The Basics: session review & \" Deconstruction\"
 

Poker - how do you play yours?

are you a TAG a LAG a sLAG a nit ?

However you play and whoever you play against one often overlooked part of paying goot is reviewing the hands you play afterwards and looking to see what good decisions you made - what bad stuff you did and trying to not repeat the bad stuff again and versa vice.

Often times I find myself playing on autopilot - I get the poker fired up I open up 3279874574305790428590480 tables - I look through the players that are sitting choose what tables I want to play and off I go. An hour or two later I finish up happy that I ran goot or mad that I lost monies and I go do something else.

Sound like you?

A lot of mediocre players play like this - they know the basics they know what plays are goot and what are not - for the most part they make the right plays most of the time - hey nobodies perfect right.

I think this is a one way ticket to breakevensville.

How do we make $ playing poker??

We make more with our good hands and lose less with our bad hands than the other players we play against. We make less FTOP "mistakes" than the rest of the opposition - thats it.

It's *very* hard to get out of the "woot I won x buyins today I rule" or the "Holy sheet I ran so bad I am down $x" mentality when you finish a session. All we ought to really care about is whether we made goot decisions or not and think after a sesh "woot I made some great +EV moves today ++ Sklansky bucks for me" or "man I really sucked calling there and sucking out for 300bb"

But if you play a bunch of tables you don't have nearly enough time to review how +/- your EV was for the big decisions you made that session. Here are some handy steps that help me after I play a session to get a handle on how well I am playing - and in what spots I really need to work on and improve.

i) Open up notepad or use pen/paper or something - open up the tracker s/w and filter it to show the big pots you just played.

ii) Open poker stove - replay the big hands you wanna look at in the replayer and pause the action when you had to make a decision. Punch the hand into the stove take your time and put the villain on a range and check your equity vs that range.

iii) MAKE A NOTE! - and move onto the next big hand.

This takes you 15-20 mins after you're done playing for a 90 min 4table session or thereabouts. If you got all-in pf AAvKK and stuff ignore those - just focus mostly on the hands where you had to think a little.

You should end up with a notepad file that looks like...

Session 5th Nov - Party $50NL

i) raised a 19/16 MP TAGs "CB" with air on rags flop - folded to shove - villain plays v tight from E/MP - but can't continue with whiffed OC's - OK play.
ii) called a b/3b all-in OOP vs TAG on flop w TPGK, V had naked fd. Good call - he is often semi-bluffing.
iii) ...

etc.

Save these then once a week look back through your cliffnotes and see if the same spots come up often - get into the habit of writing down why you did x in y situation and I find it helps me to think better at the table and overall make less FTOP "mistakes".

Which leads me onto "Deconstruction"

Basicaly taking other peoples games apart - and looking for ways to possibly exploit their weaknesses.

We all maintain large databases of opponents play - we ought to use these more.

Once a week I sit for an hour - pick out a villain I play against often that I have a LOT of hands on and I look at what moves they make - how they lost the big pots they played - how often they fold to a re-raise - what size of raise is need to get value - or to get a fold. I write up a huge pile of notes on this villain and either import them directly to the poker s/w or I notepad them and copy/paste them in later when I see them again.

Some villain giving you trouble at the table? - instead of keeping out of their way get under their skin, figure them out and be better armed next time you play them.

Re: The Basics: session review & \" Deconstruction\"
 

A+ will read again and use it to break down my session tomorrow when I wake up!

Re: The Basics: session review & \" Deconstruction\"
 

Yay, 2nd fantastic post today!

[ QUOTE ]

Once a week I sit for an hour - pick out a villain I play against often that I have a LOT of hands on and I look at what moves they make - how they lost the big pots they played - how often they fold to a re-raise - what size of raise is need to get value - or to get a fold. I write up a huge pile of notes on this villain and either import them directly to the poker s/w or I notepad them and copy/paste them in later when I see them again.


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Great idea, will do this on a regular basis.

Re: The Basics: session review & \" Deconstruction\"
 

Good post!

Re: The Basics: session review & \" Deconstruction\"
 

Def gd idea, although I don't think I have the discipline to make myself do this after every session!

Re: The Basics: session review & \" Deconstruction\"
 

[ QUOTE ]
Yay, 2nd fantastic post today!

[ QUOTE ]

Once a week I sit for an hour - pick out a villain I play against often that I have a LOT of hands on and I look at what moves they make - how they lost the big pots they played - how often they fold to a re-raise - what size of raise is need to get value - or to get a fold. I write up a huge pile of notes on this villain and either import them directly to the poker s/w or I notepad them and copy/paste them in later when I see them again.


[/ QUOTE ]

Great idea, will do this on a regular basis.

[/ QUOTE ]i need to do this more also. nice post matrix. glad to have u back in unl and grinding again

Re: The Basics: session review & \" Deconstruction\"
 

great post, thanks.

Re: The Basics: session review & \" Deconstruction\"
 

[ QUOTE ]
Def gd idea, although I don't think I have the discipline to make myself do this after every session!

[/ QUOTE ]

If you do not spend ~1/2 the time that you spend playing reviewing your play/studying and actively looking for leaks and ways to exploit people your winrate suffers BIGtime.

I know this from painful experience cos I just played and posted and played and played - and was a mediocre breakeven player for a long time, this has really helped me to improve my game.

It gets easier tho as you go along - when you are new and mostly clueless you need more studying/reviewing, as you improve the ratio of study that you need drops - invest the time now and it pays off later. Nobody enjoys studying - well at least noone I know [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Re: The Basics: session review & \" Deconstruction\"
 

but my problem with trying to review is that i dont know what im looking for. how am i suppose to find leaks if i feel like i played most hands the best i could

Re: The Basics: session review & \" Deconstruction\"
 

very nice hand sir

Re: The Basics: session review & \" Deconstruction\"
 

I make a habit at looking at all my biggest pots (winners and losers) after every session. The first step is just to examine the hand from a basic EV standpoint, and after that it's often informative to lookup the hands you have on the villains to see if the reads you made during the hand actually matched other hands you have. Sometimes I've found I was making certain assumptions based on stats that didn't actually hold up for that particular opponent based on his previous hands. This can be a useful way to examine the kinds of reads you make based on stats. Beyond that, it's often informative to try to think of how the hand would have gone if you had played some alternate line. Did you miss value? Lose too much? Overvalue a read?

Of course not every big hand is interesting, and sometimes the small pots are better, but I think this is a good practice to get in the habit of. It also is helpful for getting into the mindset of evaluating your play on the basis of decisions made, rather than money earned or lost. Sometimes you won but you remind yourself that you got very lucky. Sometimes you lost but you decide you played well and are happy.

Another thing I've found useful so far is that periodically I'll use the filters (either in PT or PokerEV) to examine how I'm doing with particular categories of hands in certain positions. You have to be careful not to overvalue the results of such an investigation given variance will be high over small samples, but you can notice significant trends that might alert you to leaks.

For example I noticed at one point I was limping in early position with suited aces and suited connectors and mostly just losing money. For a lot of people that leak would seem obvious but it was something I realized by examining PT data. Playing small-mid pocket pairs too much for set value (and too passively) was another problem I noticed this way.

Edit:
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but my problem with trying to review is that i dont know what im looking for. how am i suppose to find leaks if i feel like i played most hands the best i could

[/ QUOTE ]

I think this is one area where having enough data, and using filters, you can notice you are losing money consistently in certain spots even though you feel you are playing alright. Obviously with small amounts of data this might just be variance, and you can't be overly results oriented, but it can also be a clue that maybe the lines you are taking in these spots aren't actually all that great, or perhaps are not appropriate to table textures of the games you are playing.

Re: The Basics: session review & \" Deconstruction\"
 

[ QUOTE ]
but my problem with trying to review is that i dont know what im looking for. how am i suppose to find leaks if i feel like i played most hands the best i could

[/ QUOTE ]


Sit and fool around with Stove ... try to estimate ranges for villians based on your information and then experiment with different lines based on how you think your opponent plays and try to estimate EV for each line.

Re: The Basics: session review & \" Deconstruction\"
 

Sounds very good. I will employ this as soon as I can. Thank you very much [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Re: The Basics: session review & \" Deconstruction\"
 

[ QUOTE ]
Sounds very good. I will employ this as soon as I can. Thank you very much [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[/ QUOTE ]

honestly, this is the number one key to being a good player imo.

post any hands you are unsure about here (say 2 a day), but you should be getting to the point where you are able to work out how well you played most hands by yourself.

Re: The Basics: session review & \" Deconstruction\"
 

Nice post Matrix. I've done a less formal review in PT by just looking at large pot hands but have never really written down notes or reviewed them for trends over time, that's a really good idea. Between this post and Pokey's "How to use PT" that was included in our resident plagiarist's compilation post this morning, I think we should all have the tools to do a lot of self-assessment.

"Resident Plagiarist" - custom title ftw?

Re: The Basics: session review & \" Deconstruction\"
 

Thanks a lot!!!

Re: The Basics: session review & \" Deconstruction\"
 

Having just started out playing cash games and luckily having read QTip's To the New, Aspiring Player where he suggests to play less and learn/review more, I started to look through my hand histories after each session, but didn't post any hands and didn't take notes as well. I will add these missing elements straight away, especially the note taking thing seems to be a very valuable tool for self-examination.

Thanks a lot for this post, your timing couldn't have been better!

Re: The Basics: session review & \" Deconstruction\"
 

I just went through mine as I said I would, took about 30 mins. Definitely found a few questionable moves. Going to ask about a few hands.

Re: The Basics: session review & \" Deconstruction\"
 

How many hands do you feel is enough to start seriously digging into your opponent's game looking for leaks? 500? 1k?

Re: The Basics: session review & \" Deconstruction\"
 

[ QUOTE ]
How many hands do you feel is enough to start seriously digging into your opponent's game looking for leaks? 500? 1k?

[/ QUOTE ]

That depends on the opponent - the easiest guys to pick apart are villains who go to SD too much so you see a larger % of their starting hands. I'd guess about 1000+ is good.

Open PT click the "Summary" tab and about 1/3 down the page you see the "Player performance summary" - click the column heading "Hands" and it sorts players by # hands - just start working from the top down until you find a villain you think you can exploit.

Re: The Basics: session review & \" Deconstruction\"
 

Great post and something needed for me even though I play mostly HUSNG's these days where the key to winning is deconstruction.

Re: The Basics: session review & \" Deconstruction\"
 

I've been very lazy about this aspect of my game. This post just gave me the motivation to get off my butt + fix that leak. Thanks!

Re: The Basics: session review & \" Deconstruction\"
 

I know it's a little late to be hopping on the praise bandwagon, but your post eerily described exactly where I am with my game right now.

[ QUOTE ]
A lot of mediocre players play like this - they know the basics they know what plays are goot and what are not - for the most part they make the right plays most of the time - hey nobodies perfect right.

I think this is a one way ticket to breakevensville.

[/ QUOTE ]

http://www.screenshots.cc/view_image...732/stats2.bmp

Sorry for not having the image in the actual thread. I'm a moron who can't figure out how to post pics. Anyway, thank you so much for telling me EXACTLY what's been keeping me from winning money.

Re: The Basics: session review & \" Deconstruction\"
 

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post any hands you are unsure about here (say 2 a day), but you should be getting to the point where you are able to work out how well you played most hands by yourself.

[/ QUOTE ]

I kow. My current reviewing was basically looking at the big hands and deciding If I was right or wrong. Never really thought about writing it down in order to take look at it later and to filter out some routine/habits.

Re: The Basics: session review & \" Deconstruction\"
 

Printed and saved.
Thanks!

Re: The Basics: session review & \" Deconstruction\"
 

Excelent post. I am doing it myself as im running very bad these days. Find the big pots in PT, looks its +EV or a mistake or something like that. I thinks its a correct way to improve your game.
Thanks.

Re: The Basics: session review & \" Deconstruction\"
 

Excellent post OP ive downloaded Pokerstove but i cant figure out how to get the hands in there any ideas appreciated. ty

Re: The Basics: session review & \" Deconstruction\"
 

Bump for greatness...and a question.

When one says you should review the biggest pots won/lost in a session, what is the cutoff point? 10bb pots? 20?