Unlock faster growth by applying these changes to your study routine
Watching poker videos. Browsing sims on a solver. Discussing hands with friends on Discord.
Those are the typical ways most serious poker players study. And yet, most poker players don’t experience rapid growth in understanding of the game and quality of play – in fact, lots of players stay for years at the same limits, playing the same strategies without much improvement.
It doesn’t take much to realize that the common study habits of poker players are not ideal. What happens is that there is no one talking about potential improvements that could be made. This post is my attempt to change that.
But before we attempt changing the current habits, we need to understand why they suck.
WHY TYPICAL POKER STUDY METHODS SUCK
Typical study methods in poker suck because they are passive learning methods. All you’re doing is sitting there waiting for information to be put in front of you. You open YouTube or a paid poker training platform, and you click on a video from someone you like, with the expectation that they will serve you with relevant information that can improve your game. You watch it for a few minutes and then move on with your life. Then the next day you might pick a hand from your Database you’re unsure of how to play, and you open a solver tree of that same spot and board texture, with the expectation that the solver will show you how it is that you should play. If you are not satisfied with the solver answer, you may send the hand history to your friends on Discord, and then once again you wait for them to give you their view about it, and hopefully that is somewhat useful for your improvement. You read their comments, you may reply or may not reply, and then you move on with your day.
The problem with passive learning methods is that they don’t trigger much retention of the information in your brain. It’s true that you will in fact learn something, as retention is not 0%, but you could learn much more by using active learning methods.
WHAT TO DO INSTEAD
Instead of just waiting for information to be put in front of you, and then absorbing it passively, you can engage with it. Instead of just looking at the end of the text book for the answer to your problem (that’s exactly what you’re doing by jumping straight to a solver sim when you have a doubt), you could derive the answer by using your current knowledge and recalling information from your brain.
Scientific research has shown that the act of recalling or retrieving information from your brain is a very powerful – perhaps the most powerful technique – in achieving retention. The more you recall a piece of information, the more your brain strengthens the neural pathways that lead to that information, which makes it more likely that you will be able to remember it next time.
A very easy way to practice active recall is simply by testing yourself. You must engage in an activity that forces you to retrieve information from your brain. There are multiple ways you can do that, and we’ll explore them in the context of studying poker with the next 3 tips.
TIP #1 – DRILLING
This one is no news to you. If you have been following my content for some time, you’ll know how big of an advocate I am for drilling.
Now you might understand a bit better why – drilling is an amazing way of testing yourself and forcing the retrieval of information. It has all the properties of a good study technique: it promotes active recall; it contains immediate feedback; and it allows for many repetitions per unit of time. In the context of poker, it’s even better because it can feel just like playing, so it’s also pleasurable and fun.
Drilling is extremely popular as an improvement method in pretty much any competitive or high performance activity. Sports, Academics (in the form of exercises), the Military. Most activities that requires high level of execution, physical or intellectual, incorporate drilling in their improvement framework. In poker, it should be no different.
Besides being consistent and drilling one hour a day, there are a few things you can do to further enhance the efficiency of your drilling hours. One of them has to do with how you arrange the study – which spots, which lines, which board textures – and when you do it.
Nowadays, through platforms like GTO Wizard, you can build pretty much any study drill setting you can imagine with their practice modes. The feature is extremely flexible, allowing you to choose and specify every unique variable that is pertinent to the activity of drilling:
In this context, one thing that is believed to be beneficial for learning purposes is to mix different topics in your learning sessions. The idea behind this is that the alternative – focusing on only one specific thing for too long – doesn’t allow the brain to forget.
Remembering is also about forgetting. If active recall is what we must do to effectively learn something and put it into our long term memory, then it won’t work if that topic is always at the forefront of our minds. We must first forget before we can recall.
Mixing different topics allows for that to happen. Since your brain will be required to switch in between topics, you’re basically forcing it to forget about the thing that you’re are trying to learn repeatedly, allowing the next recall attempt to be much more effective.
My students always ask me – is it better to just study one spot for an entire week, and then move to something else the next week, or to mix different spots every week?
I would say you should mix different spots in every drilling session. Drill Flop Cbets BTN vs BB for 15 minutes; then drill defending vs small flop cbets BB vs SB SRP for 25 minutes; then practice the whole hand for 3BP OOP SB vs BTN for 30 minutes.
That being said, don’t get overly paranoid and obsessed with the perfect study structure. There is no such thing. If you keep the above principles in mind – recalling the information through drilling, and mixing different topics – then whether you did 25 minutes of BTN vs BB or 45 minutes of SB vs CO doesn’t necessarily matter.
Just remember to prioritize the most important spots to your winrate, which are:
- SRP IP as PFR;
- 3BP OOP as PFR;
- 3BP IP as PFR;
- SRP OOP as PFR.
TIP #2 – ACTIVE REVIEW
Everyone loves to review hand histories. It’s probably the number 1 habit in the lives of professional poker players. It feels logical to take a hand you’re not sure about and go check the answer in the solver. And when you finish reviewing it, you get a bit of a dopamine release, which feels good. You feel like you’ve accomplished something, and that feeling makes you more likely to review a hand the next day, thus reinforcing the habit.
I’ve said a few times in my videos that I think reviewing hand histories, in the way I described above, is absolutely terrible. Practically useless. Absolutely unnecessary and unfruitful.
As I’ve said above, the act of going straight to a solver solution to check on a hand that you played is pretty much the same thing as trying to work on a math problem by going to the end of the text book and reading the answer. Who would ever do that before trying to solve the problem?
I know, however, that habits are hard to change. Perhaps you really really want to keep reviewing hands. If that’s the case, then I have a few ideas that can help make that process more efficient and useful – by using exactly the concepts discussed above.
How can we making reviewing hands a more engaging activity, where instead of being passive and going directly to the answer, you practice retrieving relevant information, in a way that can strengthen and enhance your memory about that spot?
The way I like to approach this is by asking questions – and obviously trying to find the answer. You essentially turn the hand history into a small test.
“Test?? Uhhh, f**k you Saulo, this ain’t school!!”
Man, I fucking love tests lol It was my favorite thing in school to actually put myself through the challenge and then see my results. It didn’t even have to be official tests worth grades. I also really enjoyed tests that simulated SATs, with the sole purpose of practicing. I would do them for fun.
But I get it. Not everyone is a nerd like me, and testing yourself 1 hour a day is perhaps not what you envisioned when you decided to become a professional poker player. But I’m here to give you good, solid advice that can help you improve your game and make more money – not to tell you to do things that you like.
I believe as adults one of the most crucial skills we can develop is the ability to do things despite not liking them. It’s impossible to not be forced to do things you don’t particularly enjoy as an adult. Avoiding them just creates more problems. Procrastinating doesn’t make responsibilities go away. At the end of the day, you are just sabotaging yourself.
To improve your studying efficiency through a hand history review method, you must turn it into a small test. Before opening any solver sims, before asking anyone about their thoughts, you must try to retrieve relevant information and make sound estimates about the hand in question. This can turn a practically useless activity into a very fruitful learning method.
When reviewing hands with my students (I don’t review hands myself), I force them to answer the following questions:
- What’s the equity of your hand here? (rough estimate is fine)
- What’s the EV of your hand here? (also rough estimate)
- What’s the betting frequency with your entire range?
- What are the thresholds – weakest hand you should bet; weakest hand you should call?
In the process of answering these questions, the student is forced to retrieve information from his brain. “What’s the typical equity I see for hands similar to mine in similar boards?”; “What’s the typical betting frequency I see solver playing in spots like this?”.
After all this information is retrieved (or estimated using logic), the student now has a very solid set of tools to try and derive the answer.
“If your range bets on average this much, and the weakest hand you should bet is this, and your hand has this much equity, then what should your hand do?”
Boom. Knowledge is built.
We open up the solver, and the answer is right. The student smiles; I give them a compliment. Dopamine is released. Next time they play a similar spot, they’ll be much more likely to remember the correct play.
This is how I recommend you do your hand history reviews. Stop going straight to the solver solution. Doing that is not useful for you. Turn the hand into a test; retrieve information; build and solidify knowledge.
TIP #3 – Qualitative is nice, Quantitative is better
This last tip is something I practically see no one else preaching.
I do hold quite a lot of contrarian beliefs and ideas in the poker landscape, but this one – despite very contrarian – is probably the one I’m most convinced of.
Poker is math. It’s about numbers and quantities. Whether people like or not, actual poker theory and solid poker strategy is about figuring out mathematically what’s the best play.
Often times, the qualitative reasonings people assign to their plays lead them to the same conclusions that a quantitative analysis would arrive at. That, however, doesn’t make qualitative reasonings better than quantitative reasonings. Or even good at all.
Qualitative perspectives are subject to a multitude of cognitive biases. Psychology experts have been showing this for decades through scientific research – the biggest exponent in that field being Daniel Kahneman, known to ordinary people through his best-selling books Thinking, Fast and Slow and Noise – A Flaw In Human Judgement.
Availability bias (which includes biases like selection bias and survivorship bias), confirmation bias, conservatism bias and cognitive dissonances are a few of the psychological issues we experience that drive us off proper rational thinking and decision making, on and off the poker tables.
Confirmation bias is one that happens a lot in poker. One of the most obvious examples is when people call a bet from a recreational and lose.
Since the preconception of the individual is that recreational players underbluff (belief he acquired primarily through his environment – friends, media and references), every instance where they call and lose against them serves as confirmation of the initial bias of the preconception and thus the event gets a special place in our memory. On the other hand, hands where they called and won against that same player type are simply ignored and forgotten – they don’t confirm the bias. The next time they face a bet from a rec, they will easily recall the instances where they lost, but not the instances in which they won. The bias then progressively makes their behavior more and more passive.
An individual that engages in quantitative analysis wouldn’t fall victim to this psychological bias. The decision of bluffcatching on the river is merely mathematical – if you can expect to win more often than the pot odds you’re getting, you should call, as the call is profitable. Analysis of large data sets of hands can illuminate the situation by showing the facts – no influence of subjective experiences, just the numbers of actually how often such player profile bluffs.
Quantitative analysis is not just about using data from real hands, however. Any poker player can engage in quantitative analysis that will be beneficial to their decision making process at the tables.
One of the things I always recommend to my students is to build the habit of using the EV view in solvers, not just the strategy view.
Can you quickly estimate what’s the theoretical EV, in bb per hand, of a decision you made in a hand, like a flop cbet? Most people can’t. This is because we don’t have the habit of studying poker from a quantitative lens. EV is the most important metric in poker strategy – it’s literally how much money you make with your decisions – and yet most poker players have no idea of those figures. All they know is whether solver bets small or big.
My final tip for you in this post is: engage more often in quantitative analysis during your study. This can be as silly as browsing EV view on solver instead of strategy view, to more complex things like doing EV calculations on hand, and using excel to build mathematical models of your plays at the tables. You should more and more often concern yourself with the metrics and parameters of your strategy.
Instead of thinking “my blockers are bad”, actually do the math to see how many good hands you block and how many bad hands you block, with which then you can calculate whether your perceived fold equity with your bluff will be higher or lower than average. Instead of thinking “my hand is a pure check, so I’ll check”, try to estimate what’s the EV of checking, and then contemplate (and perhaps calculate) what would be the EV of betting instead, considering the application of a population exploit. Instead of saying “I should value bet this hand, because this guy is a fish”, which is a qualitative reasoning subject to cognitive biases, consider calculating what could be the EV of checking with the assumption that your opponent overbluffs. Then compare the two.
My hope is that these tips can help you become a better poker player. Remember that knowledge is the most important thing. More knowledge equals more money, it’s as simple as that. If you want to make more money in poker, then you should prioritize acquiring knowledge faster and more efficiently. And I firmly believe these tips will help.
I In the video below, I demonstrate how to use a quantitative method to arrive at the best possible play in a given hand. Check it out:
How To Turn A Pair Into A Bluff
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See you next week. Until then – keep it simple.
Saulo