Quote:
Originally Posted by adam levine
What’s your study look like?
I will have 3 types of study sessions in general. Almost all are 1.5 hours long exactly at the start of each and every day.
1. Drilling
Most sessions (7 out of 10) are straight drilling with PLO trainer - First half of session I focus on preflop, second on post flop. Most important is structuring this study in blocks for 4-5 weeks. I have heard Stefan Sonteimer talk about treating poker study like a Decathlon athlete, so first block would naturally be RFI from all positions preflop, then playing VS 3bet from each position etc. For post flop the same, SRP IP, how to play vs x/raise on the same board etc, before moving on to SRP OOP. I will usually split a post flop block into something like 4 unpaired boards, 3 straight boards, 2 paired, 2 mono before allowing myself to move on.
Keeping all my trainer results in a google spreadsheet (will share below) gives me a tangible feeling of progress and I think is where a lot of people **** up with studying. Most players who bother to study (and myself in the past) will jump around spots depending on what they struggled with in their previous session. I think there is definitely a place for hand review but for 5card at least, finding the answer to one spot on one board will make almost no difference to your EV in game. Even if I know I am struggling with 3bet pots OOP for example, I am never moving on to it until I have studied all the previous parts of the gametree effectively. To move on to another board I need to hit a predetermined accuracy goal 2 days in a row. For example if I am aiming for 85% accuracy over 150 hands drilled C-betting on K44r IP, if I hit 84%, 86%, 83%, 86%, 87% on consecutive days only after the last 2 days of reaching the goal in a row can I move onto the next board.
For 5card specifically I believe this is a much, much better way to study than trying to learn heuristics from the trainer or from coaching videos. There are way too many tiny subtle heuristics in 5card that trying to learn them all and apply them to each hand is almost impossible. I think the way to get around this is drilling so much that these heuristics just become a subconscious part of your game. 5card is way too dynamic a game to have hard and fast rules like 'we always check top set here,' or we get in all wrap with FD here, because our sidecards vary so much. I think it is more valuable to just expose your brain to so much solver that you start to subconsciously implement all of these mini heuristics without having to verbalise what they even are.
I use a colour code system to keep track of progress: green is when I hit two days and a row and so can tick that board off, blue for all the failed attempts of that board before hitting green, and yellow if I am on track to go green if I hit accuracy goal next session.
2. Coaching video review:
As there isn't much 5card coaching content online (one new vid a week on PLO mastermind) this is a much smaller part of my study regime. But when I do watch a video I watch it and take a load of notes, so much that I wouldn't need to watch the video again to glean the same info. This basically turns a 20min video into 1.5 hour of watching and note taking. I collate all of these in a OneNote file which I will use in any hand reviews to quickly understand a spot without having to go to the trainer. I know I spent a **** load of time in the last few years just watching videos thinking I was studying and retaining almost no information on what I just watched past 1 or 2 days. This is a boring but good way to cement that info in my brain.
3. Group study and hand review:
The only time I do hand review is when I am studying with other people. I have definitely had a habit of tagging a load of hands and 'confirming' whether I played it correctly or not based on sim outputs after a session. Although I am sure this will have a little bit of benefit I think there is very limited value in it unless you have other players to bounce around ideas about the hand. Very rarely is a prerun sim gonna give me a good applicable output to a hand I find complicated enough to review. Many times I will have my mind changed by talking with my study group about a spot, even if I have already 'checked' it's correct in PLOtrainer. Learning how other players think and how they perceive population I think is just as valuable as any paid coaching and would highly recommend finding other players to talk with deeply about hands.