Session Review and Forum Searching Tips & Tricks

[loyalguard]

Following in a fine tradition, for my 1000th post I thought I’d try to make a meaningful contribution to this forum and give back in exchange for all that I have received. I have also received some requests for the search techniques I’ve used to put together some of my recent compilations. As such, I would like to share with you some tips for making the most out of your session reviews and the hands that you post in this forum.

Like many new players/posters, I started out posting a lot of my own hands in order for the more knowledgeable posters here to show me the error of my ways. I was getting great advice on what to do and not do but the funny thing was I was still losing money. Then someone told me to stop posting so many hands and start replying to other people’s hands. Ding! I started replying to more hands and forcing myself to think them through. Soon after, I actually started to learn and apply my new found knowledge to my own game.

The next step of course was to review my own hands after a session and think through them the same way as I thought through them in the forum. But how? Well, I found some great posts in this forum on reviewing your session in Poker Tracker. Here they are:

reviewing a session with PT

How do you review your PT sessions?

session review routine

So, I would review a hand and if I couldn’t figure out my error I’d post the hand here and get everyone else’s take on it. After a while, I started to notice that you see a lot of the same types of hands posted over and over. So I added a step. Before posting a hand, I would search the forum for similar hands, compare it to my hand, and see if I could answer my questions before posting. This accomplished the following: 1) I was getting access to much more analysis, 2) I needed to post far fewer of my own hands, and 3) I was learning even more and able to give better (not yet great) advice in this forum.

The trick to all this was being able to perform effective searches in the frequently cursed 2+2 search page to get a good sample of hands similar to the ones I wanted to review. After a little trial and error and some tips from this site:

www.ubbcentral.com/boards/showflat.php/Cat/1/Number/35218/Main/35218

I was able to find some great hand analysis from posters, new and old, and use it to get more out of the forum.

Here are some of the search tips and tricks I use:

Say you want to find threads with AJo in them to see how they were played. You can go to the search page and simply type…:

AJo

…but, you are most likely get the maximum (but not exhaustive) results of 200 posts and have to hunt and peck through both original posts and replies to find what you want.

Here’s a screenshot of more effective search parameters:





By typing…:

+" AJo " –“Re:”

…and make sure “in subject” is selected…

…You will get every original post where someone typed “AJo” in the subject line. Why? +“ AJo” will give you posts with exactly AJo in them and –“Re:” will omit posts with “Re:” in the subject line (when you reply to a message it the forum adds “Re:” to the subject). You can now click on the results to find similar hands or whatever else you had in mind. If you still get too many results, you can run multiple searches using different date ranges to better break them down.

Another useful technique is to search for posts by a favorite poster. Say for instance you really like MrWookie’s replies. If you run a similar search by typing…:

+" AJo "

…and typing in the Username field…:

MrWookie

...you will get all posts with “AJo” in the subject that Wook replied to.

Say you really like how Gregatron plays small pairs (specifically 66). Well, you could type…:

+" 66 " –“Re:”

…and type in the Username field…:

Gregatron

…you will get instances where Greg has posted an original 66 hand.


Last, but not least, say you wanted to see if any of the hands you want to review have made their way into the digest in the past. Well, you could type…:

+digest

…and type in the Username Field…

VoraciousReader

….and you will get results showing all of Racious’ digest posts so that you can then browse the links and look for prominent hands.



If you are so inclined, you can get pretty fancy with some of these search strings. If you wanted to only see certain hands that were not played from the blinds you could add the keywords -"is SB" -"is BB". Or, if you wanted to see when they were played only from UTG positions you could type +"is UTG" .



Hopefully these session review and search tips will help you improve your game like they’ve helped mine. Please feel free to let me know if you have any search related questions. I am far from being an expert, but I’ve run several hundred specific searches in this forum and have had pretty decent results. Thanks!

p.s. I’ve included some general search notes below for those that are interested.




General Search Notes

1. If you do not know how + or – or “ “ works, the link above to ubbcentral breaks them down nicely.

2. As of the date of this post, all searches performed in the main forum will only return results as far as on or about July 14, 2005. All previous posts can be found in the archives (you can use these same techniques there too!)

3. I have not covered too many aspects of date range searches here but I highly recommend using specific ranges in order to get optimum results. Unless you are specifically looking for something from within the last week, always set a different “newer than” range to give results spanning a longer period.

4. When using the -“Re:” technique to find original posts only, you may still get some reply posts as results if the poster making the reply changed the subject line of the post.

5. I recommend only searching one forum at a time. If you choose multiple forums or no specific forum you will either get too many results and hit the maximum of 200 without getting all the posts you want to see and/or it will be too cumbersome to browse them for relevant content.

6. Not everyone types “AJo”, “66”, etc. in their subject lines, so you will miss posts that don’t have them included in their subjects. However, there are more advanced (yet slightly less effective) techniques for finding those posts as well. To find posts where someone played 66 while not in a blind that didn’t have “66” somewhere in the subject line you could type the below search string (make sure you select “in subject and body”):

-“66” -“Re:” –“is SB” –“is BB” +”with 6<”

The key parts of the above search are the first and last keywords. The first omits any posts with “66” in them (you should run that search first). The last will find instances where a converted hand history shows a 6 as one of hero’s hole cards. This technique is less effective because you will get results where hero had 6[img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img], 7[img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img]…or…6:diamond, 8[img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img]…etc. because you cannot search for exact hole card matches because of the different possible suit variations. (The reason for this deficiency is a conflict between HTML and the search script – if you’re actually interested in why, PM me). But, this search should still return very limited results making manual elimination pretty quick.

Ok, so you’re asking why does the last key word include a < sign, right? This limits result to an instance of say 6[img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img] or 6:diamond”, etc. Why? Because the suit icons displayed in the forum come from html tags that embed the appropriate .gif file into the page (e.g. <img src="/images/graemlins/club.gif"). When the search is conducted it looks for instances of “6<” as in “6<img src="/images/graemlins/club.gif” in the page code so you get a result of 6 from a HH and not someone just typing “with 6 outs” or some other variation. I know, too much info, right?