How To Be Your Own Poker Coach

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If you’re the kind of player who’s proactive enough to seek out TPE as a resource for poker learning, I’d say it’s reasonable to assume you’re probably the kind of player who’s interested in working on their poker game and continuing to improve. You’re probably doing a few things to keep yourself learning, but you might not necessarily be doing it with the greatest degree of efficiency. There might be some holes in your learning, some flaws in your methods, or some lapses in motivation.

What I’d like to do is show you a few ways in which you can perform the same role for yourself as a good coach would do. You might wonder how this is possible, since the role of a coach is to teach you things you don’t already know – to a certain extent this is a valid concern, since it’s very easy to have a blind spot or two when you don’t have anyone else there to review your game.

However, it ignores the reality of what a good coach’s role really is – to help you develop the thought processes that will allow you to make optimal decisions under your own steam in future, rather than relying upon someone else’s prescriptive idea of how certain hands should or shouldn’t be played. There are plenty of things you can do to help your thought processes evolve, without necessarily having someone on hand to impart additional knowledge.

Do the math…repeatedly

Everyone knows that math is a key part of MTT poker, but not many people put a great deal of effort into understanding it. It’s one thing to be able to pay attention to pot odds and estimate opponents’ ranges, but it’s another thing to understand the mathematical implications of those ideas. One thing you can do to rectify any weaknesses in this area is to actively run ‘drills’ after a fashion – to train yourself to do the math faster and more accurately in-game.

There are many ‘drills’ you can do. You can practice converting pot odds to equity percentages (e.g. 2:1 requires 33% equity, 1.5:1 requires 40%, etc). You can take a specific, frequently-encountered hand range (e.g. 99+ AQ+, any pair/any ace/any broadway, any two suited cards, etc) and test yourself on what percentage of overall hands or how many hand combinations that range equates to, and then use that figure how much equity certain specific hands have against that range.

You can run one range vs another range (e.g. reasonable big blind defend range vs reasonable button open range) on various flops, turns and rivers, and see how equities change throughout the hand. There are any number of additional ‘drills’ you can create for yourself, dependent on your individual mathematical strengths and weaknesses. If you’re not great at mental arithmetic, that’s all the more reason to practice in this department.

Study your own statistics

I personally have a sample of over four million hands on my Holdem Manager 2 database. This includes almost every hand of poker I’ve ever played, all the way back to 2009, when I flat out sucked at poker (or at least, more so than I do now).

This gives me the opportunity not just to analyze what my stats look like right now, but also what they used to look like during other periods of my career – periods where I played my best, my worst, or somewhere in between. I can analyze trends and patterns that I might never pick up on otherwise. I have a wealth of information about myself and my own game, all at my fingertips. I try to use this information regularly, but never as often as I’d like.

You can do the same here. You can use whatever tracking software you prefer, to take a look at your own game under a microscope. Look at your EVbb/100 number, the most important number in poker. Your 3bet numbers, your aggression frequencies, everything.

You can sort between different stack sizes and positions and hand groupings, and potentially identify and fix some glaring leaks in your game, just from even a few minutes spent sifting through data. It’s a great idea to do this regularly, or perhaps even at the end of every session – as long as you bear in mind that each individual session is usually going to constitute a relatively small sample size of hands.

Practice range analysis

When it comes to the thought processes involved in playing good poker, possibly the most important part is being able to correctly estimate opponents’ ranges in every spot. What this means, is that it’s not actually that important whether your estimations of players’ ranges are accurate in each specific instance, since you can’t get concrete proof – it’s only important that you get into the habit of making sure you have a range in mind in every single spot. Over time, more experience under your belt will improve the accuracy of your assumptions.

A good way to practice range analysis is to run a recent tournament through a hand replayer, and simply go through the motions of stopping to assess ranges every time a player takes an action. This way you can get into the habit of making it a consideration in every spot, and you can start identifying trends and potential errors in your thinking.

You can narrow down a player’s range as a hand progresses, and if the villain turns out to have a hand that you had not previously included in their range, then you can revisit your assumptions to try to establish which one(s) might have been incorrect. You can also combine this practice with math drills to give your poker brain a really in-depth workout.

Ultimately, anything you’re doing to improve your understanding of the game is going to help. But there is a tendency among poker players to assume that watching coaching videos is all that’s necessary to improve. This is far from the case, because a coaching video can’t embed a new thought process into your brain, and it can’t tell you about the leaks in your own game unless you take the time to think about it again later. So take the time to try out some of these methods, or to invent your own ways of looking at your own game on a deeper level, and you may find the effectiveness of your learning reaches a new level.