Players who want to advance and get better must master the technique of reviewing poker hands. Poker is a game of chance and skill at the same time. Therefore, the ability to analyze your hands separates a weak player from a competent player.
Reviewing a hand history and all of the decision points in the hand to seek any potential sub-optimal decision points is the process of hand analysis. Any dedicated poker player who wants to work on their game, uncover their leaks, and plug them, will benefit significantly from hand analysis.
By doing this, they will gradually improve their game and become stronger players. Learning poker theory and practicing at the tables are insufficient for improvement. The gap between theory and practice can be filled through hand analysis. It could be challenging and require discipline, but studying your hands and applying whatever you have learned from it to the game is essential.
Record your hands
Any poker player who plays the game must keep track of their Texas Holdem hands history. Live players should try to remember noteworthy hands to review later, even if this is sometimes not practicable.
Online poker gamers can use a variety of tools to help them with this. In any case, you should have a system to track the poker card that has been played.
Pick the Correct Hands to Analyze With
It’s essential to choose which to analyze. Finding your most frequent errors and those that cost you the most money will significantly improve your game and raise your win rate. You can start noting hands while the game is still in progress to work with later because you obviously cannot go through every hand that was recorded. Pick the ones that cost you a substantial quantity of chips or were your most challenging decisions.
Your initial objective can be to figure out how to avoid situations where you routinely make mistakes. Doing so will cut down on losing chips and lengthen the duration of your tournament.
Run the math
During the initial evaluation, you can also verify the precise pot sizes for each street. You can use this to determine whether your bet size was too small or if you made a mistake while picking your line.
You should download an equity calculator because you can’t question other players about every single hand. There are many excellent, free alternatives available online.
You’ll be able to decide whether to value bet, bluff, or merely call when you know your equity in hand. As you continue to see your equity calculated, you will eventually be able to perform more accurate calculations while playing in real time. When switching to live poker, this is helpful.
Concentrate on your opponents too
You can better understand your opponent’s playing style by looking over your hands. It’s crucial to assess their playing style and make notes that will be useful later in the game. When you categorize your opponents’ playing style as tight-aggressive, loose-aggressive, tight-passive, or loose-passive, your strategy will vary, guiding your decision on how aggressively to play after the flop and how much to wager.
You should make a note of how your opponents play and analyze them. It will allow you to determine your poker odds more precisely.
Finding the answers
There will come a time when you cannot understand a hand and need help from others. You can choose any of these to help you find answers to your hand analysis.
Poker forums
If you make the mistakes you have committed while reviewing your hand, you can always use an online forum to post your questions. When you post your query, be clear about it. Include all the details of the hand so that other people in the forum can provide the answers you need.
Hire a coach
It’s straightforward to analyze your poker hands and stop your leaks. You can evaluate your important hands and determine whether or not you played them correctly. However, there comes a time when you cannot understand your hand and cannot find the answers online. The best thing you can do is to hire a coach.
Hiring a coach can be expensive, but if you want to understand your hands better, you can benefit from this. Have plenty of hands samples with the same leak to present to your coach.
Find answers from articles and videos
You can also use Google or YouTube to help you understand more about your hands. You can find all sorts of information online, which is free. You can also ask people on forums to show you a website or video that can help with your question.
Take your time when reviewing hands
Making in-depth analyses right after your session is over is not a good idea because you’ll be exhausted. It could cause you to move more slowly and force you to define your opponents’ ranges incorrectly. However, it would be an excellent moment to select 5โ10 hands that you intend to review since in-depth research on a hand can sometimes take several days. Give yourself time, and create a schedule.
It’s quite doubtful that you will immediately be able to come up with the best solutions, but that is okay. If you work toward them, you will eventually acquire a skill set that will show a noticeable improvement in your gaming and outcomes.
Conclusion
The simplest method to improve at this is to begin marking hands for review, setting up a time for review sessions, and analyzing those hands. When you learn how to analyze your Texas Holdem poker hands, you will be able to find solutions to your errors and improve your strategies when you play again.