One of the most powerful means of improving your game, and one that most players really don’t take advantage of properly, is taping your own sessions and then going over them with other players. In other words, you’re pretending that you’re making a training video, with your live comments included in the audio. You don’t have to make a lot of these videos, but they are certainly worth the effort. The benefits aren’t so much watching yourself play as looking at your play from the view of instructing, which can cause you to think about what you’re doing from a third party perspective and provide insights you would not have gained otherwise.
Another popular tool that a lot of players use is Poker Stove, where you can plug in ranges and get the program to assign equity percentages. This can be helpful with some situations, and it’s a good educational tool at times, but it’s not something I’d spend a great deal of time with. Some players love it, and will play around with it at great length. While it has its place, you always have to look at your study time in terms of getting the most done, and single hand studies can certainly be overdone. If you’re a very advanced player, PokerStove is an invaluable tool.
The same benefit can be gained from writing instructional articles, and what happens here is that you push yourself to think a little more deeply about the material than you would have otherwise. It doesn’t matter if the work ever gets published, as it’s the process itself that provides the benefits. This endeavor is highly underrated generally and regardless of your level of advancement it’s something definitely worth doing. While this isn’t reviewing your own play in a technical sense, it is reviewing your own thoughts and knowledge about the game, and that’s a very important part of the process.
Finally, having someone else to go over your own play with you, whether it’s a friend, a peer review group, or a coach, is very important as well. Ideally, you get yourself in a situation where you both describe and defend your thinking, and that in itself can be of significant benefit, in addition to getting the ideas and opinions of other players. This can be in the format of discussing actual hands or it can be more of a theoretical discussion. Very few players have much interest in discussing poker theory, but this is their misfortune, and if you can find some folks who have opened their minds enough to try to get beyond standard play and look for better approaches to the game then you’re really on to something good.
Improving at poker is something that we all know we must do, yet there are so many players who are so focused on playing that they end up depriving themselves of the enormous potential benefits of looking to improve through work away from the table. Reviewing your own play effectively is the cornerstone of this and must not be neglected. While profit per a given time period is important, it’s critical to look at the long run. Spend the right amount of time on improving, and do so in the most effective manner possible.
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