think to yourself, “I was 5-tabling, so I didn't have enough time to make a good decision”.

But, with game tape, the truth of what happened is right there and you can't hide from it.  You're going to catch yourself clicking CALL and not even mentioning the opponent's range, their bet size, their stats or the board at the time.  You won't even discuss the situation at all.  You'll just see yourself clicking call, then getting upset that they had you crushed.

I also love game because as far as I know, I'm the only one who talks about it.  That means that out of your opponents who study poker, you've got a leg up on them.  If you use game tape, you're doing this incredibly beneficial form of play and study, and they've never even thought to do it.

All they do is watch videos and review hands, baby!  You're crushing them in the study efficiency wars.

The 3 Benefits of Game Tape

1. It Forces You to Speak Aloud Your Logic

Too often we button-click because a play seems right or we think it's the right one to make.  “I've got AK, I'm gonna 3bet!”  Yeah, you just voiced what you're going to do, but you gave no reason behind it.

You didn't say, “I'm 3betting with AK here because the open-raiser is folding a ton and I block some of their stronger hands.”  Nor did you say, “I'm 3betting here because this Fish calls 3bets way too often and with every Ace, so I'm crushing their calling range.”

Forcing yourself to speak the logic you use gets you thinking more about the plays you make.  By doing game tape, I've become a more consistent and logical player, making plays more often because I have a purpose and I know how to get what I want from my opponent.

2. You Don't Want to Disappoint Your Audience

There's a reason Twitch streamers often play so well; the audience expects them to voice the reason for every play they make, and this forces them to make better plays.  They don't want to seem like a dumb-ass for making illogical 3bet bluffs or river calls or 20bb final table shoves.

Even if you never publish your game tape, you can imagine you have an audience watching you and hoping you make the best plays possible.

Pretend that these are being recorded and your grandchildren will play them for your great-grandchildren:

“Look how incredible your great-grandfather was.  He had this crazy ability to fold when he knew he was beat, and call when he knew he was ahead.  His poker prowess built this incredible mansion we're in right now.  Let's watch this video and marvel at his brilliance.”

So, when you record your game tape, pretend your coach, friends, husband or wife or God is looking over your shoulder.  Because they're watching, you're going to strive to make the best decisions possible by taking into account all the information available in every hand dealt.

3. You Can Find Your Mistakes

It's weird how we learn so much from reviewing our play away from the pressure that we feel when on-the-felt.

There's no money on the line, no pride at stake, no audience watching and we have all the time in the world to dissect the hand.

Because all this pressure is gone, we can look objectively at how we played.  We'll catch ourselves NOT looking at HUD statistics or NOT noticing bet and stack sizes or NOT remembering this is a 3bet pot when we call the flop, turn and river with top pair weak kicker.

Because we catch these mistakes, we can take note of them and now work to NOT repeat them in the future.

I always have my poker journal open in front of me to record my mistakes during my game tape reviews, and you must do the same.

3 Steps to Using Game Tape

1. Download OBS and Set It Up

This takes less than 5 minutes, and to help you out, here's a quick set-up video:

I recommend OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) because it's quick and easy to use, and it's FREE!

Run it and follow the steps in the video above to get it game tape ready.

Of course, have a microphone to record your speaking as you play.

2. Record Your First Game Tape Session

Fire up one or two tables then hit “Record”

Play for just 30 minutes.

Make sure you speak through your decisions out loud as you play.

In the beginning, you’ll find yourself not speaking as you work out a hand in your head.  But, just keep practicing.  Playing and speaking your thoughts is just another muscle to develop and with time you’ll be speaking for a full 30 minutes or longer.

Stop the recording then continue playing your normal session.

3. Review Your Game Tape

I recommend reviewing your game tape the next day when the session isn't so fresh.

This way there's a better chance that you can watch the video objectively with the goal of learning from your mistakes.

Take notes on any mistakes you catch.  I could give you a whole list of things to look for, but what's the fun in that?

The only way you'll learn how to review game tape to find mistakes is to record then review game tape to find your mistakes.

Action is the greatest teacher after all, so take action on game tape and learn on your own the power of using it.

Record your first game tape tonight, then review it tomorrow to find your mistakes.

This is the best play and study strategy you can do, so get to it.

Now, I challenge you to take action!

Poker Study Technique #4: Set Poker Goals

Since you're going to study and play more in 2021, you must set some goals to work towards.

“The major reason for setting a goal is for what it makes you do to accomplish it. This will always be a far greater value than what you get.” -Jim Rohn

I used to believe that the reason for setting a goal was simply to achieve that thing.

But, now I believe the real benefit of setting a goal is to become the person who can achieve that goal.

Listen to episode #262: The Really Real Reason to Make Poker Goals

In order to run a marathon, maybe starting from scratch, you have to become…

• A person who runs multiple days every week
• A person who can smartly plan your training to gradually increase your endurance and strength
• Someone who can persevere through sore muscles and not wanting to train that day
• Someone who has the mental fortitude to make a long-term goal and work over weeks and months to achieve it without giving up

Those are the real benefits of setting and working toward a goal of running a marathon.

Striving to achieve this goal turns you into the person you want to be. Every goal that you strive for is an opportunity to improve yourself and develop a growth mindset, great habits and increased confidence.

Setting a Monetary Poker Goal

Most players want to earn money from poker, at least a nice side income from the game.

Let’s say you are a 25nl player, and your current win rate is 4bb/100 hands.

You decide to set a goal of earning $20 per day over the next 30 days, for $600 total profit. So, what do you need to do to earn $20/day?

1. On-the-Felt: Become a Grinder

With a win rate of 4bb/100 hands, you earn $1 for every 100 hands you play.  This means that you need to play 2,000 hands per day to achieve $20 profit per day.

But, maybe over the past 30 days you only played 30,000 hands (1,000 hands/day).  How are you going to fit in 2,000 hands/day in the next 30 days?

Now your task is to figure out how to play 2,000 hands per day.  This is where the real benefit of setting a monetary goal comes in.

1. Force yourself to play longer sessions. This is going to mentally toughen you up to deal with the beats, the boredom and the extra time on the felt. You will become a mentally stronger poker player for putting yourself through this.
2. Increase the number of tables you play.  This leads to more hands per hour so it will take you less hours/day to play 2,000 hands. This is also going to make you a stronger player.
3. Improve your poker scheduling.  If you create and stick to a schedule of play, you’re more likely to hit your 2,000-hand target.  So, you can decide to play every night from 7pm to 10pm.

By trying to implement these 3 things, even if you don’t hit your goal of 2,000 hands per day, you’re turning yourself into the type of person who can. That’s the real benefit here.

And, even if you don't hit your goal of 60,000 hands but only play 50,000.  That's 50,000 more hands of experience, more hands to study and more to help you find and plug leaks.

2. Off-the-Felt: Study Dedication

Let’s say over these 30 days, you decide to work on incorporate more study to improve your skills and win rate. So, you schedule 30 minutes of study time every day.  Maybe it’s during your lunch breaks or you wake up 30 minutes earlier every day to hit the books.

You select one strategy to study via article, video or podcast and you take notes. You also do one full hand reading exercise in relation to your strategy focus. And then you focus on executing this strategy in your play session that night.

So not only are you playing more poker, you’re doing it with better focus and with an eye towards building specific skills.

Maybe during these 30 days of extra play and study, you’ve improved your win rate from 4bb/100 hands up to 5bb/100 hands. At this higher win rate, it’ll take you less hands to achieve your $20/day.  Or, if you still play 2,000 hands, you’re going to earn $25/day on average.

Now that your win rate is increased and you can play 2,000 hands per day, imagine what you can do over another 30 days.

Set another goal, this time for $25 per day, or even $30.  Continue to push yourself on an off-the-felt, and you’ll be turning yourself into the player you want to be.

Take the time right now and figure out what kind of player you want to be.  Do you want to slowly grind out some profits at the micro stakes?  Maybe take down your local tournament at least once a week?  Or, are you looking to make a living from poker?

Once you figure this out, you can set some goals that will bring your closer to your ideal poker self.

Now, I challenge you to take action!

SMARTER Goals

I make my goals around the ‘SMARTER Goals' formula that I learned from Michael Hyatt.

SMARTER is an acronym: Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Risky, Time-keyed, Exciting and Relevant.

Specific

A specific goal is made very clearly and says exactly what you're shooting for.

SMARTER Goal: Play consistently at 50 NL by January 1^st.

Measurable

Measurable means that we can assign a quantifiable and trackable number.  These goals are better because you either hit them or you don’t.  The numbers don’t lie.

SMARTER Goal: Increase my bankroll by 20% to $6,000 by December 31^st.

Actionable

Actionable means that your goal begins with an action word, not what you want to be.

SMARTER Goal: Listen to one podcast per day, take notes, and put into action one thing from each podcast.

Risky

Risky goals are hard to hit because they push you beyond what you’ve done in the past.  These goals command more of your attention and force you to get creative, to focus more and to put forth so much more effort. These goals take you out of your comfort zone and put you into your discomfort zone, which is where all the magic happens (but don't get into the dellusional zone).

SMARTER Goal: Play 600 hands each day, Monday through Friday, with weekends available to get me to 4,000 hands or more per week.

Time-keyed

This means that you give yourself either a deadline or a specific time frame to achieve the goal.

SMARTER Goal: Record, edit and post 13 episodes of my new vlog called “Vlogging the Dolphin” once per week starting January 1.

Exciting

You want to set goals that you are pumped to achieve and that you have an internal drive towards. These are goals set around things that you just love to do, and maybe you can’t see yourself doing anything else.  If you love it you'll do it.

SMARTER Goal: Play the $10,000 Main Event at the 2019 WSOP.

Relevant

Being relevant means that they fit in with the season of life you’re in.  So, I have a wife and 2 kids to support. Deciding to go off and become a traveling tournament grinder just is not in the cards for me right now. What I can do instead that fits with where my life is right now, is to grind all the PM online tournaments every Monday and Tuesday.

SMARTER Goal: Study 30 minutes Monday through Friday by waking up 45 minutes earlier than the kids do.

Create a SMARTER poker goal, and strive to hit it in 2021.  Remember that the purpose behind the goal you create is to turn yourself into the type of person that can achieve the goal.

If you actually achieve it, great!  Make a harder goal next time.

If you don’t achieve it, be happy with that fact that you’ve pushed yourself to do something difficult and you’ve grown as a poker player because of it.

Now, I challenge you to take action!

Poker Study Technique #5: Utilize Focus Sessions for Active Learning

A Focus Session is where you play only 1 or 2 tables for at least for 30 minutes, where you are intently focused on putting one strategy into play.

Listen to episode #265: Take Action with Focus Sessions

Of course, don't ignore everything else. If you're working on making better bluff cbets, you won’t mindlessly 2bet or 3bet preflop just to give you the opportunity to cbet. You’re simply looking for every opportunity to make profitable cbet bluffs (whether you’re involved in the hand or not).

Focus sessions give you a great opportunity to diligently apply your off-the-felt studies to you're on-the-felt the game. Too many players passively spend their time watching videos or reading a book or listening to a podcast and they hope this is enough to build their skills.  Maybe they take notes, but without actively applying the strategies learned, this is just inefficient.

Your goal must be to actively learn as much as you can by taking action and practicing what you're learning off-the-felt.

Step 1: Choose or Create an Action Step

If you're NOT new to my podcast or my books or my training videos, you know I'm all about taking action. Everything that I create not only teaches you a strategy, but it also tells you how to practice that strategy on-the-felt because I give you action steps or challenges all the time.

I work hard to make it easy for you to be an active learner. If you're watching videos or reading somebody else's books, most of the time they just teach you the strategy. That’s good, but it's now up to you to figure out how to put that strategy into play.

For example, if you watch a random YouTube video on cbetting, you have to come up with your own action step. You have to pay attention to the things that they're talking about and then figure out on your own how to implement that on-the-felt.

But, I do things differently.  In my latest Poker Forge strategy video, I taught members the benefits of utilizing flop texture for better cbet bluffing.  In the video I started with discussing strategy, then I demonstrated how to do off-the-felt work with a spreadsheet and Flopzilla Pro to improve that understanding.  Then I gave 3 action steps, two off-the-felt and one on-the-felt that gets them actively working on the strategies I taught. If members simply follow those 3 action steps, they’re being active participants in their poker education.

Step 2: Know the Elements at Play

When you are implementing a new strategy on the felt, you're not just willy-nilly button clicking without taking into considerations at least a few bits of information.

For example, if your goal is to bluff cbet more frequently and profitably, you’re not going to indiscriminately throw out cbet bluffs, right? Instead, you must…

• Think about which players are most susceptible to folding versus cbets
• Consider your relative position versus them
• Strive to put yourself into profitable cbetting opportunities against foldy players
• Pay attention to their Flop to Cbet statistics and their Raise and Check-raise Cbet statistics
• Take into account the size of the pot, the stack sizes involved and whether or not they’re already committed to the pot
• Choose the best cbet bluffing size that maximizes your fold equity while saving you chips when your bluff doesn’t work
• Put them on a preflop range of hands and gauge how well it interacts with the board

Wow, that’s a lot of elements to keep in mind for one strategy focus of making better bluff cbets.  It’s critical that you write all of these elements down to prepare you for an effective focus session.

Step 3: Just Do It

Now that you know the action step you want to take and the elements involved, just do it.

Read and noodle on your list of elements for bluff cbets during your pre-session warm-up. Then, fire up 1 or 2 tables and play with focus.

For our example of cbet bluffing, you’re looking for every +EV, profitable cbet bluffing spot. Do this even when you're not involved in the hand.  Assess the caller's range and the board, look at their stats and stack sizes and decide whether or not the open-raiser (whoever that is) should make a bluff cbet or not.

And for hands that you are involved in, when you come across a good opportunity, make the bluff cbet and tag the hand for review.  If you encounter any questionable hands that confuse you, tag those as well so you can spend time off the felt in your next review session figuring out whether or not it’s a good bluff cbet spot.

Choose a strategy you want to practice in your next session.

Create an action step and write down the important elements to focus on as you practice your strategy.

Now, I challenge you to take action!

Focus Sessions: Just Do It!

I recommend doing focus sessions in one of 2 ways:

1. For an Entire Session

Let’s say you’re used to playing 4 tables at a time, but you really want to ingrain bluff cbetting as an effective strategy.  So, you decide to play just 2 tables for 2 hours each day this week.  This is going to give you more time to focus on watching every hand that sees the flop and gauging the profitability of bluff cbetting on every one of them.

Imagine how much better you’ll be with 14 hours of cbet bluffing focus.  You’ll train those cbet bluffing elements into your thought process for every hand that sees the flop and you’ll pull the trigger numerous times on +EV cbet bluffs.  You’ll also see many spots where a cbet bluff won’t work, so you don’t make it and you save yourself money for it.

After your week of focus, you can go back to your normal 4-table sessions and work to continue your great cbet bluffing with more hands coming at you.

2. At the Start of a Normal Session

You can start your fist 30 minutes of any session with just 1 or 2 tables as you focus on bluff cbets.

After your 30 minutes is up and if you feel like it, add tables until you get to your desired number.

Help to Stay Focused

I love using Game Tape to help me stay focused (poker study technique #3 above), and it’s great for your focus sessions.

Game tape helps you stay focused on the task at hand because you’re forcing yourself to speak through your decisions.   The goal would be to speak about each of the elements for each cbet bluffing decision and ultimately why you pulled the trigger (or not) on every bluff cbetting opportunity.

One more thing that helps me to stay focused is utilizing a tick sheet. These are used to track the number of times you make a specific action:

Every time you make one of these plays, you put a tick mark in the appropriate column.  There isn’t a magical number of tick marks to have in each column at the end of your session.  The whole idea with this task is to just help you keep focused on cbetting.  As long as you're making check marks under the different columns, you're probably staying focused on the strategies you're trying to implement.

Play 5 focus sessions this week surrounding ONE strategy you’re studying off-the-felt. For Poker Forge members, cbet bluffing is a perfect strategy to focus on.

Choose whether or not you’ll do your focus session for 30 minutes or maybe the entire session.

Write out the important elements then get to practicing. Tag every hand where you use your strategy or choose not to so you can review them later off-the-felt.

Now, I challenge you to take action!

Poker Study Technique #6: Conduct Hand History Reviews

Hand history reviews are when you go through your database of hands (LIVE players review their notes) to learn from the way you played prior hands, normally in your most recent session.

Listen to episode #266: Conduct Hand History Reviews

You’re looking for any mistakes made so you can take note of them and work to not repeat them in the future.  You’re also looking at mistakes your opponents are making. When you find common mistakes that they make, you can devise exploits to use against them.

You’re also going through your hands to help refine your strategies. Maybe you’re studying cbet strategies and you're practicing them on the felt.  So, in your hand history review the following day, you can review hands with that exact same focus.

I often do my hand history reviews early in the morning before my day begins or sometimes as a pre-session warm-up. Going through yesterday’s hands gets my mind primed for A-game poker play.

There aren't any hard and fast rules for when you conduct your hand history reviews.  But, they should be done sooner rather than postponed for a few days or even a week down the road. You are studying off-the-felt and putting new strategies to work on-the-felt. It is absolutely necessary that you review your hands in order to learn from your mistakes and to refine the strategies that you’re trying to ingrain into your skill set.

Start with Tagged Hands

Every hand history review starts with looking through your tagged hands. If you don’t currently tag important hands as you play, that’s because you haven’t developed it as a habit. It’s something that you must train yourself to do. PokerTracker 4 has an easy function for tagging hands:

Click the “tag”, scroll down to the hand in question and select the “Review” tag or create your own.

Go through each tagged hand by replaying the action.

Always assign Villain a preflop range. This doesn’t mean you have to do a full-on hand reading exercise if you don’t want. But, putting them on a preflop range helps you make better post-flop decisions against them, so practice this off-the-felt.

As you review hands, try to learn what you can about each opponent you face. When you spot something worth remembering, take a note of it within their PokerTracker 4 note editor. This way the note is available to you the next time you play against them. Try to make sense of their actions to help you understand how they and others like them play so you can exploit them in the future.

Watch how I conduct a cbet-related hand history review:

Review BIG Losing Hands

I hate seeing big losing hands in my database, but I love learning from them.

When I lose an entire buy-in with a top pair hand, I can almost guarantee there is something I can learn from this.

You must review these hands to understand why you made the street by street plays you did. Maybe you are totally justified and you got in with the best hand but they caught their draw or sucked out on you. At least you can take comfort in the fact that you didn’t make a mistake but instead it was variance working against you.

But, if you catch a mistake, take note of it in your poker journal. The reason you record your mistakes is so that you can review them in your pre-session warm-ups in an effort to NOT make those mistakes again.

I’ll also look at big winning hands. It feels good reliving the glories of earning an entire stack from somebody.  But, there's still an opportunity to learn from mistakes that they made or that I made. I can't tell you how many time's I've made an ill-timed bluff shove on the flop, Villain had the nuts, but then I backed into a better hand.

Yep, sometimes the suck-outs are in our favor.  Just because we won the hand doesn’t mean we didn’t make a mistake that we can learn from.

Filter for Specific Situations

One of the reasons I love PokerTracker 4 is for the ease with which it allows me to sit through my database and filter for specific hands that are relevant to my current focus.

If improved cbetting is your focus, a simple yet great filter would be Cbetting Opportunities on the Flop:

So, if you played 700 hands yesterday, you might have 20 or 25 opportunities to cbet. These are more than enough hands to learn from in one hand history review session.

Once the filter returns the necessary hands, I often start on the button because it's the best position and this is where I should be able to make the best cbetting decisions. So, I’ll sift through the hands first to find hands where I lost a lot but haven’t reviewed yet, or maybe where I checked instead of betting or where I bet with an absolute bluff.

There’s no set way that I go through hands.  I've done this so many times over many years, so I let intuition guide me as I look for important hands to review.

So, if you’re not sure on how to filter through your hands and then start reviewing them, just start doing it and you'll figure it out along the way.

Before your next play session, review your prior session.

Pull up yesterday’s hands in your database and go through your your tagged hands.  Didn’t tag any?  Review your big losers and big winners.

Still got more time to study?  Filter for the situation you’re working on and review those hands to find your mistakes and to refine your strategies.

Now, I challenge you to take action!

4 Hand History Review Tips

#1 – Complete 1 Full Hand Reading Exercise

With every hand history review, I always do one full hand reading exercise. Hand reading is the most important skill to learn and by doing at least 1 of these daily, you'll improve your use of this skill so you can use it on-the-felt to improve all of your decisions.

I believe that hand reading is the most important skill that’s why it was the 1st thing I covered for an entire month in the Poker Forge.

If you aren’t in the poker Forge you can still learn hand reading on your own with a bit of practice:

• How to Do Poker Hand Reading Podcast Episodes
• 66 Days of Hand Reading videos on YouTube

#2 – Let Your Questions Guide You

As you review your hands, you’ll ask yourself questions like, “Why didn’t I cbet there?”  When this happens, let that question guide you to further studies.  Maybe you didn’t cbet with AKs when you flopped the nut flush draw.  So, dive into this by filtering for all flopped nut flush draws to see how often you’re cbetting.  Look at the hands where you failed to cbet and gauge whether the cbet would’ve been better than checking.

This could easily raise more questions like “If I don’t cbet the nut flush draw, then what hands am I cbetting?”  You can filter for Opportunity to Cbet and you can do so on various board types as well.  Dive into these hands to figure out your cbetting tendencies.

You might also ask yourself, “How profitable is AKs for me?”  This could lead you to filtering for all AKs hands and learning from them.  This could also lead to studying AQ, AKo and so on.

#3 – Save Your Filters

You're going to find yourself running tons of filters to narrow your studies.  Save each of these because doing so will:

1. Save you time re-running filters in the future.  Some filters are super quick and easy: 3bet preflop or cbet on the flop.  Other filters like lines taken (ex: flop bet, turn check and river bet), are complicated and take multiple steps to run.
2. Remind yourself of what you’ve studied in the past.  Maybe you know you have some sort of problem on the turn, things just don’t seem right and you’re often at a loss for what to do.  Saving all your turn related filters will allow you to go back and re-study these situations and remind you of prior lessons learned.

#4 – Take Notes

Always utilize your poker journal as you study hands.  You might think you’ll remember that, “I’m folding too often on the turn with TPWK hands”.  But, it’s really easy to forget things like this.  Take notes, revisit them occasionally and try to work on the mistakes you catch yourself making.

Also, utilize the player note taking feature in PokerTracker 4.  Maybe you just caught “Bobby789″ making an all-in bluff shove on the flop with a weak gut-shot draw.  Taking this note now might help you respond better when they make this play again in the future.

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