The Basics: session review & " Deconstruction"

[well named]

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

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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.

[Gelford]

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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

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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.

[Parvex]

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

[bozzer]

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

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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.

[doppelganger]

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?

[runfor1]

Thanks a lot!!!

[MMagicM]

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!

[vixticator]

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.

[Milky]

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

[matrix]

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

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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.