Reviewing your sessions

[redCashion]

I'm starting to be more rigorous about my session evaluations until I tune up some aspects of my game that I have regressed with. I am basically going through the bigger hands that I've lost in a session and deciding how many I made avoidable mistakes on, and then calculating the amount lost due to those mistakes. And then I'll log it session to session to view trends.

Of course this is all an imperfect science, and I have to be careful not to get too results oriented since I can easily misplay a hand I make money on, or one that was for too small a pot to show up on my radar. But I think as a general exercise it has a some value.

Thoughts, and comments on how you conduct your own session reviews?

[Dogballs88]

I don't really like to jot down $ lost due to bad play - after awhile, I would imagine this would just eat at your confidence. No one is perfect.

What I will do however, is wait a day before reviewing my session. This makes it "fresh" and rids myself of any subconcisous tilt. I keep a blog, and post in it the next day, and before playing the next day's session, I fire up PokerTracker and replay my biggest losers and pause it on each street to evaluate. Also, I replay my biggest winners for both a boost of confidence and to make sure I didn't miss any value, etc. I may also replay some bread and butter hands like AK to compare my lines in various situations.

[redCashion]

Keeping track of $lost hasn't bruised my confidence at all, I actually find it to be a great motivator. I can see that it wouldn't work for everyone, but so far it has caused me to play with greater awareness.

Btw, I like the idea of keeping a poker blog, especially if you are getting some views on it I would guess that the feedback would be very valuable.

[Dave I]

[ QUOTE ]
I don't really like to jot down $ lost due to bad play - after awhile, I would imagine this would just eat at your confidence. No one is perfect.

What I will do however, is wait a day before reviewing my session. This makes it "fresh" and rids myself of any subconcisous tilt. I keep a blog, and post in it the next day, and before playing the next day's session, I fire up PokerTracker and replay my biggest losers and pause it on each street to evaluate. Also, I replay my biggest winners for both a boost of confidence and to make sure I didn't miss any value, etc. I may also replay some bread and butter hands like AK to compare my lines in various situations.

[/ QUOTE ]

These are all good suggestions.

[CaucasianAsian29]

Don't worry about recording money lost, this will mess with your mind too much. Just review hands when ever you have time. If you've got 10-15 minutes or 1/2 hour, just sit down and go through PT-look at any hands that you lost or won more than the Blinds, and make sure you played those correctly. If you diden't you should know where you went wrong. And if your still stuck then post them here. GL!!

[Ben K]

Each month I track through all the hands where I'd put someone all in or I'd been all in myself AND there were still cards to come.

Then I run through poker stove the hands as they were from the hand histories and stick it into a spreadsheet with the amount that was at stake.

I don't record if I won or lost.

I hope that my share of each pot sum (p-value win * pot) / sum all pots is above 50%. I.e. the numbers get weighted by the bigger hands of the month where you should, rightly, be more cautious.

I also jot down what I had at the point I made the decision to be all in and do the same analysis across hand types to check I'm not overplaying certain types of hands.

Day to day, I review the stats of each session to make sure I'm playing roughly how I want to be with enough pre flop raising (third to 2 thirds VPIP), flop aggression (infinite or just v high), lowish went to showdown (15% to 30%). Then I'll check my position stats to check I played positionally aware. I've found plenty of tables where passive pf works but not many which respond better to playing position (theoretically) incorrectly.

Usually if I've lost a lot I'll see various things I don't like in the mix of the stats which indicate poor play like losing a huge hand from OOP or something.

The main anaylsis described at the top has helped me with my hand reading a lot as I'm condensing a lot of big hands to the point of all in and then looking at expected p-values of a win. I'm getting a better understanding of which types of flops will call big raises and which are more likely to generate action and other good stuff. Of course, I could just be getting a bit better generally or on a roll, you can never really tell.

edited 'cos I wrote somethink rubbish

[Shaddux]

I look at the big pots I won and lost. I observe whether I luckboxed the ones I won or if I played correctly. Alternatively, I check to see if my big losses are to to variance or to bad play/tilting.

I also look at the sessions where I had major downswings and assess my play that way.

In addition, I have a friend I review hands with occasionally (his name is NinetyEight...he's a new poster here). I usually do this a few days after my session to get a clear outlook on my play.

btw, I looks for specific leaks...I don't just say "wow I totally tilted away my stack there." I look for patterns. Recently, I've found that I am overplaying top pair (common mistake with micro/ssnl players), I'm not playing position strongly enough, and for some reason I constantly spew with TT (which is odd because I am a winner with 88, 99, and JJ).

This is all pretty basic, but I hope it helps a little to whomever reads this.

[cwar]

I take a similar method where each time I have a non-automatic decision I put AJo into notepad and look at the hand later in PT reviewing every street and analyzing other lines.

[matrix]

I review yesterdays sessions before I start to play today - this gets me in the right frame of mind to think about pokah before my own money gets involved in the equation.

I look through big wins and big losses and I take notes and flag certain hands in PT for later review if I thought they involved difficult decisions.

This also helps as I can take better notes while I review and PT auto imports notes into the client s/w /images/graemlins/smile.gif

Lots of times I find that I played something garbage from OOP or made a stupid pf mistake which then mushrooms into a big mistake on later streets...

[redCashion]

How do you flag hands in PT? I don't see a way to do this.

Ben, I like the idea of running the all-in hands through Poker Stove. Is there a way to filter hands in PT to view just all-ins, and is there a way to port that info to Poker Stove, or is it done manually?

[redCashion]

Ah, nevermind.. I see the flagging checkbox on the Game Notes page.

[Ben K]

It's done manually. I sort each session by net result so the big hands end up on the top or bottom and then write it down on a bit of A4 and input into my spreadsheet from there. It's a bit tedious but doesn't actually take that long when you get down to it. In 8,000 hands or so in September I had about 70 examples so it's not much and even easier if you break it up by doing it weekly.

I bet someone could write a script to export the info.

Also, I reckon I miss a few all in hands when they're against small stacks because the pot doesn't go above 40BB or so. I also ignore hands that went all in on the river.

[munkey]

The game notes Tab is your friend when reviewing sessions.

I also select net won/lost and review the top 10 green and red hands -I usually do it the same day but might do what matrix does and the next day though I tend to do it sooner as the reads an exact situations I can recall better.

I also when running bad/playig badly compare periods of play to earlier periods where I may have played better and cross-reference similar hand types (obviously you need a decent sample size)

Preferences Tab -->Dates since... e.g lst month.


As well as reviewing myself - I often pick two villans to examine in PT whether good or bad or aparticularly challenging opponent to play against - I usually just note their SN down in the session.

I have incoporated plays and changes to my game from some of these good players and if they're a weak player I will update my notes with their exploitable ways/ make sure I don't do this.

[HitNRunPoster]

[ QUOTE ]
Thoughts, and comments on how you conduct your own session reviews?

[/ QUOTE ]

Reviewing big hands is ok. As an aside, I'm a little curious about how much of our profit comes from these hands rather than the smaller hands.

Anyways, just remember that all actions are against a range rather than against a hand, so stuff that looks like a mistake worth $X will really be for less than that most of the time (ty pokey!).

(However, when you start comparing the true values to your winrates, you'll see that even small mistakes blow.)

--Dave.

Edit: thanks to the guys who mentioned game notes as a way to quickly find the big hands. I'd been doing through the sessions tab. /images/graemlins/frown.gif

[4_2_it]

[ QUOTE ]
I am basically going through the bigger hands that I've lost in a session and deciding how many I made avoidable mistakes on,

[/ QUOTE ]

I do this. Don't go overboard calculating how much it cost you though, that doesn't help you learn anything.

I suggest you also look at your biggest winners and see what you did right (or were you lucky).

Also, look at PT and see if you are losing with hands that should be long term winners (AK, AQ, PPs).

[kidpokeher]

[ QUOTE ]
Each month I track through all the hands where I'd put someone all in or I'd been all in myself AND there were still cards to come.

[/ QUOTE ]

How do you identify the ones where you put someone AI and they fold? I couldn't figure this out in PT so I went back to the ol' A4 as you say.

[HitNRunPoster]

zomg reviewing my big hands yielded at least 4 hands where i lose a full buy in in really horrid stackoffs (including a few bluffs)

Hmm.

[kokiri]

Every once in a while, I also run through a whole session. I have found that this is a real eyeopener in terms of reads i didn't get first time around and it reminds me of how much I am not picking up at the table..

[HitNRunPoster]

[ QUOTE ]
Every once in a while, I also run through a whole session. I have found that this is a real eyeopener in terms of reads i didn't get first time around and it reminds me of how much I am not picking up at the table..

[/ QUOTE ]

That's not totally fair, because when you review a session in PT you can pause the action on a given hand for an indefinite period of time, and take notes during this time.

However, yeah, I've been thinking this for a long time, it's just beautiful how easy it gets when you have precise reads, eh? /images/graemlins/smile.gif