Hello guys, I wanted to give those who're reading my BS something in return in this blog entry so I'm going to share my study method and the reasons why I use it.
Studying is not the thing we're used to see in schools; sticking your face to a book until you can repeat what it says without looking at it. Studying is, for what I like to believe, absorbing usefull informaiton and keep it in our brain for future use, so the two main pillars of studying are absorbing information, and keeping this information for future use, we can agree on that I guess.
However, tho studying is very close to the learning concept, everyone learns in very different ways, and studying has to adapt to those learning styles so the information we study sticks to our brain easily.
In the following link you can learn more about the learning styles
http://www.learningrx.com/types-of-l...styles-faq.htm and in this other link you can test yourself to find out which one fits you better
http://www.whatismylearningstyle.com...le-test-1.html
All this said, after we figure out how we learn, lets get to the "how we keep" the information we learned.
You might think that once you study something, it's going to stay there forever and if someone asks you about the topic you studied 1 year ago you'll remember everything, but no, in fact you only remember a very small percentage of what you learned just 1 week ago if you don't refresh that information. Jared Tendler mentioned in many of his books the importance of reviewing the topics you studied often or you might (and will) forget them therefore make some mistakes that you had solved time ago.
So what's the solution to this?, because study something and forget like 90% of the content 1 week ago is really time consuming and unefficient, this concept is called the "curve of forgetting"
https://uwaterloo.ca/campus-wellness/curve-forgetting and the only solution is to review the topic you studied, however, if you do that with all the poker material you might have, you would be studying forever, well I've got you covered guys, the solution is a software called ANKI.
https://apps.ankiweb.net/
Yep, this free flash card software will really help you when it comes to studying and reviewing old content, this is how it works.
Here's the first thing you'll see when you install it.
First off you have to organize how you want to store your information, this information is split in decks, and in every deck there're "flash reverse cards" that you're going to use to study.
Let's see an example of how could you divide each block of information, a very simple way.
This way you have flash cards for every position you play from, you could be more precise and, for example, create 2 diferent decks for HU pots and MW pots from every position, that's up to you.
After you've decided how you want your study material to be organized, it's time to fill those decks with cards. It's as well very simple.
You just have click on "ADD" on the top-center of the software main window, select the deck you want this card to be in on the right drop-down menu, and write down the a question in the upper white box and an answer on the one below, like this.
You can add images and other media as well to make very buffed flash cards that really test your knowledge.
Let me show you how an example of a poker-themed card would look like.
This is what you first see when you're studying.
Then you try to answer your own question, and after you did, you check if you did well or not.
Depending on how good you did, you select the down below option that fits better the level if difficulty when answering the question and the software will shuffle the card to show it again to you in X days.
It might sound a bit stupid, if you made the question, and wrote the answer, it's obvious that you know both the question and the correct answer, but when you've created 1k flash cards, about 10 different topics, I assure you won't remember nearly 5% of them all.
This is my study method, I hope it helps someone. I find it very usefull and the more cards you create, the better this is, and another good thing about it is that you can share your decks with others, and others with you, this way you'll have a huge DB of different hands and situations to study different topics and never make mistakes you solved time ago.
A good thing to make this a bit more bearable is to mark hands you struggled with as you play, then discuss them with your mentor, friends, study group, post it in a forum or whatever to get a clear answer, and then make a flash card out of it, in just 1 month or 2 you'll have a pretty decent DB to study without having to read a book about it again, or read a full post of a pro, or watch 10 videos, just click on "STUDY" on the desired deck, and spend 10 minutes reviewing stuff you did yourself time ago.
Sorry for the longpost by the way.
TL;DR
Study is important guys.
Cheers!