My Poker Improvement Journal

I'm a few months into a new phase of playing poker. I've previously had a few runs over the years where I played online and live as my primary hobby, generally with modest success. My newest push is going to come with a serious effort to study. I studied hard before, but I'm starting already with a fairly solid base, hoping to go from somewhat good to good to great. I'm going to try to document my thoughts here as I go, because why not!? I invite people to comment and discuss and I will from time to time update with progress, reflections, and results.

I'm going to begin, in this post, with gathering a concise explanation for how I think and approach mastering hard subjects. I have formed and applied these ideas in other arenas, and am now going to apply them to poker. Specifically, my experience as a graduate student in mathematics contributed most to learning how to learn. I've also applied these ideas to chess, my other hobby, where I am a USCF class A player rated in the low 1800s. I use these ideas in my profession, software engineering and data analytics, where keeping up with technology changes puts a premium on continuous learning.

Learning is ultimately a psychological battle with yourself to be honest and fearless enough to identify and discard your faults. It requires tremendous humility, in my experience. I will try to approach my game with brutal honesty, combined with an optimistic faith that the journey is the destination.

I think there are 5 levels/states of learning. These apply at different scales, to individual techniques and to the whole:

• Novice: unconscious incompetence
  
• Enthusiast: conscious incompetence
  
• Practiced: conscious competence
  
• Fluency: unconscious competence
  
• Mastery: conscious expertise
  

Cutting across these levels of learning are various approaches to conscious improvement. Most activities we do will fall into one or more of these categories:

• Ideation: cataloging the ideas, concepts, and terminology of a field so you can discuss and think about it efficiently
  
• Review & Assessment: looking back at your performance and results with a critical eye to find, identify, and quantify improvement opportunities
  
• Deliberate Practice: repeatedly performing planned activities with the intention of gathering feedback to improve a specific associated skill
  
• Analytics: using data driven approaches to refine assessment and guide deliberate practice
  
• Experimentation: trying things to see what happens with an open mind
  

Ideation is what differentiates enthusiasts from novices, but it's necessary at all levels above. In poker, when we read blogs, watch videos, and interact with each other in discussions on 2p2 or discord, we are learning through ideation mostly. Having the right mental model and vocabulary is simply a requirement for success as a learner. In poker it's even more important than most settings, since as dnegs says "everything you do at the poker table conveys information". Confuse a set with trips or say "I put him on AK" and you've capped your range on poker knowledge.

Occasionally, someone actually posts a hand for discussion and then they are doing the second approach: review and assess, where peers, experts or tools can be used to reason "in situation X you did Y, but the alternative Z was preferable". It seems like a classic 2p2 pattern is someone moaning and groaning about losing due to bad luck and bad beats only to be counseled to post hands so they can actually learn. Learning requires a "no excuses" brutal realism. We must review and assess what we can control so we can improve it. Bitching about things we can't control wastes the most precious resource we have: time. I've been using poker snowie to review my sessions and quickly find mistakes and dubious plays I make across all the hands I play. Flopzilla and solvers are for the deep dives.

In most subjects, deliberate practice is the meat and potatoes of improvement. In some sense, I use online play as practice for live, where the stakes I play will be higher. That isn't entirely fair, because online play matters some to me, just not as much, at least at present. Practice is how competence is honed. I don't believe "practice makes perfect" but rather "practice makes permanent." There is a whole world out there for how to decide what to practice. I recall learning to get better at golf and being amazed at how refined their set of drills are. An expert trainer can make the translation from swing fault found on video review to a drill to solve it. We need more forms of deliberate practice in poker. The ones I see in poker are things like interactive quizzes, "play against the solution" vs a solver, or the kind of hand range quizzers that a few sites have. In poker, we think in terms of leaks. Play, find leaks, practice new behaviors until they are automatic, repeat. When you've done this a little you are practiced. When you've done it a lot, you become fluent.

Analytics, on the other hand, is an area where poker is highly advanced. Playing online and capturing the hands in pokertracker or holdem manager or equivalent is just amazing. I love geeking out on the stats in PT4 and finding and quantifying a leak with the right filter excites me because I know that's the first step towards making graph changing improvements. I recall many years ago (before black friday) working with a coach on my HU SNGs and combining hand history reviews with database work, making some changes like playing tighter OOP, barreling some more, and checking instead of betting marginal hands. Each of them saw my graph take an angle up. This is where deep improvement comes from. When you know what most of your leaks are and can help others hone in on theirs (even ones you never had) that's when mastery is at hand.

Experimentation doesn't necessarily get you from any level to the next, but it's how people come up with new ideas. What does the solver do if you offer it a 2X overbet in this spot. How do tournament players react if I raise 5X occasionally when I steal instead of the standard size? How do LAGs handle it if I take this weird line. These kinds of questions may not matter for honing best play in standard spots, but the thought process required to answer them is a critical component of mastery. Playing around with things, solving them with the tools you've learned through ideation and constantly looking for new exploits is the hallmark of poker greatness, I think.

Plan

With that as a backdrop, here's how I plan to improve at poker:

I'm going to try to balance play and study. Something in the 50-50 or 60-40 range seems about right for a while. Study will be a mix of ideation, review, analytics for now. I'll try to incorporate deliberate practice, but that has to be driven by what I'm trying to improve and the best way to practice it.

I will study content on a couple training sites I have and with books. I'll deep dive into them in follow up posts in this thread maybe. My primary focus right now is on 6max cash, but I'm also feeling the bug to get back into tournaments. I like some of the "How to Study Poker" content from Sky Matsuhashi and may use some of his techniques for feedback and review.

I'm reviewing my play most often with poker snowie. I just try to put all my hands in and have it highly every spot where it thinks I got something wrong. I nearly always agree with it, but the few places where I don't are often interesting too. I have a discord group where I post hands from time to time to discuss. When a hand that I or someone else played is particularly interesting, I'll break out flopzilla and sometimes my solver GTO+. At some point, I want to do my own systematic exploration of flop textures with GTO+.

I spend a good amount of time looking for my leaks in my database. At the moment, I seem to have some issues in 4bet pots generally. I have some issues when I've called a 3bet in position. I need to work on my ranges facing raises preflop. I need to improve my blind vs blind play. In all of these areas, I want to refine my exploitive adjustments, so that my approach is to start with GTO as best I can replicate it, but to deviate deliberatively by following planned changes from my exploitive bag of tricks when conditions are right.

I'd really like to expand my exploitive poker bag of tricks, too. This is an area where I'm searching for a way to do deliberate practice. I'm pretty good at identifying player types quickly when I play online with a HUD. It's harder but I do OK with this live, too. But I want more weapons in my arsenal, so that I can go from observing a non-GTO pattern repeating to putting a hook into my thought process where I say "but, this guy does X too much, so I'm not going to the standard play Y, but instead I will do Z".