After a significant downswing recently, I decided it was time to reassess some aspects of my game with a more focused lens. I read HomeyG30's post on deliberate poker drills
Fixed Linkand was really interested by the handreading drill he describes wherein you
1)Filter HEM for all hands where showdown = true
2)Go through each hand street by street with flopzilla/stove and narrow down villain's range as much as possible until showdown.
3) Keep a tally of how many times villain's hand is within that range, and how many times villain shows up with an unexpected holding.
Some impressions:
-I'm consistently giving villain too narrow a range (mostly preflop, but often post as well). Making a mistake early in the hand really screws up the ability to make +EV plays later on.
-It's pretty nuts how few flush draws tight players have. Conversely, I have re-realized that loose passive players often have a significant amount of flushdraws on even high two tone boards.
-I under-utilize the hell out of my HUD
-People call flop c/r a lot lighter than I'd expect...so I guess I should either be c/r'ing rarely or firing another barrel more often. Also, this could be biased since I'm looking at the hands that got to showdown (whereas if villain is stronger it's likely he would fold out my bluffs at some point in the hand and thus would not be reviewing it with this exercise).
-My autopilot is killing me. There have been so many hands I've butchered based on a lack of reading and reliance on 'standard' lines. When going through and trying to systematically narrow down ranges, I've found that often times I'll bet TPMK for value when it's extremely unlikely 50% of his calling range is behind me (and other similar mistakes). I remember watching a replay of me playing A9o or something on an Axx rainbow board where I just kept betting against a average-ish player. When I did the handreading exercise, OTR all his hands that would call anymore were ahead of me, yet I was still "value-betting".
-I have had to face the truth that I'm making pretty terrible hand selection decision preflop. When I plug in some of my OOP calling hands against even REALLY wide opening ranges, I'm often behind! For example, A3s is a hand I was cold calling BTN opens with in the BB. Well, against a 52% opening range, we have only 51.7% equity, and we're OOP. I personally am just giving up too much card equity to make up for with skill advantage. Speaking of skill advantage...
-Overall, I am god awful at hand reading...embarrassingly so. I think currently I'm 53 correct out of 95 attempts. This means that 44.2% of the time villains have shown up with hands THAT I DIDN'T EXPECT THEM TO EVER HAVE. If this is a problem for me, I'm guessing it's a pretty big problem for others as well. I've spent countless hours chatting about specific hands, watching videos, making and discussing videos, having coaching sessions, posting hands...and with all that energy put towards the game, I am still pretty damn bad at hand reading.
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How many posts do you see where it's painfully obvious that the OP has not taken the time to even give villain a range? It's something to seriously look at if you are wanting to be successful at poker.
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