COTM: Off Table Analysis
09-02-2015
, 01:43 AM
COTM: Off Table Analysis
By MpethyBridge and Spikeraw22
Intro (Spike)
All of the posters that I have ever held in high regard have had something in common. It was obvious that they had put in far more work off the table than anyone else. It was evident in how precise their responses were to threads. They were confident in their math and their ranges in all situations. Conversely, most players level off and stop improving early on. Why? Because their work away from the felt has not given them the tools needed to perform better at the table.
Goals
We will outline a proper approach here so that those with the will can see maximum return for their time investment in studying. We will touch on short term session and hand review as well as a long term strategy for database development and analysis. We’ll finish with an example hand history analysis. Grab some coffee and smokes. This is going to take a while.
General Exhortation
Do it
Most players say they study away from the table. Most are lying. For many of those who actually do, their method is so flawed that they don’t actually gain much from all that work. In some cases, they might actually be stunting their growth. In my opinion, the number one reason players don’t improve is laziness. There comes a point where they need to put in work off the table to improve. It’s often tedious and not very fun. So they don’t. I’m here to tell you that step one is to get off your ass and DO IT. If you want to break your ceiling, you have to do the work to get better.
It gets harder
Like any pursuit it’s a rule of diminishing returns. The better you get, the more you have to work to get better with less dramatic results. A whale can become a fish with relatively little effort. A fish can become a decent player with more improvements, but they take more discipline and time. After that, it gets a lot tougher.
When to Study
Wait for It
Although this will vary for everyone, it is almost universally true for all players that immediate analysis after a session is less helpful if not completely worthless. There have been times in my career that it took weeks for my bias to fall away so that I could truly look at a hand objectively. The time for in depth hand review is later. It could be the next day, later in the week, or however long it takes for the emotion to fade.
What to Study
There’s Lots
Obviously, you want to analyze hands, but we’ll deal with that later. There are a lot of other factors to consider when analyzing your play. This is not an exhaustive list but it’s some of the things that I try to look at when looking back at my play.
• Game selection- Did I pick the best game? Did I actively look for better games? Would I have been better passing on playing?
• Seat selection- Was I in a good seat? Why was it good or bad? Were there better spots at the table that I passed up?
• How did I do in big pots? Did I make any big mistakes? Did I make any mistakes more than once? Did I struggle with a certain player?
• Emotional State- I rate my mindset before, during, and after playing. How prepared was I? How focused was I during the session, and was I able to turn it off after it was over?
• Time/Length- When did I play and how did that correlate to my overall results. How long did I play? Did I quit too soon? More likely, did I quit too late?
List your Strengths and Weaknesses
Ways I Suck
It’s amazing to me how many people never do this. It’s hard to get better if you never identify what you need to improve. Actually write out a list. I have a working top five things that I suck at. Intentionally identifying areas of weakness triggers your brain in the moment. You will start to recognize when you are about to fall into the same pattern at the table before it happens.
Limit your Field of Study
Overload
One of my best friends got really into poker for about 6 months. He started from scratch. He read something like 20 poker books in 2 months. I took him under my wing, but by the time I got to him his head was so full of stuff that he couldn’t even think straight. While he was still learning to calculate pot odds, he was trying to apply SPR, ranging, bet sizing, position, deception, and God knows what else he pulled from those books. It ruined him (along with getting QQ cracked a few times during his first few sessions). He doesn’t have much interest in it now. The moral of the story is to pick just a few things and work on them. It takes time to fully grasp how to implement something new. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. You’ll have time to work on it all. Also, don’t get QQ cracked with your lunch money.
Recording Hands
Be Thorough
I stated earlier that you should not review hands immediately following your session. However, you should record them immediately. Here’s how I (Spike) do it. I don’t really like using the notepad feature on my phone. It takes too long and everyone sees me typing furiously on my phone and I miss a lot of action. Instead, I step away from the table as soon as I can and use the voice recorder. I record everything I possibly can from reads to stacks, to action on every street. I try to be as accurate and detailed as possible. I’ve found that it really helps to state the exact bet sizes on each street. That way I can extrapolate the pot size for each street as well as exact stack sizes pre flop. Accurate recording is vital. It is shocking how far off some of my recollections have been compared to my voice records. This will help you post more helpful hand histories on the forums. Mpethy will discuss his method later on.
A Year of Poker Homework (mpethy)
In thinking about the subject of this COTM, studying at home, there seemed to be only one logical approach: to develop an actual study guide that readers could follow more or less directly to help improve their game. Unfortunately, playing live imposes some limitations on our data collection efforts and results that slow the pace of analysis.
On the positive side, we have one major advantage over online players who are using database software to collect their hand histories: we know our intentions in a hand, and Hold 'Em Manager and Poker Tracker do not. This allows us to track our hands by the type of play we're making; if we want to study “c-bets with air” or “or “floats” we can create a category for that, rather than jury-rigging tracking software hand history filtering queries to approximate our intentions. This is a huge advantage, and if you're serious about systematically analyzing your game, we need to take full advantage of it after dealing with the basic leaks.
What follows is very similar to the database analysis I performed for over a thousand customers who played online. It varies mainly in the precision of the conclusions you'll be able to draw because you'll be generalizing from much smaller samples than I did with online grinders. The idea is fundamentally exactly the same as my database analysis: we will have you systematically collect information about your game (build a database), then analyze it to find and plug leaks. Actually, database construction and analysis will proceed simultaneously.
Note: If you're not willing to spend the next year of your poker life recording a few hand histories per night at the casino, you may as well stop after reading the following word on poker books.
Passive Homework:
Reading Poker books:
I haven't read a new poker book since about 2011, when I read “Building a Bankroll.” So I don't know what is currently out there. But, to me, a lot of the money I spent buying poker books was wasted. There are only two poker books that I consider absolutely essential to read: The Psychology of Poker, by Alan Schoonamaker, and No Limit Hold 'Em, Theory and Practice, by David Sklansky and Ed Miller. If you internalize much of these two books, you will have the skills necessary to beat LLNSL. Period. End of story. A useful third book is Professional No Limit Hold 'Em, by Ed Miller, simply because stack to pot ratio is such a completely useful concept for thinking about post flop play. But you could certainly live without it.
Read Poker books actively. Don't just sit and read them. Take notes, either on a separate pad or in the margins of the book. Engage with the material. Try to relate what you're reading to hands you have actually played.
Use concepts from poker books as a to-do list of things to do at the poker table immediately before a session. Part Two of No Limit Hold 'Em, Theory and Practice, the “Concepts and Weapons” section, is particularly useful in this regard, because it is short blurbs about discrete subjects that you can more or less memorize.
Here's an example of how I use Concepts and Weapons. At page 247, concept 5 is “when you first sit down, evaluate your game and decide whether your profits should come from big pots or small pots.” In a notebook, I have compiled this and other of the concepts and weapons that I think I most need to be reminded of, and often, before a session, I will go through my notebook and pick out a concept I haven't worked on for a while, or another, like this one, that I think is a leak. And I will tell myself that “tonight, I am going to implement this concept. Not only am I going to evaluate the table for this question, but I will evaluate each player at the table. My goal for the night is to table change any time I have evaluated the majority of the players at the table as “small pots” unless I wind up with the God seat on a deep stacked “big pot” player.
(Note added during editing: The night I wrote that, I went to the casino, sat at a table, and noted that there were 3 small pot players, 5 big pot players, and that I needed to seat change to get the God seat on the deepest stacked big pot player. I eventually got that seat, and the game went completely according to plan except the 2 outer that the deepest stacked fish spiked to turn my win into a loss. Using this stuff actively really works.)
I normally rotate through the concepts and weapons, focusing on 2 or 3 per session, or maybe 2 or 3 for a week of sessions. I'm fairly casual about it by now, but I have been doing this for 4 years now.
Reread Select Poker Books:
As I said, I haven't read a new poker book for years. But I have reread No Limit Hold 'Em a bunch of times. I have actually made a ritual of it. Every January 1, I go up to my library, and I pull No Limit Hold Em (I also reread Guns Germs and Steel [the most important book ever written, imnsho, but non-poker]) and I spend January going through NLTAP actively, normally adding a concept or two to my concepts notebook.
Reviewing Hand Histories:
Most of us do this already, but we do it far too passively. We'll load the hand into a replayer and watch it, and maybe think, “yep, that was good,” or “damn, should have gone $40 on the turn instead of $30,” or we will post a vaguely recalled hand here in LLSNL and ask others what they think.
The problem is that there's no organization to this material, and you're learning lessons in a completely haphazard fashion. When you think “damn, I should have gone $40 on the turn,” you don't really have a mental filing cabinet into which that conclusion will go. So you wind up with the mental equivalent of a cubicle covered in post-it notes and piles of interoffice memos.
No more. Part of our plan is going to be to give you a filing system for organizing your lessons.
Active Poker Study:
Data Collection:
There simply is no getting around the fact that if you are going to study your game, you are going to have to record hand histories honestly, carefully and fully. You can't record every hand, so we're going to organize and systematize your hand history note taking so that it is at all times purposeful and goal-oriented toward identifying and plugging specific leaks. If you're not willing to record up to 8 or 10 hand histories a night, and keep two or three different notepad files on your phone (as an example), then you're simply not really interested in doing poker homework, and this article is not for you.
We're going to organize your hand history collection around potential leaks. There are as many potential leaks as there are potential situations, so we are going to start with the big leaks. You're just going to have to trust me on this: The list below is a list of common leaks, pretty much in order of their importance to the average solid winning regular's win rate in live play.
1. Misplaying AA and KK. Your ego may want to refuse to admit it, but about half of all money you win at a poker table comes from playing AA and KK. You'll never come close to maximizing your WR unless you are playing these hands optimally, by winning the max and losing the minimum.
2. Misplaying other premium hands. QQ, JJ, AK and AQ, although if you added TT, AJs and KQs, that'd be fine, too, Your win rate with these hands will be substantially lower than your win rate with AA and KK, and they all cluster together in a pretty tight range. So they can be studied as a group, or individually. The merit of treating them as a group is you get a bigger sample size faster, the down side is that you lose the precision of studying them individually. I compromise, and I organize these hands as a group in any given month, with the knowledge that, eventually, I will have a big enough sample to break them out and study them individually.
3. Blind defense. This is the biggest PITA, but it is by far the biggest leak that most good, solid winning players still have. But, to do this right, you have to record every hand you get dealt from the blinds, not just the ones where you volunteer to put money in the pot. But this is where you learn the most about your game, and, I promise you, improving your blind play is the single most important thing you can do to improve your win rate if you already consider yourself an advanced player.
4. Cold calling. It used to crush the souls of a lot of the good online players that I was working with to find that their cold calling range had huge unprofitable chunks. They prided themselves on their ability to play in position, and then, bam, they'd see proof that they were losing money calling in position with suited connectors. We will actually break this down into three sections for doing our data collection—broadway hands, suited connectors and pocket pairs.
5. Isolation plays. If this were a list of online leaks, I would actually have button stealing in this position, but, in live play, you get way more opportunities to isolate limpers than you do to attempt a steal, so I have reversed their positions.
6. Button stealing. This is probably a minor leak, simply because there are so few opportunities to attempt a steal. I have this planned as my October data collection, and I'm planning to record all raises from the button and the cutoff, but if you want to record just the button, that should be fine.
7. Three Betting. Online, this potential leak is much higher on our list of leaks, but three betting is so much less a part of live play that I moved it down.
8. >30bb pots. Any pot you play where you put 30bb or more in is worthy of a second look. Once you start recording these hands, you should never stop. Our recurring daily homework assignment will be to actively review every 30bb pot we play. However, we will drop it from our study plan in the second half of the year in favor of looking at small hands that, individually are so trivial, that they wind up escaping notice:
9. <30bb pots. This will be a substantial hassle, but should pay dividends. Here, we'll be looking for classical leaks—the steady drip, drip of a mistake that might only be costing us a fraction of a BB, but because it recurs often, winds up costing us a decent amount of money.
Data to collect:
A complete hand history, as if you were going to post it here. So a recent note I took for my cold calling category was: “$450 eff, bad aggro goes $15 UTG WYSIWYG BST (“what you see is what you get bet sizing tell'), 2 mp callers, OTB TT, call, BB calls. Flop T22ss, BB ships $100, UTG calls, mp fold x 2, I ship $435, UTG tank/calls AA, MHIG, +590.”
At home, I recreate this hand history in an online hand replayer where it is permanently stored. I embed a link to the hand history in my spreadsheet of hand histories. Here's a link to a hand I actually recorded on the site; up at the top of the linked page is a “Convert Hand” tab that takes you to the main page of the site, which walks you through the process of converting a hand.
http://www.pokerhandreplays.com/view.php/id/6554177
I don't create a hand history for every hand I play. If the hand is super standard, I don't bother with a hand history, and I just fill in the rest of the spreadsheet (discussed below). An example would be where my title is: “CO w/22, whiffed setmine.” And over in the win/loss column, I'd note that it was -$8 or whatever.
Creating a Spreadsheet for hand histories:
You can also do this with a text file, but I find that it is more engaging to use a replayer, so I can watch the hand, pause the action to discuss with my coach and whatnot.
So just create a spreadsheet and create a page for the spreadsheet for each of the potential leak categories I listed above. Load the hand into an online replayer or fully describe the hand, and enter it on the spreadsheet on the appropriate page. Note that some hands will belong on more than one page; if you make an apparent iso raise with KK and play a greater than 30bb pot, that HH should go on three different pages of the spreadsheet—iso plays, KK, and >30bb.
If you're going to use a text file, which I think I'd be sorely tempted to do if I knew how to upload my note files from my phone to my home computer, as you upload the notes, convert them to more comprehensible formal hand history descriptions. Don't try to work directly from the unedited notes, because, among other things, I find significant errors in about half of my notes that I take at the casino. The process of editing them promptly after the session (for me it's the next day) catches these errors. In addition, the process of thinking through the hand as you type it out more fully is a pretty effective hand history review in itself.
In making your spreadsheet, you should have the following column headings: Date, link to hand history, Title of Hand (such as “T8s HJ open gets 3!”), Range (use this to say whether he was at the top, middle, bottom or out of the range you had him on), $won/lost, equity adjusted $win/loss, pros, and cons. Those last three column headings deserve some discussion.
Equity adjusted win/loss:
Here we are accounting for variance in our results to adjust for suck outs. If you get all in with cards to come, the results of the hand won't necessarily reflect whether it was played profitably or unprofitably. So here's where we take this into account, so we don't draw false conclusions based on the actual results of the hand. More later.
Pros and Cons.
Poker players are in the terrible habit of assuming that they mainly learn from their mistakes. Nonsense. Here I have a column for the good things I did in the hand as well as the mistakes I made. Just a phrase that defines what I (or my coach or 2+2) thinks was good or bad about the hand. So the same hand might say in the pro column “2+2 says sweet turn sizing” and the con column “c/f, fish never bluffing here.” A lot of the hands I record are standard, and I don't say anything other than “NH.”
Among other things, specifying your good play and your bad play in this way allows you to go through your DB looking for the frequency where your con is “c/f” to highlight the fact that you might be a bit of a station on the river. Learning to reinforce your successes, though, is almost as important as learning from your mistakes.
Data Analysis:
Now that we have our data collected and organized, we can begin looking at it and drawing conclusions. The first thing to look at is your sample size, which will be laughably small by the standards online players are used to. But we're not going to try to force the data to spit out mathematically precise equity adjusted win rates. We're going to draw general conclusions from the data. Whereas an online database can tell us our true win rate with a high degree of accuracy and confidence, our live play database is going to have to be very carefully interpreted with the idea that our conclusions will, at best, probably be reasonably accurate.
What we're going to do is look for trends in the data. After a month of full time play collecting cold call data, for example, you'll have maybe 70-100 hands where you cold called with a pocket pair.
So, here are some questions I would ask:
1. What were my results? How much money did I actually win or lose in that month by cold calling? This is my “achieved winrate.”
2. Does my achieved win rate seem to have been unduly affected by variance, either good or bad? One thing to check is whether you flopped sets near expectation. So, if you have 100 cold calls with pocket pairs, you should have flopped 12 sets. If you have 14 you ran good, if you have 10 you ran bad.
3. What was my win rate with sets? Pull out your sets, tally the total winnings, and divide by the number of sets. Does it seem high? Low? Is it at least 8.5 times the size of the average preflop raise you called? If not, you have identified a potential leak. Review all of your sets and ask yourself whether you could have won more on the hand with a different line. Post the hand in LLSNL and ask people about how they would have played.
4. Factor in suck outs. If you lost a giant pot with a set to a rivered flush, you can adjust that -$200 loss based on your equity. A rough and ready EV calculation is “I lost a $200 pot when I had 84% equity when the money went in; so it's not actually a $200 loss, it was actually a $168 win.” Same thing if you're the one who sucked out; if you got a set in against a flush on the turn and then boated OTR, you can change that to a loss. If you have one of each, then you don't really need to make an adjustment, you'd already be in the neighborhood of your equity. And we're not ever going to have information precise enough for some BBs here and there to make a difference; close enough is plenty good enough for our purposes. For that reason, an only somewhat inferior alternative to recording your equity is, when you're doing your win rate analysis, to just exclude the odd hand that wildly swung your results based on luck. We're not aiming for precision here, just trying to get a sense from limited data, after all. But I favor recording equity; more information is generally better than less.
5. Look at your win rate when you don't flop a set. (It's probably negative). If it's more negative than the average preflop investment, that would mean that you're losing money post flop. If you're losing less than the average preflop call, that means you're winning a bit postflop. Either way, review these hands. Now you're looking to answer very specific questions: which of these hands that I played post flop and lost could I have lost less with? That flop bluff raise with 44 against the nitty UTG raiser on the KJ6r board was kinda dumb, wasn't it?” Or: “look, this turn float against that dumb lag made me $x; I should look through the hands where I just folded the flop and see whether I missed any good floating opportunities.”
6. Break the hands out by positional groups—blinds, EP, MP and LP. Look for patterns. Your win rate should go down as you approach the blinds. If it doesn't, no big deal, because we're dealing with a tiny sample that will be highly affected by variance. But we'll draw some tentative conclusions: for example, if your WR with pocket pairs calling in MP is negative, and we didn't lose to a big suck out or a standard cooler, that's going to raise a red flag. Then, later, if we see we're also losing with broadway hands when we cold call in MP, we'll start thinking we've maybe found a leak, that we're having a hard time showing a profit in this awkward situation, and we'll have something to work on, by either changing our preflop play and dropping the worst hands from our calling range, or by working on taking different post flop lines to improve our results. Post hands here in LLSNL that look like they might be the root of the problem.
OK, so you see what we are doing here. We're collecting data, and then we're looking for patterns in the data that might disclose leaks, hands and or situations that we are consistently misplaying.
We'll take this form of analysis and apply it to all of the data collection that we're going to do throughout the year.
The Curriculum:
There's no time like the present, so we are going to start today. What follows is going to be a year's worth of studying your game, tailored to people who think they are struggling in their game. If you're already doing well in your game, you can start now with November or December.
Daily assignments:
Before each session, write in a notebook, (not on your computer) a concept or idea, in one sentence, from the poker book, that you think you need to work on. Try to apply the concept at the table during that session. As you fill your notebook, instead of writing a new concept in it, select one or two from the notebook and try to apply them during the session. While driving to the casino, think about the concept and talk to yourself about how to apply it. Develop a plan. Drive carefully!
During each session, record the hands you play with AA, KK, and any hand you play where you put more than 30bb in the pot.
After the session, update your spreadsheet or hand history files.
Weekly Assignments:
Review every hand history from the previous week. Post at least one hand here in LLSNL which you have identified as the toughest spot you were in during the prior week. Make notes next to each hand. State specifically whether the villain was at the top of the range you assigned, the middle, the bottom, or out of it, if known.
End of month assignment:
Perform a detailed win rate analysis along the lines of the one that I described for cold calling. If you like, you can post a summary of the data you collected ITT and I will help you with the analysis. It is very important that you write down specific recommendations about how you are going to change your play going forward.
You'll be following this template for each topic you're covering through the year.
Schedule of Leaks to Examine
September: AA/KK and >30bb Pots
October: QQ, JJ, AK and AQ and >30bb Pots
November: Blind Defense and >30bb Pots
December: Cold calling—split into: broadways, suited connectors and pocket pairs.
January: Isolation plays and >30bb Pots.
February: Button Stealing and 3 betting
March: Button Stealing and 3 betting (we're increasing our sample size by repeating and reinforcing lessons)
April: Isolation Plays and <30bb pots
May: Cold Calling: split into broadway, suited connectors and pocket pairs.
June: Blind defense and <30bb pots
July: QQ, JJ, AK and AQ and <30bb pots
August: AA and KK and <30bb pots.
When you're into the second half of the year, repeating the first six months of leak detection, your monthly analysis at the end of the month should be in two steps: step one is to repeat what you did in the first half of the year, and step two is to combine your results from the first half of the year with the second half of the year and analyze the total sample, which, being twice as large now, will be somewhat more reliable.
Alternate Curriculum for Low Volume Players
It occurred to me after I drafted the first lesson plan that it really only works well for people putting in 100 hours or more a month, and that most readers probably don't. So here's an alternate plan for the year for low volume players:
September-end of January:
Record all hands you play in categories:
1. AQ-AA
2. 2. All >30bb pots
3. Cold calls
4. Isolation plays
You'll do the same tasks as outlined above daily, weekly and monthly, but you'll give less credit to the conclusions you draw until you have a decent sample of 150 hours or so.
February-End of August:
Record all hands you play in categories:
1. Blind defense
2. Button Stealing
3. <30bb pots
4. 3 Betting
Conclusion:
Feel free to use this thread as a central location for asking me questions about the monthly data analysis as well as discussing it among yourselves. In the online poker forums, we had threads that were called “stats and graphs analysis thread” that were very popular and effective tools for leak detection. If there's enough interest in following this leak detection program, this thread can become a live poker analog to that type of thread.
For those of you who consider yourselves advanced players, there are a TON of other situations that you can collect data on and systematically analyze if you think you have a good handle on these rather basic situations. If you want suggestions on alternate situations to analyze, post ITT and I'll give some recommendations based on where most people usually leak.
Important Note about Laziness:
As we were passing drafts back and forth, Spikeraw22 said to me that he thinks 99% of readers won't follow this lesson plan. (Sorry for diming you there, bro). He may be right. But here is why he should be wrong: If you're even halfway serious about poker, you're already recording at least some hand histories. All this system really does is maybe double the recording burden for somebody that already records 4 or 5 hands per session, and then organizes the data into a form that can be systematically analyzed. It's not nearly as daunting to do as it looks like it may be. If you're not already recording 4 or 5 hands per session, well, you haven't been serious about improving your game at all. If you're in this thread looking to change that, that's great; here's how you change that. If you're not in this thread looking to change that, congratulations on wasting 20 minutes of your life.
Spikeraw22 continues:
To Mpethy-
I’d add Elwood’s Reading Live Poker Tells as a great but unnecessary addition to this list. You should at least know the basics there, although you don’t NEED it to be a winner.
I really thought we had a connection.
Now back to the task at hand.
Be Honest
It’s in the 10 Commandments
The best thing you can do for yourself is to be brutally honest. You do yourself no good by fudging the details during your analysis. If you called a raise from an UTG nit and proceed to assign a range of 77+, 78s+, and all broadways post hoc in order to make your play look good on paper, then you’re not really performing an analysis. You’re performing a retrospective justification. That’s why it’s important not to review hands when you still have emotion invested in the outcome. I’ve gone on downswings that I chalked up to variance. Months later I looked back only to realize that at least half of my losses were due to bad play. So, I guess my point would be not to review a hand once early and then never again. Go back and look again at a later date and see if you come to the same conclusions.
(mpethy adds): Brutal honesty with yourself is a difficult, but necessary discipline. You need to be honest while reviewing individual hand histories as well as when doing the leak detection analysis I described above. If you have 18 cold calls in middle position with broadway hands, six with suited connectors and 10 with pocket pairs, and the net result is that you're down -1.5bb/hand, don't cop out and say “meh, it could just be variance in a small sample” when, in fact, that is pretty much the exact result I would predict from all of those cold calls. If a negative number makes sense, you have to treat it as a presumptive leak; that's the whole point of this exercise.
Be Disciplined
Not a Commandment but it Should Be
Keep at it. You won’t become world class overnight, but you will see results. You’ll only see results proportional to the amount of quality work you do though. So, don’t give up because it’s too hard or not fun. Don’t stop working once you start to turn some corners. Build good habits and continue them. Once you know what to do, do it and don’t stop.
If you have any techniques, tips, or subjects of study to add please post them.
(mpethy adds): If the whole program we've outlined looks like way too much work for you, then start small. Just recording all of your AA and KK hands will be, at most, recording two hands per session, and at the end of a given period, you'll still be able to conduct a systematic analysis to determine how to improve your win rate. It's sub-optimal to do so, but you can pick and choose from the course above to create a workload to which you can stick with discipline.
Hand Analysis
(Spike): I drew this HH from my personal archive so that we can give an example of just how to do a self eval.
My voice note:
“I Btn straddle. Ed calls UTG with $220. Fez calls in MP with $245. Shredder calls in CO with $320ish. I cover and check 5
4
Flop is A
92
. Ed quickly bets $15. Fez folds. Shredder quickly calls. I call.
Turn is 3. Ed checks. Shredder thinks and bets $25. I raise to $80. Shredder thinks for a minute and calls.
River is 8. Shredder checks. I bet $75. Shredder goes all in for $142 more. I call and I’m good.”
This took 1-2 minutes tops to record. Later I went back and figured Shredder’s exact stack size and exact pot sizes. Normally I would include relevant reads, but I knew all of these players quite well already.
Ed is an OMC who can get a little sticky but usually folds to continued aggression. He avoids me mostly.
Fez is a whale.
Shredder is a halfway decent player except that he constantly bluffs when sensing weakness. Especially rivers. I’ve caught him bluffing many times in the past year often with bluff shoves.
(mpethy): Hand analysis: What I am doing here is going back and forth between the hand history and my notes. My comments on each street will be written before I read the action of the next street. Basically, I'm grunching every street.
Preflop
(Mpethy) Button straddle is gross, but whatever. Checking is fine. We're preliminarily (spike adds, “Is that a word?”) going to put Ed on a range of the usual limping reasonable stuff, plus stuff he is too scared to put in a big raise with in a straddle pot. So the top of his range is probably AQ, and the bottom of his range is probably high suited connectors and S1Gs, such as 97s. Pocket pairs, obviously, and probably a few suited Qs and Ks. Fez likes pie, so that's his range. Shredder is going to have a lot of Axs, SCs, small pockets. Nothing he could be aggressive with in a straddle pot and feel good about. So his range is 22-77, SCs and Ax, mainly, by far the most reasonable of the three ranges. Excluding premiums above TT from both ranges, though JJ possible for Ed.
(Spike): The first thing I’m doing here is setting up preflop ranges. There’s a subtle consideration here. I can assign the ranges that I (hopefully) had in game. I can also assign ranges after the fact if I think my range was way off in the moment. That is to say, I should analyze the hand using what I knew and considered at the time, but I can also go through afterward and consider how well I did at the time and what a better range might have been. I just have to make sure that I don’t meld the two and convince myself that I was using the well thought out range when I was really pulling something out of thin air during the hand. In time, these two ranges should start to look a lot alike. Honesty is obviously key.
Also note, I’m actually trying to range them. This is probably something that a lot of readers still need to work on. Ranging starts the minute someone puts chips in the middle.
Ed- Anything that looks pretty, but not so much that he can raise, although I might leave a small window open for a failed l/rr. If this is the case, I’ll find out at some point. Looking at Mpethy’s range, I’d say it’s pretty close except I’d maybe add some AK because old men do that sometimes.
Fez- I’ve heard peach pie is his favorite.
Shredder: I like Mpethy’s range here as well.
Checking seems like the only play.
Flop:A92
(Mpethy) The flop action fits these ranges perfectly. We expect an OMC to have a lot of aces when he limps into a straddle pot, and he leads into the field, repping an ace plus. Fez has too much trash to normally hit an ace high flop and whiffs and folds. Shredder could easily also be on an ace, too. Both, of course, have flopped sets in their range. Shredder could be calling just to put a play on Ed if Ed has a crappy kicker and checks the turn, though, so let's give him some second pair hands like K9s and J9s. The board is dry, so nobody is chasing a draw, which means they both have SDV.
Our play: When you're contemplating a call with a gut shot, you should generally be able to articulate a reason you can win a stack, or close to it. We're about 10:1 to hit the next card, and our IO usually disappears on the turn. So you need someone to be pretty strong. Here, that's possible. The rationale is that Ed could hit a really strong two pair, and, if they're both on an ace, it doubles the chance that one of them will hit two pair by the river. The compounding effect of a multi-way pot means that river bets are going to be big on the river, anyway, so there is a decent chance we could win a big pot.
(Spike): For this call to work, I HAVE to stack someone most of the time when I hit. So, the first thing I’ll review is stack sizes. Does the play make sense in regards to how much I could win, and who is the most likely culprit? Ed has something he’s at least somewhat happy with since he led out, and he has a little over 100BB. He needs to have a good hand or one that has a good chance to improve if I’m to stack him. Shredder is a prime candidate due to his spazziness. He has a juicy 160BB.
At 10:1 and 260BB in combined V’s money in play plus position and a really disguised hand, I think I can justify this call.
Next I try to fit their ranges with their actions. I think Mpethy actually did a nice job here, so I’ll just keep it moving. One quick note; Shredder is not on air, but he can have more 9x than you’d think.
Finally, I’ll consider other actions that I hadn’t even considered. In this case, raising. I think it would be pretty dumb here. Ed has a real chance of holding a monster, and Shredder is just too unpredictable. Best case, I fold them both out, but I think that’s wasting a shot at binking a hand that has a good chance of getting paid.
Turn:3
(Mpethy) Of course spikeraw binks here, because what fun is the hand if we just quietly fold the Js OTT?
Ed is on the range we think, and folds his one pair. Shredder is more interesting. I'm capping his value range at exactly a set of deuces. I think a set of 99 just shoves when we raise. It's barely possible that 22 is sufficiently scared of the combined possibilities of us having 99 and us having spiked a gutter that he cops out and calls. But 99 I think shoves, if it's even in shredder's range, which I doubt (I think he raises it pre, so I don't actually have it in his range here). Obviously, his most likely value hand here is A9, since he can't have top pair with the flush draw to the hearts. I'm going to take almost all air out of his range. I don't think he bet/calls air just in the hopes of putting a play on a hand that we are repping as near nutted. So second pair with a flush draw now 4 or 5 possible combinations in his range.
Our play: Our sizing is ok. I would have gone more for two reasons: If he will limp A9o, then he has more combos of A9 and 22 that will call almost any raise we put in here, than he has combos of pair and a flush draw that we might think we need to tempt with a slightly lower price. So I'd tend to err on the bigger side here. Realistically, I'd have probably gone either $95 or $105 here by cutting out a stack of reds, and then ostentatiously taking one off or putting one on depending on how I thought Shredder would read it. I'd probably take one off for him. So $95. Shredder should have us on the same range we have him on, more or less.
(Spike): I don’t always chase gut shots, but when I do, I spike them. I agree again with Mpethy’s ranges.
Sizing: This is my main consideration. When Ed checks, I’m pretty much giving up on him, so now I’m trying to figure out how to get Shredder all in. It’s funny that Mpethy mentions putting out a stack of $100 and pulling one off. That’s exactly what I did except I pulled three off one at a time. Shredder’s leak is going bananas when shown weakness. This action along with a smaller bet size and more perceived FE with more behind was my main reason for this sizing. I was hoping he’d shove right there, but wanted to give him more room on the river to do his thing. Otherwise, agreed.
River: 8
(Mpethy) Shredder's check indicates that he has show down value, but less than the nuts. If he had the flush, I'm pretty sure he'd jam into us to prevent us checking back on this card which is scarier to most players than it should be (although he does have a few combos of flushes in his range before he checks). A good player might check/shove a flush or a bluff here, but I expect every decent player ever to shove for value with a flush here. So we're usually good when shredder checks.
Our play: that being the case, our bet is reasonable, provided we're never folding to a shove. The reason is because we know shredder can shove on a bluff. So by betting $75, Shredder has to answer this question: are we betting $75 because we're afraid of the flush, or because we think he is? If he guesses wrong, and thinks our bet is scared, he could shove his whole range as a bluff. If he guesses right, he still has to call with the top of his range because his range and our range are basically the same here (except we probably never have the flush). Alternatively, if we bet $75 specifically to induce a bluff from shredder, I think that's fine, too.
Prior to the river, the pot is basically $225, and shredder has about $217 behind. Had we gone $95 on the turn, the river pot would be $255-ish, and shredder would have $200, and a shove here would have been less than a PSB, rather than a PSB. This reinforces the argument for a bigger turn raise.
In game, I think I probably shove here, unless I am betting small specifically to induce a bluff shove. But I'd want a better read on Shredder than I have from Spikeraw's short description of him than I have. Based on my read, of shredder, I shove, but I would defer to spikeraw's read of a regular in his game, and if he went $75 to induce based on his read, I'd support that play.
(Spike): Well, he didn’t shove so the nuts are out of the question. He absolutely is shoving big made hands because he knows that I bluff catch him all the time. So, now I’m specifically trying to induce him (to bluff shove not go into labor).
$75 gives him enough room and looks a little scared. It also salvages some value if he’s feeling ill and decides to call, but I’m mostly counting on a bluff shove from his entire range. Some would advocate bigger here, but this is just a function of knowing the player. My sizing on both turn and river was due to this. Note that I was thinking about setting this up all the way back at the turn. Play the whole hand, not just street to street. Mpethy is right on with his limited read on Shredder. With my actual experience, I think I was right on with my sizing.
End hand analysis
(Mpethy): Do I do this for every significant hand I record? Yes, but not in writing. I think this through for all of them when I do a hand history review session. It's important to get into the habit of specifically narrowing a villain's range street by street, and then sticking to that. Similarly, it's important to spend some time away from the table thinking about the implications of your read on specific players or types of players, and how to exploit the tendencies you've identified.
(Spike): Mpethy makes a really good point. Review each hand thoroughly. Then think about what you've discovered. It’s not enough to identify leaks. You have to figure out what to do about them. Player profiling is great, but if you haven’t come up with a plan to exploit them all you’ve really got is a nice labeling system.
That’s it! Let the trolling begin!
By MpethyBridge and Spikeraw22
Intro (Spike)
All of the posters that I have ever held in high regard have had something in common. It was obvious that they had put in far more work off the table than anyone else. It was evident in how precise their responses were to threads. They were confident in their math and their ranges in all situations. Conversely, most players level off and stop improving early on. Why? Because their work away from the felt has not given them the tools needed to perform better at the table.
Goals
We will outline a proper approach here so that those with the will can see maximum return for their time investment in studying. We will touch on short term session and hand review as well as a long term strategy for database development and analysis. We’ll finish with an example hand history analysis. Grab some coffee and smokes. This is going to take a while.
General Exhortation
Do it
Most players say they study away from the table. Most are lying. For many of those who actually do, their method is so flawed that they don’t actually gain much from all that work. In some cases, they might actually be stunting their growth. In my opinion, the number one reason players don’t improve is laziness. There comes a point where they need to put in work off the table to improve. It’s often tedious and not very fun. So they don’t. I’m here to tell you that step one is to get off your ass and DO IT. If you want to break your ceiling, you have to do the work to get better.
It gets harder
Like any pursuit it’s a rule of diminishing returns. The better you get, the more you have to work to get better with less dramatic results. A whale can become a fish with relatively little effort. A fish can become a decent player with more improvements, but they take more discipline and time. After that, it gets a lot tougher.
When to Study
Wait for It
Although this will vary for everyone, it is almost universally true for all players that immediate analysis after a session is less helpful if not completely worthless. There have been times in my career that it took weeks for my bias to fall away so that I could truly look at a hand objectively. The time for in depth hand review is later. It could be the next day, later in the week, or however long it takes for the emotion to fade.
What to Study
There’s Lots
Obviously, you want to analyze hands, but we’ll deal with that later. There are a lot of other factors to consider when analyzing your play. This is not an exhaustive list but it’s some of the things that I try to look at when looking back at my play.
• Game selection- Did I pick the best game? Did I actively look for better games? Would I have been better passing on playing?
• Seat selection- Was I in a good seat? Why was it good or bad? Were there better spots at the table that I passed up?
• How did I do in big pots? Did I make any big mistakes? Did I make any mistakes more than once? Did I struggle with a certain player?
• Emotional State- I rate my mindset before, during, and after playing. How prepared was I? How focused was I during the session, and was I able to turn it off after it was over?
• Time/Length- When did I play and how did that correlate to my overall results. How long did I play? Did I quit too soon? More likely, did I quit too late?
List your Strengths and Weaknesses
Ways I Suck
It’s amazing to me how many people never do this. It’s hard to get better if you never identify what you need to improve. Actually write out a list. I have a working top five things that I suck at. Intentionally identifying areas of weakness triggers your brain in the moment. You will start to recognize when you are about to fall into the same pattern at the table before it happens.
Limit your Field of Study
Overload
One of my best friends got really into poker for about 6 months. He started from scratch. He read something like 20 poker books in 2 months. I took him under my wing, but by the time I got to him his head was so full of stuff that he couldn’t even think straight. While he was still learning to calculate pot odds, he was trying to apply SPR, ranging, bet sizing, position, deception, and God knows what else he pulled from those books. It ruined him (along with getting QQ cracked a few times during his first few sessions). He doesn’t have much interest in it now. The moral of the story is to pick just a few things and work on them. It takes time to fully grasp how to implement something new. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. You’ll have time to work on it all. Also, don’t get QQ cracked with your lunch money.
Recording Hands
Be Thorough
I stated earlier that you should not review hands immediately following your session. However, you should record them immediately. Here’s how I (Spike) do it. I don’t really like using the notepad feature on my phone. It takes too long and everyone sees me typing furiously on my phone and I miss a lot of action. Instead, I step away from the table as soon as I can and use the voice recorder. I record everything I possibly can from reads to stacks, to action on every street. I try to be as accurate and detailed as possible. I’ve found that it really helps to state the exact bet sizes on each street. That way I can extrapolate the pot size for each street as well as exact stack sizes pre flop. Accurate recording is vital. It is shocking how far off some of my recollections have been compared to my voice records. This will help you post more helpful hand histories on the forums. Mpethy will discuss his method later on.
A Year of Poker Homework (mpethy)
In thinking about the subject of this COTM, studying at home, there seemed to be only one logical approach: to develop an actual study guide that readers could follow more or less directly to help improve their game. Unfortunately, playing live imposes some limitations on our data collection efforts and results that slow the pace of analysis.
On the positive side, we have one major advantage over online players who are using database software to collect their hand histories: we know our intentions in a hand, and Hold 'Em Manager and Poker Tracker do not. This allows us to track our hands by the type of play we're making; if we want to study “c-bets with air” or “or “floats” we can create a category for that, rather than jury-rigging tracking software hand history filtering queries to approximate our intentions. This is a huge advantage, and if you're serious about systematically analyzing your game, we need to take full advantage of it after dealing with the basic leaks.
What follows is very similar to the database analysis I performed for over a thousand customers who played online. It varies mainly in the precision of the conclusions you'll be able to draw because you'll be generalizing from much smaller samples than I did with online grinders. The idea is fundamentally exactly the same as my database analysis: we will have you systematically collect information about your game (build a database), then analyze it to find and plug leaks. Actually, database construction and analysis will proceed simultaneously.
Note: If you're not willing to spend the next year of your poker life recording a few hand histories per night at the casino, you may as well stop after reading the following word on poker books.
Passive Homework:
Reading Poker books:
I haven't read a new poker book since about 2011, when I read “Building a Bankroll.” So I don't know what is currently out there. But, to me, a lot of the money I spent buying poker books was wasted. There are only two poker books that I consider absolutely essential to read: The Psychology of Poker, by Alan Schoonamaker, and No Limit Hold 'Em, Theory and Practice, by David Sklansky and Ed Miller. If you internalize much of these two books, you will have the skills necessary to beat LLNSL. Period. End of story. A useful third book is Professional No Limit Hold 'Em, by Ed Miller, simply because stack to pot ratio is such a completely useful concept for thinking about post flop play. But you could certainly live without it.
Read Poker books actively. Don't just sit and read them. Take notes, either on a separate pad or in the margins of the book. Engage with the material. Try to relate what you're reading to hands you have actually played.
Use concepts from poker books as a to-do list of things to do at the poker table immediately before a session. Part Two of No Limit Hold 'Em, Theory and Practice, the “Concepts and Weapons” section, is particularly useful in this regard, because it is short blurbs about discrete subjects that you can more or less memorize.
Here's an example of how I use Concepts and Weapons. At page 247, concept 5 is “when you first sit down, evaluate your game and decide whether your profits should come from big pots or small pots.” In a notebook, I have compiled this and other of the concepts and weapons that I think I most need to be reminded of, and often, before a session, I will go through my notebook and pick out a concept I haven't worked on for a while, or another, like this one, that I think is a leak. And I will tell myself that “tonight, I am going to implement this concept. Not only am I going to evaluate the table for this question, but I will evaluate each player at the table. My goal for the night is to table change any time I have evaluated the majority of the players at the table as “small pots” unless I wind up with the God seat on a deep stacked “big pot” player.
(Note added during editing: The night I wrote that, I went to the casino, sat at a table, and noted that there were 3 small pot players, 5 big pot players, and that I needed to seat change to get the God seat on the deepest stacked big pot player. I eventually got that seat, and the game went completely according to plan except the 2 outer that the deepest stacked fish spiked to turn my win into a loss. Using this stuff actively really works.)
I normally rotate through the concepts and weapons, focusing on 2 or 3 per session, or maybe 2 or 3 for a week of sessions. I'm fairly casual about it by now, but I have been doing this for 4 years now.
Reread Select Poker Books:
As I said, I haven't read a new poker book for years. But I have reread No Limit Hold 'Em a bunch of times. I have actually made a ritual of it. Every January 1, I go up to my library, and I pull No Limit Hold Em (I also reread Guns Germs and Steel [the most important book ever written, imnsho, but non-poker]) and I spend January going through NLTAP actively, normally adding a concept or two to my concepts notebook.
Reviewing Hand Histories:
Most of us do this already, but we do it far too passively. We'll load the hand into a replayer and watch it, and maybe think, “yep, that was good,” or “damn, should have gone $40 on the turn instead of $30,” or we will post a vaguely recalled hand here in LLSNL and ask others what they think.
The problem is that there's no organization to this material, and you're learning lessons in a completely haphazard fashion. When you think “damn, I should have gone $40 on the turn,” you don't really have a mental filing cabinet into which that conclusion will go. So you wind up with the mental equivalent of a cubicle covered in post-it notes and piles of interoffice memos.
No more. Part of our plan is going to be to give you a filing system for organizing your lessons.
Active Poker Study:
Data Collection:
There simply is no getting around the fact that if you are going to study your game, you are going to have to record hand histories honestly, carefully and fully. You can't record every hand, so we're going to organize and systematize your hand history note taking so that it is at all times purposeful and goal-oriented toward identifying and plugging specific leaks. If you're not willing to record up to 8 or 10 hand histories a night, and keep two or three different notepad files on your phone (as an example), then you're simply not really interested in doing poker homework, and this article is not for you.
We're going to organize your hand history collection around potential leaks. There are as many potential leaks as there are potential situations, so we are going to start with the big leaks. You're just going to have to trust me on this: The list below is a list of common leaks, pretty much in order of their importance to the average solid winning regular's win rate in live play.
1. Misplaying AA and KK. Your ego may want to refuse to admit it, but about half of all money you win at a poker table comes from playing AA and KK. You'll never come close to maximizing your WR unless you are playing these hands optimally, by winning the max and losing the minimum.
2. Misplaying other premium hands. QQ, JJ, AK and AQ, although if you added TT, AJs and KQs, that'd be fine, too, Your win rate with these hands will be substantially lower than your win rate with AA and KK, and they all cluster together in a pretty tight range. So they can be studied as a group, or individually. The merit of treating them as a group is you get a bigger sample size faster, the down side is that you lose the precision of studying them individually. I compromise, and I organize these hands as a group in any given month, with the knowledge that, eventually, I will have a big enough sample to break them out and study them individually.
3. Blind defense. This is the biggest PITA, but it is by far the biggest leak that most good, solid winning players still have. But, to do this right, you have to record every hand you get dealt from the blinds, not just the ones where you volunteer to put money in the pot. But this is where you learn the most about your game, and, I promise you, improving your blind play is the single most important thing you can do to improve your win rate if you already consider yourself an advanced player.
4. Cold calling. It used to crush the souls of a lot of the good online players that I was working with to find that their cold calling range had huge unprofitable chunks. They prided themselves on their ability to play in position, and then, bam, they'd see proof that they were losing money calling in position with suited connectors. We will actually break this down into three sections for doing our data collection—broadway hands, suited connectors and pocket pairs.
5. Isolation plays. If this were a list of online leaks, I would actually have button stealing in this position, but, in live play, you get way more opportunities to isolate limpers than you do to attempt a steal, so I have reversed their positions.
6. Button stealing. This is probably a minor leak, simply because there are so few opportunities to attempt a steal. I have this planned as my October data collection, and I'm planning to record all raises from the button and the cutoff, but if you want to record just the button, that should be fine.
7. Three Betting. Online, this potential leak is much higher on our list of leaks, but three betting is so much less a part of live play that I moved it down.
8. >30bb pots. Any pot you play where you put 30bb or more in is worthy of a second look. Once you start recording these hands, you should never stop. Our recurring daily homework assignment will be to actively review every 30bb pot we play. However, we will drop it from our study plan in the second half of the year in favor of looking at small hands that, individually are so trivial, that they wind up escaping notice:
9. <30bb pots. This will be a substantial hassle, but should pay dividends. Here, we'll be looking for classical leaks—the steady drip, drip of a mistake that might only be costing us a fraction of a BB, but because it recurs often, winds up costing us a decent amount of money.
Data to collect:
A complete hand history, as if you were going to post it here. So a recent note I took for my cold calling category was: “$450 eff, bad aggro goes $15 UTG WYSIWYG BST (“what you see is what you get bet sizing tell'), 2 mp callers, OTB TT, call, BB calls. Flop T22ss, BB ships $100, UTG calls, mp fold x 2, I ship $435, UTG tank/calls AA, MHIG, +590.”
At home, I recreate this hand history in an online hand replayer where it is permanently stored. I embed a link to the hand history in my spreadsheet of hand histories. Here's a link to a hand I actually recorded on the site; up at the top of the linked page is a “Convert Hand” tab that takes you to the main page of the site, which walks you through the process of converting a hand.
http://www.pokerhandreplays.com/view.php/id/6554177
I don't create a hand history for every hand I play. If the hand is super standard, I don't bother with a hand history, and I just fill in the rest of the spreadsheet (discussed below). An example would be where my title is: “CO w/22, whiffed setmine.” And over in the win/loss column, I'd note that it was -$8 or whatever.
Creating a Spreadsheet for hand histories:
You can also do this with a text file, but I find that it is more engaging to use a replayer, so I can watch the hand, pause the action to discuss with my coach and whatnot.
So just create a spreadsheet and create a page for the spreadsheet for each of the potential leak categories I listed above. Load the hand into an online replayer or fully describe the hand, and enter it on the spreadsheet on the appropriate page. Note that some hands will belong on more than one page; if you make an apparent iso raise with KK and play a greater than 30bb pot, that HH should go on three different pages of the spreadsheet—iso plays, KK, and >30bb.
If you're going to use a text file, which I think I'd be sorely tempted to do if I knew how to upload my note files from my phone to my home computer, as you upload the notes, convert them to more comprehensible formal hand history descriptions. Don't try to work directly from the unedited notes, because, among other things, I find significant errors in about half of my notes that I take at the casino. The process of editing them promptly after the session (for me it's the next day) catches these errors. In addition, the process of thinking through the hand as you type it out more fully is a pretty effective hand history review in itself.
In making your spreadsheet, you should have the following column headings: Date, link to hand history, Title of Hand (such as “T8s HJ open gets 3!”), Range (use this to say whether he was at the top, middle, bottom or out of the range you had him on), $won/lost, equity adjusted $win/loss, pros, and cons. Those last three column headings deserve some discussion.
Equity adjusted win/loss:
Here we are accounting for variance in our results to adjust for suck outs. If you get all in with cards to come, the results of the hand won't necessarily reflect whether it was played profitably or unprofitably. So here's where we take this into account, so we don't draw false conclusions based on the actual results of the hand. More later.
Pros and Cons.
Poker players are in the terrible habit of assuming that they mainly learn from their mistakes. Nonsense. Here I have a column for the good things I did in the hand as well as the mistakes I made. Just a phrase that defines what I (or my coach or 2+2) thinks was good or bad about the hand. So the same hand might say in the pro column “2+2 says sweet turn sizing” and the con column “c/f, fish never bluffing here.” A lot of the hands I record are standard, and I don't say anything other than “NH.”
Among other things, specifying your good play and your bad play in this way allows you to go through your DB looking for the frequency where your con is “c/f” to highlight the fact that you might be a bit of a station on the river. Learning to reinforce your successes, though, is almost as important as learning from your mistakes.
Data Analysis:
Now that we have our data collected and organized, we can begin looking at it and drawing conclusions. The first thing to look at is your sample size, which will be laughably small by the standards online players are used to. But we're not going to try to force the data to spit out mathematically precise equity adjusted win rates. We're going to draw general conclusions from the data. Whereas an online database can tell us our true win rate with a high degree of accuracy and confidence, our live play database is going to have to be very carefully interpreted with the idea that our conclusions will, at best, probably be reasonably accurate.
What we're going to do is look for trends in the data. After a month of full time play collecting cold call data, for example, you'll have maybe 70-100 hands where you cold called with a pocket pair.
So, here are some questions I would ask:
1. What were my results? How much money did I actually win or lose in that month by cold calling? This is my “achieved winrate.”
2. Does my achieved win rate seem to have been unduly affected by variance, either good or bad? One thing to check is whether you flopped sets near expectation. So, if you have 100 cold calls with pocket pairs, you should have flopped 12 sets. If you have 14 you ran good, if you have 10 you ran bad.
3. What was my win rate with sets? Pull out your sets, tally the total winnings, and divide by the number of sets. Does it seem high? Low? Is it at least 8.5 times the size of the average preflop raise you called? If not, you have identified a potential leak. Review all of your sets and ask yourself whether you could have won more on the hand with a different line. Post the hand in LLSNL and ask people about how they would have played.
4. Factor in suck outs. If you lost a giant pot with a set to a rivered flush, you can adjust that -$200 loss based on your equity. A rough and ready EV calculation is “I lost a $200 pot when I had 84% equity when the money went in; so it's not actually a $200 loss, it was actually a $168 win.” Same thing if you're the one who sucked out; if you got a set in against a flush on the turn and then boated OTR, you can change that to a loss. If you have one of each, then you don't really need to make an adjustment, you'd already be in the neighborhood of your equity. And we're not ever going to have information precise enough for some BBs here and there to make a difference; close enough is plenty good enough for our purposes. For that reason, an only somewhat inferior alternative to recording your equity is, when you're doing your win rate analysis, to just exclude the odd hand that wildly swung your results based on luck. We're not aiming for precision here, just trying to get a sense from limited data, after all. But I favor recording equity; more information is generally better than less.
5. Look at your win rate when you don't flop a set. (It's probably negative). If it's more negative than the average preflop investment, that would mean that you're losing money post flop. If you're losing less than the average preflop call, that means you're winning a bit postflop. Either way, review these hands. Now you're looking to answer very specific questions: which of these hands that I played post flop and lost could I have lost less with? That flop bluff raise with 44 against the nitty UTG raiser on the KJ6r board was kinda dumb, wasn't it?” Or: “look, this turn float against that dumb lag made me $x; I should look through the hands where I just folded the flop and see whether I missed any good floating opportunities.”
6. Break the hands out by positional groups—blinds, EP, MP and LP. Look for patterns. Your win rate should go down as you approach the blinds. If it doesn't, no big deal, because we're dealing with a tiny sample that will be highly affected by variance. But we'll draw some tentative conclusions: for example, if your WR with pocket pairs calling in MP is negative, and we didn't lose to a big suck out or a standard cooler, that's going to raise a red flag. Then, later, if we see we're also losing with broadway hands when we cold call in MP, we'll start thinking we've maybe found a leak, that we're having a hard time showing a profit in this awkward situation, and we'll have something to work on, by either changing our preflop play and dropping the worst hands from our calling range, or by working on taking different post flop lines to improve our results. Post hands here in LLSNL that look like they might be the root of the problem.
OK, so you see what we are doing here. We're collecting data, and then we're looking for patterns in the data that might disclose leaks, hands and or situations that we are consistently misplaying.
We'll take this form of analysis and apply it to all of the data collection that we're going to do throughout the year.
The Curriculum:
There's no time like the present, so we are going to start today. What follows is going to be a year's worth of studying your game, tailored to people who think they are struggling in their game. If you're already doing well in your game, you can start now with November or December.
Daily assignments:
Before each session, write in a notebook, (not on your computer) a concept or idea, in one sentence, from the poker book, that you think you need to work on. Try to apply the concept at the table during that session. As you fill your notebook, instead of writing a new concept in it, select one or two from the notebook and try to apply them during the session. While driving to the casino, think about the concept and talk to yourself about how to apply it. Develop a plan. Drive carefully!
During each session, record the hands you play with AA, KK, and any hand you play where you put more than 30bb in the pot.
After the session, update your spreadsheet or hand history files.
Weekly Assignments:
Review every hand history from the previous week. Post at least one hand here in LLSNL which you have identified as the toughest spot you were in during the prior week. Make notes next to each hand. State specifically whether the villain was at the top of the range you assigned, the middle, the bottom, or out of it, if known.
End of month assignment:
Perform a detailed win rate analysis along the lines of the one that I described for cold calling. If you like, you can post a summary of the data you collected ITT and I will help you with the analysis. It is very important that you write down specific recommendations about how you are going to change your play going forward.
You'll be following this template for each topic you're covering through the year.
Schedule of Leaks to Examine
September: AA/KK and >30bb Pots
October: QQ, JJ, AK and AQ and >30bb Pots
November: Blind Defense and >30bb Pots
December: Cold calling—split into: broadways, suited connectors and pocket pairs.
January: Isolation plays and >30bb Pots.
February: Button Stealing and 3 betting
March: Button Stealing and 3 betting (we're increasing our sample size by repeating and reinforcing lessons)
April: Isolation Plays and <30bb pots
May: Cold Calling: split into broadway, suited connectors and pocket pairs.
June: Blind defense and <30bb pots
July: QQ, JJ, AK and AQ and <30bb pots
August: AA and KK and <30bb pots.
When you're into the second half of the year, repeating the first six months of leak detection, your monthly analysis at the end of the month should be in two steps: step one is to repeat what you did in the first half of the year, and step two is to combine your results from the first half of the year with the second half of the year and analyze the total sample, which, being twice as large now, will be somewhat more reliable.
Alternate Curriculum for Low Volume Players
It occurred to me after I drafted the first lesson plan that it really only works well for people putting in 100 hours or more a month, and that most readers probably don't. So here's an alternate plan for the year for low volume players:
September-end of January:
Record all hands you play in categories:
1. AQ-AA
2. 2. All >30bb pots
3. Cold calls
4. Isolation plays
You'll do the same tasks as outlined above daily, weekly and monthly, but you'll give less credit to the conclusions you draw until you have a decent sample of 150 hours or so.
February-End of August:
Record all hands you play in categories:
1. Blind defense
2. Button Stealing
3. <30bb pots
4. 3 Betting
Conclusion:
Feel free to use this thread as a central location for asking me questions about the monthly data analysis as well as discussing it among yourselves. In the online poker forums, we had threads that were called “stats and graphs analysis thread” that were very popular and effective tools for leak detection. If there's enough interest in following this leak detection program, this thread can become a live poker analog to that type of thread.
For those of you who consider yourselves advanced players, there are a TON of other situations that you can collect data on and systematically analyze if you think you have a good handle on these rather basic situations. If you want suggestions on alternate situations to analyze, post ITT and I'll give some recommendations based on where most people usually leak.
Important Note about Laziness:
As we were passing drafts back and forth, Spikeraw22 said to me that he thinks 99% of readers won't follow this lesson plan. (Sorry for diming you there, bro). He may be right. But here is why he should be wrong: If you're even halfway serious about poker, you're already recording at least some hand histories. All this system really does is maybe double the recording burden for somebody that already records 4 or 5 hands per session, and then organizes the data into a form that can be systematically analyzed. It's not nearly as daunting to do as it looks like it may be. If you're not already recording 4 or 5 hands per session, well, you haven't been serious about improving your game at all. If you're in this thread looking to change that, that's great; here's how you change that. If you're not in this thread looking to change that, congratulations on wasting 20 minutes of your life.
Spikeraw22 continues:
To Mpethy-
Quote:
If you internalize much of these two books, you will have the skills necessary to beat LLNSL. Period. End of story.
Quote:
(Sorry for diming you there, bro).
Now back to the task at hand.
Be Honest
It’s in the 10 Commandments
The best thing you can do for yourself is to be brutally honest. You do yourself no good by fudging the details during your analysis. If you called a raise from an UTG nit and proceed to assign a range of 77+, 78s+, and all broadways post hoc in order to make your play look good on paper, then you’re not really performing an analysis. You’re performing a retrospective justification. That’s why it’s important not to review hands when you still have emotion invested in the outcome. I’ve gone on downswings that I chalked up to variance. Months later I looked back only to realize that at least half of my losses were due to bad play. So, I guess my point would be not to review a hand once early and then never again. Go back and look again at a later date and see if you come to the same conclusions.
(mpethy adds): Brutal honesty with yourself is a difficult, but necessary discipline. You need to be honest while reviewing individual hand histories as well as when doing the leak detection analysis I described above. If you have 18 cold calls in middle position with broadway hands, six with suited connectors and 10 with pocket pairs, and the net result is that you're down -1.5bb/hand, don't cop out and say “meh, it could just be variance in a small sample” when, in fact, that is pretty much the exact result I would predict from all of those cold calls. If a negative number makes sense, you have to treat it as a presumptive leak; that's the whole point of this exercise.
Be Disciplined
Not a Commandment but it Should Be
Keep at it. You won’t become world class overnight, but you will see results. You’ll only see results proportional to the amount of quality work you do though. So, don’t give up because it’s too hard or not fun. Don’t stop working once you start to turn some corners. Build good habits and continue them. Once you know what to do, do it and don’t stop.
If you have any techniques, tips, or subjects of study to add please post them.
(mpethy adds): If the whole program we've outlined looks like way too much work for you, then start small. Just recording all of your AA and KK hands will be, at most, recording two hands per session, and at the end of a given period, you'll still be able to conduct a systematic analysis to determine how to improve your win rate. It's sub-optimal to do so, but you can pick and choose from the course above to create a workload to which you can stick with discipline.
Hand Analysis
(Spike): I drew this HH from my personal archive so that we can give an example of just how to do a self eval.
My voice note:
“I Btn straddle. Ed calls UTG with $220. Fez calls in MP with $245. Shredder calls in CO with $320ish. I cover and check 5
4Flop is A
92. Ed quickly bets $15. Fez folds. Shredder quickly calls. I call.Turn is 3
. Ed checks. Shredder thinks and bets $25. I raise to $80. Shredder thinks for a minute and calls.River is 8
. Shredder checks. I bet $75. Shredder goes all in for $142 more. I call and I’m good.”This took 1-2 minutes tops to record. Later I went back and figured Shredder’s exact stack size and exact pot sizes. Normally I would include relevant reads, but I knew all of these players quite well already.
Ed is an OMC who can get a little sticky but usually folds to continued aggression. He avoids me mostly.
Fez is a whale.
Shredder is a halfway decent player except that he constantly bluffs when sensing weakness. Especially rivers. I’ve caught him bluffing many times in the past year often with bluff shoves.
(mpethy): Hand analysis: What I am doing here is going back and forth between the hand history and my notes. My comments on each street will be written before I read the action of the next street. Basically, I'm grunching every street.
Preflop
(Mpethy) Button straddle is gross, but whatever. Checking is fine. We're preliminarily (spike adds, “Is that a word?”) going to put Ed on a range of the usual limping reasonable stuff, plus stuff he is too scared to put in a big raise with in a straddle pot. So the top of his range is probably AQ, and the bottom of his range is probably high suited connectors and S1Gs, such as 97s. Pocket pairs, obviously, and probably a few suited Qs and Ks. Fez likes pie, so that's his range. Shredder is going to have a lot of Axs, SCs, small pockets. Nothing he could be aggressive with in a straddle pot and feel good about. So his range is 22-77, SCs and Ax, mainly, by far the most reasonable of the three ranges. Excluding premiums above TT from both ranges, though JJ possible for Ed.
(Spike): The first thing I’m doing here is setting up preflop ranges. There’s a subtle consideration here. I can assign the ranges that I (hopefully) had in game. I can also assign ranges after the fact if I think my range was way off in the moment. That is to say, I should analyze the hand using what I knew and considered at the time, but I can also go through afterward and consider how well I did at the time and what a better range might have been. I just have to make sure that I don’t meld the two and convince myself that I was using the well thought out range when I was really pulling something out of thin air during the hand. In time, these two ranges should start to look a lot alike. Honesty is obviously key.
Also note, I’m actually trying to range them. This is probably something that a lot of readers still need to work on. Ranging starts the minute someone puts chips in the middle.
Ed- Anything that looks pretty, but not so much that he can raise, although I might leave a small window open for a failed l/rr. If this is the case, I’ll find out at some point. Looking at Mpethy’s range, I’d say it’s pretty close except I’d maybe add some AK because old men do that sometimes.
Fez- I’ve heard peach pie is his favorite.
Shredder: I like Mpethy’s range here as well.
Checking seems like the only play.
Flop:A
92(Mpethy) The flop action fits these ranges perfectly. We expect an OMC to have a lot of aces when he limps into a straddle pot, and he leads into the field, repping an ace plus. Fez has too much trash to normally hit an ace high flop and whiffs and folds. Shredder could easily also be on an ace, too. Both, of course, have flopped sets in their range. Shredder could be calling just to put a play on Ed if Ed has a crappy kicker and checks the turn, though, so let's give him some second pair hands like K9s and J9s. The board is dry, so nobody is chasing a draw, which means they both have SDV.
Our play: When you're contemplating a call with a gut shot, you should generally be able to articulate a reason you can win a stack, or close to it. We're about 10:1 to hit the next card, and our IO usually disappears on the turn. So you need someone to be pretty strong. Here, that's possible. The rationale is that Ed could hit a really strong two pair, and, if they're both on an ace, it doubles the chance that one of them will hit two pair by the river. The compounding effect of a multi-way pot means that river bets are going to be big on the river, anyway, so there is a decent chance we could win a big pot.
(Spike): For this call to work, I HAVE to stack someone most of the time when I hit. So, the first thing I’ll review is stack sizes. Does the play make sense in regards to how much I could win, and who is the most likely culprit? Ed has something he’s at least somewhat happy with since he led out, and he has a little over 100BB. He needs to have a good hand or one that has a good chance to improve if I’m to stack him. Shredder is a prime candidate due to his spazziness. He has a juicy 160BB.
At 10:1 and 260BB in combined V’s money in play plus position and a really disguised hand, I think I can justify this call.
Next I try to fit their ranges with their actions. I think Mpethy actually did a nice job here, so I’ll just keep it moving. One quick note; Shredder is not on air, but he can have more 9x than you’d think.
Finally, I’ll consider other actions that I hadn’t even considered. In this case, raising. I think it would be pretty dumb here. Ed has a real chance of holding a monster, and Shredder is just too unpredictable. Best case, I fold them both out, but I think that’s wasting a shot at binking a hand that has a good chance of getting paid.
Turn:3
(Mpethy) Of course spikeraw binks here, because what fun is the hand if we just quietly fold the Js OTT?
Ed is on the range we think, and folds his one pair. Shredder is more interesting. I'm capping his value range at exactly a set of deuces. I think a set of 99 just shoves when we raise. It's barely possible that 22 is sufficiently scared of the combined possibilities of us having 99 and us having spiked a gutter that he cops out and calls. But 99 I think shoves, if it's even in shredder's range, which I doubt (I think he raises it pre, so I don't actually have it in his range here). Obviously, his most likely value hand here is A9, since he can't have top pair with the flush draw to the hearts. I'm going to take almost all air out of his range. I don't think he bet/calls air just in the hopes of putting a play on a hand that we are repping as near nutted. So second pair with a flush draw now 4 or 5 possible combinations in his range.
Our play: Our sizing is ok. I would have gone more for two reasons: If he will limp A9o, then he has more combos of A9 and 22 that will call almost any raise we put in here, than he has combos of pair and a flush draw that we might think we need to tempt with a slightly lower price. So I'd tend to err on the bigger side here. Realistically, I'd have probably gone either $95 or $105 here by cutting out a stack of reds, and then ostentatiously taking one off or putting one on depending on how I thought Shredder would read it. I'd probably take one off for him. So $95. Shredder should have us on the same range we have him on, more or less.
(Spike): I don’t always chase gut shots, but when I do, I spike them. I agree again with Mpethy’s ranges.
Sizing: This is my main consideration. When Ed checks, I’m pretty much giving up on him, so now I’m trying to figure out how to get Shredder all in. It’s funny that Mpethy mentions putting out a stack of $100 and pulling one off. That’s exactly what I did except I pulled three off one at a time. Shredder’s leak is going bananas when shown weakness. This action along with a smaller bet size and more perceived FE with more behind was my main reason for this sizing. I was hoping he’d shove right there, but wanted to give him more room on the river to do his thing. Otherwise, agreed.
River: 8
(Mpethy) Shredder's check indicates that he has show down value, but less than the nuts. If he had the flush, I'm pretty sure he'd jam into us to prevent us checking back on this card which is scarier to most players than it should be (although he does have a few combos of flushes in his range before he checks). A good player might check/shove a flush or a bluff here, but I expect every decent player ever to shove for value with a flush here. So we're usually good when shredder checks.
Our play: that being the case, our bet is reasonable, provided we're never folding to a shove. The reason is because we know shredder can shove on a bluff. So by betting $75, Shredder has to answer this question: are we betting $75 because we're afraid of the flush, or because we think he is? If he guesses wrong, and thinks our bet is scared, he could shove his whole range as a bluff. If he guesses right, he still has to call with the top of his range because his range and our range are basically the same here (except we probably never have the flush). Alternatively, if we bet $75 specifically to induce a bluff from shredder, I think that's fine, too.
Prior to the river, the pot is basically $225, and shredder has about $217 behind. Had we gone $95 on the turn, the river pot would be $255-ish, and shredder would have $200, and a shove here would have been less than a PSB, rather than a PSB. This reinforces the argument for a bigger turn raise.
In game, I think I probably shove here, unless I am betting small specifically to induce a bluff shove. But I'd want a better read on Shredder than I have from Spikeraw's short description of him than I have. Based on my read, of shredder, I shove, but I would defer to spikeraw's read of a regular in his game, and if he went $75 to induce based on his read, I'd support that play.
(Spike): Well, he didn’t shove so the nuts are out of the question. He absolutely is shoving big made hands because he knows that I bluff catch him all the time. So, now I’m specifically trying to induce him (to bluff shove not go into labor).
$75 gives him enough room and looks a little scared. It also salvages some value if he’s feeling ill and decides to call, but I’m mostly counting on a bluff shove from his entire range. Some would advocate bigger here, but this is just a function of knowing the player. My sizing on both turn and river was due to this. Note that I was thinking about setting this up all the way back at the turn. Play the whole hand, not just street to street. Mpethy is right on with his limited read on Shredder. With my actual experience, I think I was right on with my sizing.
End hand analysis
(Mpethy): Do I do this for every significant hand I record? Yes, but not in writing. I think this through for all of them when I do a hand history review session. It's important to get into the habit of specifically narrowing a villain's range street by street, and then sticking to that. Similarly, it's important to spend some time away from the table thinking about the implications of your read on specific players or types of players, and how to exploit the tendencies you've identified.
(Spike): Mpethy makes a really good point. Review each hand thoroughly. Then think about what you've discovered. It’s not enough to identify leaks. You have to figure out what to do about them. Player profiling is great, but if you haven’t come up with a plan to exploit them all you’ve really got is a nice labeling system.
That’s it! Let the trolling begin!
09-02-2015
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09-02-2015
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^^^^
This is a little too much of comparing apples and oranges; there's no rake in chess, or footracing, or whatever.
Start with 100% rake. No one can win, doesn't matter how many lightyears ahead in poker knowledge you are against your opponents. I'd guess the same for 50%, and so on. At 10% capped, sure, it's beatable; but for how much pretty much depends on how horrible your opponents are, not how good we happen to be.
But I'm just nitpicking one aspect of an otherwise great learning outline by M; I don't mean to derail. My bad.
G/derailG
This is a little too much of comparing apples and oranges; there's no rake in chess, or footracing, or whatever.
Start with 100% rake. No one can win, doesn't matter how many lightyears ahead in poker knowledge you are against your opponents. I'd guess the same for 50%, and so on. At 10% capped, sure, it's beatable; but for how much pretty much depends on how horrible your opponents are, not how good we happen to be.
But I'm just nitpicking one aspect of an otherwise great learning outline by M; I don't mean to derail. My bad.
G/derailG
