Reviewing Your Poker Tournament Sessions

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One of the most important elements of playing great poker is the time and energy you put into reviewing your play. In this column I’ll take a look at why you should review your tournament sessions, and some tips and tricks to make sure you are getting the most out of these reviews.

Tournament Review Tips & Tricks

Before I get into some of the in-depth topics below let me first just layout some of the ways you can go about getting the most out of your tournament reviews:

• Be prepared to take notes, keep your study area clean, and make sure you schedule your review time. It sucks to have to spend time reviewing hand histories, but it sucks even more if you are simply wasting your time while you’re doing it. So don’t review your sessions haphazardly; fumbling around looking for notes you jotted down. The more you focus on reviewing your sessions the less time it will take and the more you will get out of it.
• Use the tools that are available. Whether it’s tracking software, ICM calculators, or pokerstove, make sure you know how to maximize the functions of these tools so you get the most out of your reviews.
• Take plenty of notes, especially for hands you are unsure of. When you are dealing with “close calls” a lot of the time the correct play comes down to some small piece of information, so it’s critical that you jot down things like current table image, exact stack sizes, or any other seemingly minor piece of the puzzle.
• If you are not going to review your session immediately after it concludes you should at least identify the hands you want to review and outline the questions you have regarding your play –it’s not uncommon to forget what it was you were concerned about after a couple of days have passed.
• Make sure you review all your hands. A common mistake players make is to only review hands they lost, or big pots, or hands that went to showdown. There are always ways you can improve you play, and simply winning the pot doesn’t mean you played the hand, or to its fullest.
• Look for certain situations that you want to improve on, and study these hands in batches. The great thing about a tool like Holdem Manager or Poker Tracker is that you can use the filters to find all the hands where you had small pairs in late position, or all the times an opponent three-bets you.  By lumping these hands together you can keep your mind sharp and focused on this particular element, instead of jumping around between different scenarios.

These are just some of the things you can do to improve the quality of your study time, from here on out I want to talk about what you should be trying to accomplish when you review a tournament session.

Exploitability

Reviewing your hand histories and session notes accomplishes two main things:

• It allows you to spot leaks and deficiencies in your play, eliminating –EV plays from your game
• It allows you to identify exploitable tendencies and weaknesses in the play of your opponents and develop strategies to exploit them

Properly using your study time to plug leaks and learn new strategies allows you to do what Mental Game coach Jared Tendler calls “the inchworm.” Essentially what this means is that by plugging leaks your low-end of play improves as you are no longer making certain –EV decisions pushing your median level play of play forward, and by learning new plays you push the envelope when it comes to playing your best.

So what you end up with is a “bad” game that is not as bad as it was and the ability to push the top end of your play even further forward. This also diminishes the difference between your bad game and your good game.

If you’re not finding leaks in your game or ways to improve while you’re studying you’re doing it wrong.

Get a different perspective

When you start reviewing your sessions you’ll likely do a lot of self-examination, and for many situations (so long as you are honest with yourself) this will help plug a lot of holes in your game, and identify the areas where you can exploit your opponents.

That being said, there will also be situations where you find yourself unsure as to the right play, and for these situations you should employ the help of other serious poker players. Not only can a fresh perspective give you valuable insight into tricky situations, but even in situations where you feel you “know” what the right play is, it’s sometimes helpful to run them by another player to see if they have a different perspective of the situation; one that you might be overlooking.

It should also be noted that for many people it’s easy to spot weaknesses in others, but when it comes to looking in the mirror and identifying your own problems they turn a blind eye. By enlisting the help of other players you’ll have to learn to deal with criticism and take a much more critical view of your understanding of the game.

Here is a list of different avenues available to you that will allow you to enlist the help of fellow poker players:

• Post on a forum
• Find a study group
• Talk with friends
• Hire a poker coach

Try to commit at least one new situation to memory

I’m a firm believer in the 90/10 rule for poker –usually known as the Pareto Principle or the 80/20 rule.

When transferred into poker, the Pareto Principle says that 90% of your money will come from 10% of your hands, or that 90% of your mistakes will come from 10% of your hands; however you want to phrase it the Pareto Principle generally fits.

So, in poker 90% of your hands will pretty much play themselves, and just one out of ten hands requires deeper thought. And of these situations that require some introspection and evaluation I would posit that a further 90% will be solvable (maybe an opponent took an unexpected line with AA that you didn’t see coming), with just 10% (of the original 10%) presenting you with a unique scenario. So about one out of every 100 hands you play will present you with a new scenario that will require you to reflect on the hand AND to enlist the help of other poker players.

So, when you review a tournament session you should first be focusing on these hands, since it is these hands that will further your poker knowledge.

Keep in mind that these “new” situations don’t necessarily reflect a better strategy, or one that you should adopt. Sometimes these scenarios simply require you to rethink your standard strategy, or show you a way to exploit a certain type of opponent in the future – for example, suppose you found yourself heads-up with a player who open-limped every hand.

By committing these rare situations to memory, and having a prearranged strategy to counteract someone else trying to employ them in the future, you will become a very formidable foe that is able to change gears and adjust to different situations.

Don’t get me wrong you should definitely focus on the more common mistakes you might be making, but as I said, these situations are “solvable” or “fixable.” It’s the odd situations that will require deep thought, and are better left for forum or study group discussion.

Far too many players simply say that counteracting a player who open-limps during heads-up play is such a rare occurrence that you shouldn’t waste time studying it. But I say the situation, although rare, happens during the most important time of any tournament (MTT or S&G) during heads-up play for 1^st or 2^nd place. So while I wouldn’t waste 20 hours trying to come up with a strategy, I am willing to think about it for a little while and then post on a forum to see what others have to say.

Additionally, by knowing how to counteract an open-limper (and conversely what strategies WON’T work against an open-limper) you will also be prepared to exploit an opponent who is employing a strategy that an open-limper could exploit.