Analyzing your playing sessions

Before diving into some meatier advice about your Texas hold’em game, I want to impress on you the importance of analyzing your playing sessions. Critical self-analysis of your game is the key to becoming a better player. Professional athletes look at video of themselves so as to spot imperfections in their physical performances, and you will need to have a mental video camera running in your head to track yourself.

After a session of play, you need to reflect upon the pots that you won and the pots that you lost. Although it’s always great to win a pot, winning does not automatically mean that you made the best decision. Maybe you just got lucky and your reckless ill-advised play will turn out to be a permanent hole in your wallet for the long term. Some pots that you win, you probably should not have won, so in the long run you will lose money if you keep pursuing inappropriately risky hands.

When you enter the analysis stage, you need to take a cold hard look at your playing decisions. This is how you learn and improve.

In consideration of pots that you won, ask yourself questions like these:

1. What category was my hand in (super-premium, premium, sub-premium, or poor)?

2. Was I taking my position into account when I made my first bet?

3. Was I playing tight or loose?

4. How much consideration did I give to the betting behavior of my opponents?

5. Did I have a good idea of what my opponents’ hands were?

6. Did I have a winning hand at the flop? Turn? River?

7. Could I have generated more action in the pot by raising, by only calling, or by checking?

On pots that you lost, you will ask yourself many of the same questions as above but also:

1. At what point do I think I made a mistake?

2. Did I count my outs? How many were there?

3. What was the chance that my hand could have won?

4. Did I think about how many cards were out there that could beat me?

5. Why didn’t I fold?

6. What made me decide I should play the hand at all? (Be honest.)

As you learn from your growing experience, try to identify those actions you took that were definitive to your success or failure. Which bets or raises benefited you the most? Did you find that you were playing fewer hands but winning more? Although there is always going to be variations in how many good hands you get and how many people bet against you, you should seek to deploy your precious bankroll in an efficient manner.

Continue: Player categories