How do you do your hand history reviews?
I am curious to get thoughts from you guys about how you going about reviewing HH in a structured fashion. I play both live and online, about 80% live.
What I have been doing to this point is just tagging hands (for online: previously in PT4 on stars, but now just GG replayer link, for live in PBT hand recoorder), then I paste the HH in onenote with a quick comment about what I want to review (eg. Is turn bet/size okay, does this villain have X combo).
Then when I have time I review them in batches once in a while with GTO Wizard (atleast for HU hands). I try not to get caught up in how my hand is played, but my overall strategy and then villains in GTO. But recently I am trying to incorporate more exploitative considerations and using node locking in my review, especially for my live poker hands, where I often have some kind of read.
However, I was finding that once I would review an hand and then just remove it from my marked hands list, what I learned about that spot is sorta just out the window shortly, and I am wondering if I should develop more structure to reviewing. I am thinking of maybe making a spreadsheet with every hand I review, and have columns to describe the spot type (SRP, 3B, MW, BB def, etc), Board texture, my question for review, what theory says, what exploitative says etc, that way I am able to take away more long term lessons from my reviews.
Thoughts? How do you go about doing reviews?
4 Replies
Note taking is pretty important if you're going to be doing any type of studying—for poker or otherwise. I think having more structure would help you retain the information better; it would be especially better if you also go back to the type of node that you've reviewed. Getting better is an iterative process. This type of process is generally going to follow the pattern of:
1. get data
2. review data
3. make changes
4. repeat
(1) is playing hands
(2) is review (pio/gtowiz etc)
(3) is identifying and then implementing whatever changes are necessary
You have (1) and (2) down I think, but writing down or structuring whatever changes you are making and then coming back to it later is important. This way you can identify if you've made the correct changes and possibly course correct or quantify the changes later.
A really basic example would be someone identifying they can open wider from the SB because their population is overfolding their BB to SB opens. They've identified this because they've gathered the data doing (1) and reviewed it via (2). Now they compare/contrast the values they have to the values they think they want. Let's say they were opening 40%, but they think they can open 60%. After they've identified what changes they want to make and to what extent and why they then implement the changes doing (3). After they play another X number hands they review this node again and repeat the process in the same way (1) (2) and then (3) again.
I find that more structure and nuance combined with notetaking and review at some point in the future is best for learning. I hope this helps. Best of luck!
Note taking is pretty important if you're going to be doing any type of studying—for poker or otherwise. I think having more structure would help you retain the information better; it would be especially better if you also go back to the type of node that you've reviewed. Getting better is an iterative process. This type of process is generally going to follow the pattern of:1.
This is really helpful, thank you for this reply.
One thing that I find challenging about the italicized paragraph is how to implement this WRT live poker. In online you have actual population data and can do MDA/DB analysis to see if changes are working. In live you can't actually get that deep into it. Ignoring chops in live, if you tried to see if the live poker pool is overfolding to BB opens in SB as your example says, and you focus on this for 100 hours, it is very possible that your sample size/villains beside you could be chronic overfolders in that sample, even though pool are chronic overcallers overall, which would lead you to implement bad chnages.
Also, WRT trying to implement exploits against pool/players in live poker, how can you test your exploits and see if you are correct in the direction you are trying to exploit if you can't get the data that you do in online poker.
I agree live would be much more difficult since you don't have the hard data. In those instances you could certainly still do some review in something like PIO, but more guess as to what the "data" is based on live reads. In conjunction with this or perhaps alternatively you could do more of your live hh review with other people, so that they may be able to also share their "data" or "reads" and discuss as in weaker environments like live I think more of your play should be significantly more exploitative. Hands also go multi-way way more so the utility of using a solver like PIO is also diminished. I think therefore it makes sense that more of your studying in this format would be better suited to a group discussion type format with other like-minded regs. I'd be curious to hear the thoughts of other live regs and what they do to study.
I agree live would be much more difficult since you don't have the hard data. In those instances you could certainly still do some review in something like PIO, but more guess as to what the "data" is based on live reads. In conjunction with this or perhaps alternatively you could do more of your live hh review with other people, so that they may be able to also share their "da
Yes I entirely agree with you here.
I have actually tried to seek out and make friendships with solid winning regs in my local room since I moved here.
However, It's tricky because a lot of people aren't looking for a poker study buddy, and the ones who are or would want to be one are mostly players who clearly less skilled than me.
I'm cautious of that because I got myself into a situation before I moved where I tried to be study buddies with a guy but ended up more like informally coaching him.
But yeah it's sort of tricky because even if I found a study buddy, they wouldn't necessarily want to share how they exploit other players.
One thing I have started is a simple notepad with notes about common players in my room, just things I think are interesting that could influence how I play against them. I'm not sure exactly how I should structure this or what things I should write, but my intention is to use it to allow me to develop profiles and exploit them.
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