Poker players love to talk hands, especially hands they played themselves. In this age of game theory solvers and other sophisticated software, reviewing hands on a one-off basis may not be the most efficient means of improving, but it remains one of the most popular. It seems inevitable that many poker players will continue to study by analyzing and discussing hands they played, so we might as well talk about how to do so effectively and efficiently.
The Alternatives
While this is an article about hand history review, I want to take a moment to highlight the alternatives because some readers may not even realize what they are.
When I talk about studying via hand history review, I have in mind a process whereby you discuss or analyze a few specific hands that stand out in your recent memory. These typically stand out because they were big pots you won or, more commonly, lost. If you play online, it might mean reviewing a full hand history from a recent tournament or cash game session in order to find specific hands to review in more depth.
Regardless, the defining feature of such a review is that your choice of which hands to review is somewhat arbitrary, based more on recency and variance than an analysis of where you tend to make your biggest or most frequent mistakes. Admittedly, if you recently encountered a situation where you were not sure of the right play in a large pot, there is a better-than-average chance that spot represents one of your largest or most frequent mistakes.
Still, there are ways of zeroing in on such spots more precisely. If you play online, database software can help you identify the positions or scenarios where you struggle most. Books, training videos, or a coach can help you identify the most important concepts you don’t fully understand or know how to implement.
Armed with that knowledge, you could craft a more focused study plan where you sought out examples—possibly including hypotheticals fabricated for this purpose—of situations where you believe your study time would be most well-spent. In other words, you could let your needs determine the example hands you study rather than starting with the examples and then guessing at your needs based on those examples.
If you saw that you had a low win rate and a high continuation betting frequency from early position, you could then run some simulations in a solver to see where the equilibrium strategy differed from your intuition. While you could choose which flops to look at based on hands where you’d actually had a decision about whether to continuation bet, that wouldn’t be the best approach. Ideally, you would look at a variety of flops, changing one variable, such as suitedness or the size of the pair on the board, to see how such changes affect the equilibrium.
Such work would not oblige you to employ an equilibrium strategy if you had good exploitative reasons to do otherwise, but it would at least provide you insight into how to make continuation betting decisions and find more EV as a result.
Talking Hands
When you do talk hands—and of course you will—you might as well get the most out of it. The first and most important question to ask is why this particular hand? Why does this, among all the hands you’ve played, stand out as one you want to discuss or examine?
Perhaps you lost a big pot. It’s important to remember that doesn’t mean you made a mistake. There may not be anything to learn here; you may simply have gotten unlucky.
Still, there’s value to discussing these hands. It’s nice to get closure on them, to get a definitive answer to the question of whether you made a mistake so that you can move on with your life. Software, a coach, or a trusted friend might be able to provide you with that closure.
If it looks like you did make a mistake, the next question to ask is why. Was it a gap in your knowledge or a gap in your discipline? In other words, when looking at the hand in retrospect, are you still unsure what the right play would have been? Or is it a case where you feel like you should have known better, and looking at it now, it’s clear what you should have done?
In the latter case, you still need to ask why you made the mistake. If you should have known better, why didn’t you? Were you tired? Frustrated? Bored? Irritated? Distracted? Rushed?
Plenty of people would be winning poker players if they played their best 100% of the time. While it’s good and fun to learn new skills, it may be more important to address bad habits that keep you from employing the skills you already have as effectively as you could. If you consistently see yourself getting sloppy because you’re tired or frustrated, then you should find a way to address that underlying issue.
Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff
If it’s a matter of a skill gap, the next question to ask is how important that gap is? Sorry to say it, but your game is full of leaks. Some are much bigger than others, and many aren’t worth worrying over.
For example, if you find that you have no idea what to do when there are five cards of the same suit on the board, I wouldn’t worry about it. Such situations occur rarely enough that even if you lost a few big blinds in EV every time they came up, it still wouldn’t make much difference to your bottom line.
What may be useful, however, is to extrapolate out to some larger skill gap. For instance, if you realize that you never bluff when there’s a flush on the board, that may be a gap in your understanding of the theory behind bluffing rather than a problem specific to that board texture. Unlike five-flush boards, bluffing comes up all the time and is well worth understanding more deeply.
The other type of “small stuff” is cases where the difference in EV between two options is extremely small, sometimes nonexistent. This is often the case on the river, for instance, when you face a big bet holding a hand that can beat only a bluff. Absent any insight into your opponent’s bluffing tendencies, it probably doesn’t much matter whether you call or fold.
Ruminating on these decisions is tempting because you can make compelling arguments for both plays. It’s also fruitless, though, because finding the right play is worth little to nothing. It’s far more important to identify and study cases where there is a clearly correct play that you aren’t making than to fret over those where your choices don’t much matter.
Talk is Cheap
If all you’re looking for is closure, then hearing from an outside source or two that your play was (or was not) correct may be all you need. If you’re trying to learn from your hand history discussion, though, then you need more than just a thumbs up or thumbs down. It’s entirely possible that two different but good players might play a hand differently. After all, the reason you wrestled with the decision was probably because there were good arguments on both sides.
The arguments are the important part. The result itself doesn’t matter, except for giving you closure. You aren’t discussing the hand to learn what you should have done in some spot that’s over and done with. Your objective is to use the fact that you struggled in that spot as a clue to help identify some deeper aspect of the game that you would benefit from studying. Ultimately, you don’t want to know what you should have done, you want to know what you should do in similar spots in the future. More precisely, you want to know how to approach them, to see how other players think through a decision that gave you trouble.
That means that getting the details exactly right isn’t important, because they’ll be different next time anyway. If you can’t remember whether you got three-bet by the cutoff or the button, that’s fine. In fact, it may lead to interesting discussion about how the position of the three-bettor affects your decision. You can discuss both cases as hypotheticals. The only detail that should concern you is what made the decision difficult for you. The rest is just more small stuff you shouldn’t sweat.
Summary
If you’re going to pester your friends with hand histories—and, let’s be honest, you are—you might as well learn from it. Get to the bottom of what makes the hand unique, interesting, and challenging. Focus on why it stands out in your head and what you can learn from it that will help you in similar situations in the future.
