I’m a relatively new subscriber and not-so-serious poker player, but I love trying to learn more about the game. So, I’m here. I initially went through a lot of the TPE university content, and now I am trying to forage for more on my own, and I’m finding it tough to browse for topics that suit my playing level and interests.

The search page seems flexible on the surface, but if you don’t already know about the existence of a video series that you want to watch, it’s tricky to find something without lots of paging. Also, the tags don’t seem all that useful, since they seem to be applied quite loosely. For instance, when I go to the premium videos page and search for the “bet sizing” tag, I get 178 videos. While it’s probably true that each of these videos mentions bet sizing in some way, there’s no video whose title or description implies that bet sizing is a key topic. Each video has so many tags that the tags lose much of their value. If I really wanted to try to find a video or section of a video where bet sizing was discussed in detail, I wouldn’t know where to really begin.

Also, I think the search result page is hampered by showing each part of a video series as a separate search result. It contributes to excessive paging to try to discover videos that are relevant to me. For example, Matthew Hunt’s latest series has 8 parts. That’s 8 search result entries, or about a third of a page of search results for just that one series.

It’s also hard for me to find a series that I was in the process of watching. It looks like I have to go re-search for that series. I see that the ones I’ve previously watched show up with a check mark in the results, but is there any way I can just quickly see what I watched recently? If I don’t remember the title or the pro who made the video, I don’t think I can easily discover what I was watching.

Maybe I’m just not using the site search tools to their fullest, so I’d be happy to hear some suggestions on how to improve my experience! I do have a few suggestions, though…

1. Make the search results show one entry per series and not one entry per video. Each series would have its own page with an overview and links to each video in the series. This would make the search more effective in minimizing the need to navigate through multiple pages on each search.

2. Reduce the number of tags per video to only those which represent a significant component of the video. For example, in the recent series from Andrew Brokos and Carlos Welch walking through Carlos’s Bovada win, the tags include “pre-flop” and “post-flop.” Those are noise, IMO. The fact that both are in the tag list sort of indicates that neither is a focus of discussion. It’s a tournament hand history discussion, so of course pre and post-flop concepts will be mentioned, but it’s not at all a focus. I’d suggest a max of 5 tags per series.

3. On each series page (the one I suggest in point #1 above), include links to other recommended series to watch that cover some of the same concepts, or other series to watch next to move up to the next conceptual level of thinking. I think this would really improve the experience of a novice player like me who sometimes (often) finds I don’t appreciate the nuance of a situation discussed in a particular video and would like to try to get more exposure to an idea. Currently, after enjoying a particular video, I have to jump back into the search world to try to find the next topic for me.

4. Have a page where I can see my history of videos. I sometimes have to scour my web browser history to find the video I watched last, and you don’t want to know what’s in my browser history.

Anyway, thanks for the great content. I am just trying to find ways to consume it more effectively!

thanks,
Chris