What type of study routine have you found most effective?
Learning any new skill requires a certain amount of routine drilling and studying. While I think there is a lot of wisdom in the “just play more” recommendation, there is one big limitation with this—immediate feedback necessary for learning. For example, if you’re trying to learn a new physical skill—think golf or tennis—the feedback on every shot is immediate. However, as poker is a game of not only incomplete information but also variance, the feedback is either inconsistent or unreliable. For example, you play a certain line until the turn, pull off an over bet bluff, and win the pot. Was this the optimal line? Maybe you got lucky. Maybe you should have gone smaller or larger with your bet.
I’ll give an example of a type of studying that can be quite effective that does satisfy the idea of immediate feedback. Create flashcards (using a program like Anki) for preflop ranges, and consistently drill these until they are memorized. Considering all of the variations of preflop ranges available, this could easily be 20-30 different memorized ranges without getting too out of hand. The feedback is immediate and direct (you either were able to cite the range or not), and you continue until these ranges are memorized. Implementing this into your play then becomes automatic.
One thing that I’ve found very helpful after reading the Play Optimal Poker 1 and 2 books is going through them as a second pass and attempting to answer all the questions again and writing down anything I missed. In this way I can hopefully drill all of the concepts and heuristics talked about in these books.
Following this, though, I’m not sure where to proceed.
Consider a skill like putting opponents on ranges. How can somebody reliably get better at this skill? Is there a way to drill this (akin to doing flashcards where there is immediate feedback) to very quickly and reliably be able to mentally put somebody on a range, follow that range through the turn and river, while updating and narrowing the range based on actions?
Long post, but I hope its able to generate some discussion. We all want to get better, and becoming as efficient as we can with improving the core skills that matter seem to me to be the best path forward. While playing more is always good, I think learning can be accelerated dramatically by being extremely efficient with how we use our time dedicated to getting better at poker.
4 Replies
It's good that you feel comfortable with your pre-flop play after all of all this drilling...
...but you sound similar to a chess newbie, many of whom memorize their openings 15 moves out and then have no clue what to do when they reach these middle game positions.
It sounds like it's time to move onto post-flop play, for which there are no simple charts to memorize. Reading strategy posts, creating strategy posts, watching videos, reading strategy books, paying for a subscription to a teaching site, etc., are all on the table now as potential resources.
It's good that you feel comfortable with your pre-flop play after all of all this drilling...
...but you sound similar to a chess newbie, many of whom memorize their openings 15 moves out and then have no clue what to do when they reach these middle game positions.
It sounds like it's time to move onto post-flop play, for which there are no simple charts to memorize. Reading strategy posts, creating strategy posts, watching videos, reading strategy books, paying for a subscription to a teaching s
I think you misunderstood my question. I've read Play Optimal Poker (1 and 2), continue to reference Modern Poker Theory, and watch a lot of strategy videos on youtube for postflop play.
My question revolved more around a systematized way of drilling and learning. For example, is there a way people have found effective to put opponents on ranges that extends beyond just trying to think through what people have while sitting at the table. Even chess players have puzzles and drills they do to improve. Getting a bunch of random chess players opinions on what to do during move 26 of a specific game can sort of kind of be helpful for that situation, but its not how any serious player gets better.
I assume you could create archetypal ranges for classes of opponents based on your player population, such as:
OMC
Calling Station
Splashy LAG
Good LAG
GTO-TAG
TAGfish (plays like it's 2003)
Nit
Manic
etc.
But that sounds like a whole lotta work, because then you need to know their continuing ranges and how their ranges interact with the board cards.
Good luck to you.
P.S. Poker is a lot more difficult than chess to drill, because we're dealing with incomplete information.
There are absolutely ways to drill in poker. In GTO Wizard there is a module called range builder it is most useful for preflop studying where you can take basically any preflop spot and you input the ranges for raise, fold, call, and the corresponding frequencies. Then you get instant feedback on what you did wrong, and whether it was a true mistake like pure folding a hand that sometimes continues or just an inaccuracy like a small frequency difference. This is the best way to drill preflop imo.
For training postflop you can use the trainer feature in gto wizard to basically play postflop spots vs a gto bot, and you can get instant feedback for how close you played to GTO.
