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Revenge! | Poker Podcast #118

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Should we want revenge?  This poker podcast is about dealing with troublesome and tilt-inducing players at the tables in a smarter and bankroll saving way.

In episode 117 I presented you with my 4 steps to H.A.N.D. Reading in Poker.

Revenge!

Doyle Brunson: “Poker is a war.  People pretend it is a game.”

To win this war of poker, you must understand your opponents.  You have to figure out their weaknesses and devise strategies to attack them.  But all the understanding in the world won’t help you if you allow your opponents to put you on tilt.

We’re at a table and a particular villain, let’s call him Victor, just seems to be holding over on us:

  • He keeps showing up at showdown with better hands than us.
  • He stays in longer than he should and turns or rivers his hand.
  • Victor seems to be able to read our soul and bully pots away from us.
  • He keeps stacking the fish at the tables, the same guys we’re targeting, and all the chips seem to be flowing his way.
  • He’s using his position and aggression to make life difficult on us.

Things are getting so bad that Victor’s putting us on tilt!  So, we end up giving in to our baser instincts and we start tilting and going for revenge.  “I’ll get my money back” is something keeps repeating in our thoughts.

This is a disaster in the making.  Instead of going for revenge, there are some better tactics to take.

Switch Seats

This is easy to do in a LIVE cash game setting, but not so easy online and impossible to do in a tourney or SNG.

As soon as a better seat opens to the left of Victor, pounce on it.  Toss a chip over there and say, “Dealer, seat change.”  You can even preempt it and tell the dealer ahead of time that you want a seat change, and when one becomes available, he’ll lock it up for you.

This might not relieve you entirely of Victor, but it’s a step in the right direction.  Having position will allow you to act after Victor and will make it hard for him to use his aggression against you.

If you’re playing online cash games, some sites might still allow you to leave a seat and click on another one to take it.  If your site allows it, do it.

Switch Tables

This is a no-go for tourneys and SNG’s, but in LIVE cash or online cash, this is piece of cake.  This will relieve you of that irksome Victor, unless he happens to be at the next online table.

Tighten Up

For some reason, this didn’t occur to me for a very long time.  If you’re getting bullied, tighten up your range (ditch the K7s and go with KJs+).

By having smaller, stronger ranges, you’re opening much less frequently and you’ll be able to defend vs Victor’s bullying aggression way more frequently.

Looking the numbers, let’s say you’ll only defend with a 5% range vs a 3bet.  If you’re opening a 20% range, you’re folding to the 3bet 75% of the time.  On the other hand, if you’re opening 10%, then you’re folding to the 3bet only 50% of the time.  He’ll have a much harder time 3bet bluffing you, and when he does, you’ll have a hand that can stand up to him half the time.

Take a Break

Sometimes all you need to get back in the correct head space is to take a quick breather.  Sitting out of the tables, hitting the head, going for a quick walk, doing some pushups, playing some Angry Birds, those are sometimes enough to clear the anger away and be able to get back to the business of poker.

Victor’s out, we’re in

So, if you’re getting owned by Victor, just avoid him.  If he’s in a hand, you’re out unless you’ve got a strong hand willing to battle him.  If he’s directly on your left, this is a tough one to accomplish, but, if he’s 2 or 3 spots away from you, this is definitely an option.

End the session early

For some of us, the only way to avoid this situation and to not tilt our stack off is to just end the session.  Of course, changing tables is a good option, but if we’ll still be tilting even without Victor at the table, then we’re just better off ending the session.

If this is the case for you and you find it hard to prevent the tilt from ruining your session, then I suggest you read Jared Tendler’s ‘The Mental Game of Poker.’  It is such a great book and an eye opener to dealing with tilt, anger, fear and everything else that leads us away from our A-game and causes us to stay and challenge Victor to get revenge on him.

Off the felt studying of Victor’s play

This is something that won’t help you in the session right now, but will help you the next time you deal with Victor.  Let’s talk about studying Victor’s play in two scenarios: LIVE games and online games

LIVE Games

The key to dissecting Victor’s LIVE game play is to take copious notes.  Pay attention to every hand he’s involved in and take note of bet sizings, the board cards, plays like c/r and donk leads and how often he seems to 3bet or cold call or open raise.  Of course, showdowns are extremely important.  So for every showdown you see, take note of what he has and the board cards along with his street by street action.

I’d recommend doing this surreptitiously.  Don’t let him know you’re noting his play.  You can take notes on every hand at the table with Evernote or another app, but just pay particular attention when he’s involved.

Noting that he likes to donk lead with fd’s or he calls down with 2nd pair or 3bets seemingly any Ace will help you understand his game and devise strategies to combat him.

The next day when you’ve had some time away from Victor, whip out the notes and start figuring out how Victor plays in certain spots, what he likes to do with certain hands and draws, and use this knowledge to formulate a plan for the next time you face him.

Online Games

Everything above is applicable to the online Victors of the world, but with online poker we’ve got a leg up on our studies… we’ve got PokerTracker 4.  This program does all of our note taking for us.  We can review every hand that we’ve seen Victor play.  All of his showdown hands are easily seen, as well as every check-raise, donk lead, 3bet and river bet.

We can filter through our database of hands on Victor and use it to devise strategies to turn the tables and start soul reading him.

Challenge

Here’s my challenge to you for this episode:  Make a plan now for how you’ll react the next time you’re being put on tilt by a player at your table.  Don’t wait for it to happen, because you know it will.  Plan now so you can react with a calm mind instead of tilting your stack off in pursuit of revenge.

Now it’s your turn to take action and do something positive for your poker game.

Up Next…

In podcast #119, I recorded a session commentary while playing one table of 25NL on ACR. I discussed blind play, post-flop bet sizing, exploiting opponents, PokerTracker4 and my Smart HUD.

Until next time, study smart, play much and make your next session the best one yet.

Hand Reading Step by Step | Poker Podcast #117

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I give you my 4 step process to effective hand reading.  This is one of the most important concepts in all of poker, and is useful in every form and stake you play.

In episode 116 I broke down the ever-important MTT/SNG play of 3bet rejamming.

What is Hand Reading and why should I care?

It’s the skill of deducing what hands our opponent likely has, and we use this information to exploit the opponent.  We’re either earning more chips because we can go for thinner or greater value, or we’re saving ourselves chips because we’re able to avoid paying our opponent off when we’re likely beat.

If we can put them on a narrow range of cards and make solid decisions based on this reasoning, we’ll be profiting like mad from this skill.

Some other benefits of good hand reading skills:

  • An increased understanding of your opponents.
  • You’re on your way to becoming the player you’re scared to face.

Hand Reading in 4 Steps

Before you start hand reading practice, you’re going to need 3 things:

  1. Hand histories from PT4 or another poker tracking software
  2. An equity calculating software, and I recommend Flopzilla
  3. My HAND Reading Steps

Hand reading is NOT about putting another player on one specific hand.  That’s a very tall order and doesn’t happen too often.  What we’re trying to do is put an opponent on a range of hands.  A range of hands is a set of hands that a player is likely holding based on the actions taken through the hand.

Great hand readers start by giving their opponent an accurate pre-flop range, then they’re able to narrow it down, sometimes by as much as 90%, based on actions through the streets.  At any given time they have this range held within their thoughts and they make +EV actions based on this range.

I developed my own four step HAND Reading Process, and it’s easy to remember because it’s using hand (H, A, N, D) as an acronym for the steps.  So, H.A.N.D. is History, Assign, Narrow and Destroy or Ditch (if necessary).

History

When you’re hand reading a specific opponent, your HISTORY with that opponent will factor greatly in your hand reading success.  You have to take into account many things:

  • The type of player they are
  • Any showdown hands of theirs you’ve seen
  • HUD stats you may have if playing online
  • Their general image at the table
  • How you think they view you

When you’re hand reading you need to get in their mindset.  Every player has logic for the plays they make, however twisted it might be.  It’s your job to find and understand their logic.

If you don’t know anything about the player, then population tendencies will help you understand them.  Base your assumptions on the type of player they are within your games.  In order to do this well, you need to pay attention to the players at your tables.  Don’t worry if you don’t really do that already.  The more you practice hand reading, the more you’ll notice that similar player types all make the same sorts of decisions.

Assign

It’s time to ASSIGN a pre-flop range to our opponent based on pre-flop actions.  Now, it’s tough to say, but we have to make assumptions when we assign a pre-flop range.

In poker we’re often working off of assumptions (hopefully they’re educated assumptions based on history and logic, but assumptions none the less).

Assigning an accurate pre-flop range is very important in hand reading, and the reason for this is the pre-flop range is as wide as their range will ever be.  If you put them on a range where the worst Aces they can have is AT+, then when they come out firing on the turn with the board as K235, you can’t put them on an A4 for a straight because that hand wasn’t in the pre-flop range you assigned.

This doesn’t mean we want to just assign a wide pre-flop range no matter what so we don’t miss any hands.  Use your noggin to assign a logical pre-flop range.

And, we want our range to be as small and as accurate as we can make it.  The less hands in their pre-flop range, the easier it is to hand read and narrow their range through the streets.  But if you err, err on the conservative side and assign a slightly wider range if you just can’t go too narrow.

Flopzilla

You should be doing your range assigning in Flopzilla.  All of this practice with Flopzilla and ranges gets easier as you go, and you’ll also get more accurate as you practice.

Remember what Vince Lombardi said: “Practice does not make perfect.  Only perfect practice makes perfect.”

One very important thing to remember about making assumptions and assigning a pre-flop range is that you’re going to be wrong very often.  I want you to expect it and accept it.  Don’t let it tilt you and don’t get angry, it’s part of the hand reading territory.  But, the more you work at it the better you’ll get.

Narrow

Now it’s time to NARROW that range as the hand progresses post-flop.

You narrow the opponent’s range based on their actions, bet sizing, board texture and just plain old logic.  Once again, perfect practice is going to be the real game changer here.  You’ll make plenty of mistakes when you start out narrowing ranges as the streets progress.  But, don’t beat yourself up over them.  Use your mistakes as fuel to push yourself to get better.

Checking and Calling

These most likely mean weakness.  Whether this weakness is a complete whiff, a draw or a weak made hand like TPWK or 2nd pair, it likely means they aren’t too happy with their hand.  If the board is super wet, like a 5s6s7s and they just call your cbet, then they could be as weak as an oesd, a one card flush draw, or even have 2p and just be scared that you have a flush or a set.  Of course, calling could be slow playing, and that’s why it’s crucial to take notes on what you’ve seen your opponents do in the past.  If they slow play every flopped made hand, then you can’t remove any flushes, straights or sets from their range.

Raising

This is often a show of strength.  A real indication of this is how passive or aggressive this player usually is.  If the player is a loose-passive calling station, then a raise often indicates strength.  If they’re a LAG and bet or raise a ton, it could mean either value raising or bluff raising.  But in general, raising is strength so you can often remove weaker hands and poor draws from their range.

Check Raising and Donk Leading

Now we get into the interesting, tricky plays.  It’s key to use stats to help you with these plays.  If their check-raise stat or donk lead stat is high, then they often use these plays as bluffs.  By high, I’m talking anything over 12% or so over a big sample.  Think about that for a second.  Check-raising and donk leading end up bloating the pot OOP.  How often do you really hit a flop hard enough to bloat the pot OOP?  Not often at all, maybe 10% of the time.  So, the further away from 10-12% they get, the more likely they use this play with whiffed hands and draws.  You can often remove TPWK and 2nd pair hands that would want to see a cheap showdown when they make these plays.  So you’d want to keep in their bluffs and value hands.

Destroy (or Ditch)

So now it’s time for the D in HAND: Destroy.  If we’ve done the first three steps correctly, we should have a narrow enough range with which we can make +EV plays against.

If their range is weak hand heavy, then a good sized bluff might be in order.  We’ll destroy them by making them fold a hand that could beat us if we get to showdown.

If their range is worse than our hand, but would be willing to call a value bet, then we can size it to give us max value when we have a reasonable assumption they’ll call based on the overall strength of the range we’ve assigned.

If they’ve only got the nuts or near nuts in their range, we know we can’t bluff them off the hand.  So, instead of destroy, it’s time to DITCH the hand and conserve our chips to fight another day.

Our hand reading skills help us to narrow their hand well enough to lead us to the most +EV decisions, whether that be to value bet, bluff, call to see showdown or fold our beaten hand.

The more perfect practice you put in, the better you’ll get at this skill and the more exploitive and +EV plays you’ll be making vs your opponents.

Challenge

Here’s my challenge to you for this episode:  Every day, do two hand reading hand history reviews on your own.  Do one from your own game play, and one from a poker forum or a Facebook group.  Use Flopzilla and the HAND Reading steps discussed today to put your opponent on a final range and make a decision as to what to do based on that final range.  Work hard and build those hand reading skills!

Now it’s your turn to take action and do something positive for your poker game.

Up Next…

In podcast #118, I’ll discuss how to handle the tilt-inducing players you often encounter in your online games.

Until next time, study smart, play much and make your next session the best one yet.

Breaking Down the Rejam | Poker Podcast #116

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I discuss the rejam in poker tourneys (MTT or SNG): 3bet re-shoving as a bluff to pickup valuable bets, blinds and antes when you’re short-stacked.

What is the Rejam?

The Rejam is a 3bet bluff shove over a pre-flop raiser with the intention of stealing his open, the blinds and antes.  This is an aggressive way to pick-up chips when you need them most because it’s normally done in MTT’s and SNG’s when stacks are typically around 15 to 25bb’s.

Example: you’re at 15bb’s, a timely 3bet rejam would add 5bb’s or 33% to your stack. And, if there’s an opener and a caller who are both capable (and likely) to fold, you’re looking at adding 7.5bb’s, which is 50% of your current 15bb stack.

The key part of rejamming is you’re doing it as a 3bet bluff.

Bluff 3bets

Quick question: What’s the goal of a bluff?  It’s to get your opp’s to fold better hands and win the pot outright then and there.

With that idea in mind, when you’re making your rejam, you want to be relatively sure your opponents will fold and award you the pot.  If there’s a good chance one or more will call, then it’s not an ideal rejam spot, and a different play may be called for.

The Perfect Rejamming Spot

Great opportunity: Near the money bubble and effective stacks are somewhere south of 25bb’s.  Our opponent opened the pot to 2.5bb’s from the CO.  He’s a loose-aggressive 28/22 player with an ATS at 45%.  His Fold to 3bet is at 75% over 8 samples.  We’re on the BTN, next to act after his open, and we look down to see A5s.  The blinds are both relatively nitty players and we only expect to see them give our 3bet bluff shove any kind of action with QQ+.

Breaking it down:

  • We’re near the bubble so most people are less willing to gamble for fear of busting out early.
  • We’re facing an open from a guy who steals a lot so he’s on a wide range that can’t defend well vs a 3bet shove.
  • The players in the blinds are nitty so we can expect folds from both.
  • Our hand has a very nice Ace blocker in it, and due to its suitedness and connectivity, it’s still got decent equity vs anyone who might call.

When should we consider rejamming?

When all the factors line up, it’s a great spot to rejam.  If one of the factors was off, like maybe the opener is a nit, or it was an UTG open, or the players in the blinds both had 50bb stacks and were calling stations, those might sway our decision.

When your stack is still healthy like this, and I consider 18bb’s to definitely be healthy near the bubble, you shouldn’t be taking chances with unprofitable rejam spots.  With a healthy stack like this, you want to take the low hanging fruit, the easy pickins, the best, most profitable rejams.  You’ve got the chips to hang on a bit longer and glide into the money or into a higher payout if you’re already in the money.

As your stack starts to dwindle, getting down to 15 then 10 then 8bb’s, you should be more inclined to rejam with each lost bb.

There are three major considerations for rejams: the opponents, the positions and your hand.

1. Consider the Opponents

Type

You’ll want to consider the type of player the open raiser is and how you think he’ll react to your 3bet shove.  High aggression levels in general make for pretty good targets b/c they’re opening frequently and therefor lightly, so look for these players.

You’ll want to consider the players yet to act in the same way.  How will they react to your 3bet shove?  Likely folds, great!  Likely callers, watch out.

Stats

For the players involved, there are some good HUD stats for you to utilize when thinking about how they’ll react to your rejam:

  • VPIP and PFR – high aggression is a likely target. So look for LAG’s and TAG’s who are likely opening wide.  Also, the wider the gap between VPIP and PFR the more likely they’ll call your 3bet shove.
  • Raise First In – especially by position over a good sample, this stat will tell you how often they open in the CO, BTN or any other position. The higher the better for rejamming over.
  • Fold to 3bet – of course, we love seeing a high fold to 3bet. This normally corresponds to higher levels of aggression as the wider they open, the less likely they have something to defend vs the 3bet.
  • Cold Call 3bet – this can be a helpful stat for determining how likely those still to act will cold call, as well as the original raiser’s view of 3bets. High cold call numbers should help to dissuade you from rejamming.

Stacks

Of course stacks are super important.  If the open raiser has a monster stack, don’t expect folds that often.  Same for those yet to act.  Conversely, super short stacks like sub 10bb’s are more likely to call as they may feel the need to gamble and double-up with anything playable.  Try to target mid-stacks that will be KO’d or really hurt by doubling you up.

2. Consider the Positions

Players – you want to think about the opener and yourself.  If the opener is UTG, then most likely he’s on a tighter range.  But if it’s the CO or the BTN, then they’re more likely to be stealing with a wider range.  Couple their position with their player type to get an idea of the opening range.  The bigger the gap between their opening range and their 3bet continuation range, the more likely they’ll be folding.

Your position is important because the earlier you are, the more players your 3bet has to get thru.  On the BTN you’ve only got the blinds and the original raiser to worry about.  But from UTG+2, you’ve got 7 players to worry about: MP, MP2, CO, BTN, SB, BB and the opener.  Your 3bet bluffs have a better chance of working in later position.

Tourney Situation – pre-ante you should be rejamming tighter because people are opening tighter as there’s not enough in the pot yet to fight over.  Near the bubble people are scared of busting and will fold more readily.  And in the money, people are often content with walking away with cash, so they’ll call you more readily again.  Just be sure to couple the tourney situation with the players to think about how their decisions will be affected.

3. Consider Your Hand

There are plenty of spots where you’ll find everything else lines up for the perfect rejam spot, but you’re dealt 32o.  If it’s perfect, it could be ATC perfect, so you can rejam with the 32o, the J4o, the 66 or the A8s.  Perfect is perfect, and if you expect them to fold often enough you can do it with ATC.

But, we also don’t want to abuse our rejamming powers because players will get tired of it and eventually look us up with an Ace or small-medium pp or KQ.  It’s best if we have some equity when called.  Suited connectors have great post-flop playability, as well as suited Aces and Kings, strong broadway hands and pp’s.

Blockers – Some great hands to include in your 3bet rejam range are Ace and King blocking hands.  The fact that you have an Ace or a King makes it a bit less likely that your opponents will have a hand worthy of calling your 3bet.

Break-even Math

We can’t talk about the profitability of rejamming without covering the math involved.  Let’s look at the break-even %, which tells you how often your bet needs to result in folds for it to b/e in profitability.  The b/e % is the amount of your bet divided by the total pot including your bet.  So looking at that 15bb shove example from earlier, you’re risking 15bb’s to win 5bb’s which includes the open raise, the blinds and antes.  So, 15 / 20 = 75%, so you need everyone to fold 75% to make this a b/e play.  If you think the opener is raising a wide range, but will only continue with QQ+ and AK, then he’s likely folding more than 75%.  And if you think the blinds are folding all but KK+, then it’s a profitable rejam at this sizing.

How do we study our rejamming opportunities?

For all the aspects of rejamming mentioned above, studying the following topics will really benefit your understanding of and the ability to spot great rejamming opportunities.

Player types and characteristics – I recommend you checkout podcast #289 where I dive into player types and give you a Poker Player Types PDF for quick reference on characteristics and ways to exploit them.  You also need to practice using the key stats I discussed to gain a deeper understanding of your opp’s.

Position – There’s a simple but great article on position I found at pokerlistings.com.  http://www.pokerlistings.com/strategy/how-not-to-suck-at-poker-play-in-position

Post-flop playability – read that article on post-flop playability at www.smartpokerstudy.com/pfplayability.  You can also use Flopzilla like I did to find out how often each hand hits flops on your own.  Actually, I suggest doing this on your own over going and reading the article.  You’ll learn more from doing this work on your own than reading what I say about it.

And on top of studying each of those topics, you should do hand history reviews.  You can do this for both online and LIVE hands played.

Online

It’s much easier reviewing online hands b/c of programs like PT4 that record every detail.  To filter for rejamming opportunities in MTT’s, here are the filters you’d use:

  • Set the “Effective Stack Size” under the “Pot size and stack depth- preflop” submenu for 15-25bb’s
  • Under “Actions and Opportunities” turn on “3bet (facing 2bet)” under “Reraise Opportunity”
  • This will show you all hands where you had the opp to 3bet, whether you did it or not.

LIVE

For LIVE hands, you just need to be very diligent and detailed in the notes you take.  Stack sizes, positions, hole cards, reads on opp’s and the stage of the tourney are all key things to record so you can “replay” the hand accurately after the tourney.

So, whether LIVE or online, once you have your hands to review, you need to think about the players involved, your position, the hand strength, and the break-even math and/or the EV and to determine if it’s truly a good spot to rejam profitably.  Use programs like Flopzilla to really nail down the opp’s opening and continuation ranges, and how well your actual hand would fare vs their continuation range.

Challenge

Here’s my challenge to you for this episode:  I want you to develop your rejamming skills.  At the beginning of your next tournament and everyone after that, be on the lookout for rejamming opportunities at 15-25bb effective stacks.  The more you actively try to search these out, the more you’ll find.  But I want you to make sure you’re picking the best spots, the low hanging fruit where all the factors align to make it a perfect rejamming spot.  The more you work on it, the sooner it will become an integral part of your MTT arsenal, so get to it!  And let me know how it goes, yo!

Now it’s your turn to take action and do something positive for your poker game.

Up Next…

In podcast #117, I’ll discuss something that will benefit every listener no matter what game or stakes you play… Hand Reading.

Until next time, study smart, play much and make your next session the best one yet.

Learning Poker by Teaching | Podcast #114

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In this episode I discuss how learning poker is a benefit of teaching poker to others. You help fellow players while you ingrain skills in your own game.

Episode 113 was the 2nd class in the Blind Play MED.  I talked about post-flop blind defense and the plays you can employ when OOP.

Learning Poker by Teaching

“While we teach, we learn.” – Seneca

When you teach a concept, there are 4 benefits we gain from it:

1. A greater understanding of the subject matter

In order to teach something, we should fully understand it.  The test of how well we understand a concept is if we can teach it to somebody so they can put it to use in their own lives.  If you can explain a poker concept like 3betting to your Aunt Susie well enough so she can apply it and blow the table away with well-timed and perfectly sized 3bets the first time she sits at a table, then you prolly understand the concept pretty well.  If you can teach your 10 year old nephew Johnny what an opening range is and how it should get wider as your position at the table gets later, and he fully understands and is able to stack you at the next family home game, then you must understand that concept as well.

When you’re responsible for teaching something to others, then you naturally work harder to understand the material.  There might be a few reasons for this such as not wanting to appear a fool, not wanting to fail in the teaching task or to simply do the best job you can and to give your students the best shot at understanding the material.  Whatever the reason, most teachers feel compelled to know the subject matter backwards and forwards.

The experience of teaching also builds your knowledge over time because of the questions and insights your students give you.  Students react to what you’re teaching in different ways.  Some will get it straight off the bat, and that’s great.  Others will have question after question or need a different explanation, one that appeals to them and that they will understand.  These interactions will cause you to think and explain the material in different ways.  This re-thinking of ideas and creating different explanations will further help you to ingrain the material in your brain.

2. Improved social and communication skills

As a teacher, you’re working with others all the time, so social and communication skills will naturally improve.  And this is obvious, in order to communicate ideas, the person you’re speaking to needs to understand what you’re saying and it’s helpful if they can relate to you.  If they don’t, you’re forced to change what you’re saying or act differently in order to find a way for them to understand.  The practice of teaching will make you very good at communicating your ideas to others.

3. Increased self-esteem and self-confidence

When you’re teaching, the element of emotions comes into play.  You don’t want to be embarrassed by any lack of knowledge and conversely, you feel a sense of satisfaction and a bump in pride when your students understand a concept and are able to put it to use in their game.  Successfully teaching something is validation for all the hard work you’ve put into studying the topic for yourself.  So, the emotions involved in teaching help you to work harder to understand the material.

4. Personal growth through challenging oneself

This last benefit is very simple; the more you do, the more you can do.  When you challenge yourself to do new things, the better you get at doing things you haven’t done before.  I started this whole thing off with writing a blog.  Never wrote one before, but I wrote papers in high school and college, so I knew the basics of communicating through the written word.  The blog led to making some videos.  Never did those before, but just got started and now I do poker training videos.  This led to the podcast.  Always loved podcasts, never did one before, but made my first podcast less than a year ago and I’m still going strong.  Haven’t written a book before, but I’m writing my first one now.

All of these things are new to me, and doing one led to the next which led to the next and so on.  If you’ve never taught before and don’t know how, so what?  You’ve had teachers, experienced poker studying and communicating your thoughts, so just challenge yourself to something new and do it!

A study

There was a study put out in a publication called ‘Memory and Cognition’ back in 2014 by a few different researchers:

“In two experiments, participants studied passages either in preparation for a later test or in preparation for teaching the passage to another student who would then be tested. In reality, all participants were tested, and no one actually engaged in teaching. Participants expecting to teach produced more complete and better organized free recall of the passage (Experiment 1) and, in general, correctly answered more questions about the passage than did participants expecting a test (Experiment 1), particularly questions covering main points (Experiment 2), consistent with their having engaged in more effective learning strategies. Instilling an expectation to teach thus seems to be a simple, inexpensive intervention with the potential to increase learning efficiency at home and in the classroom.”

Implications

First off, it makes total sense to me because ever since I started the blog and podcast, I study things much more deeply and take very detailed notes because I know I’m going to use my studies to teach others at some point.  So, if all of you listening want to push yourselves to study better and to recall more of what you study, do your studies with the intent of teaching it to others.

Another implication is that the way many of us study probably isn’t helping much.  If studying to teach is best, and studying to test is good but not as good, then how good can it be to study just because we feel we have to?  Many of us poker players watch videos without taking notes, we do half-hearted hand history reviews, read books or articles without planning on how to put to use what we’re reading… basically we’re lazy poker studiers.  We aren’t being tested on the stuff we study… you could consider playing being a test of our knowledge, but we don’t know when our studies of bubble dynamics, short stacked play, double-barreling or anything else will be used in a poker session.

Recommendation: Study With Intent to Teach

This will get your mind working it’s hardest, will keep you and your note taking organized, and will lead to better understanding.  If you also make it a goal of putting yourself out there and making a video or writing a blog post or making an epic forum post for every topic you study, you’ll learn that info all the better and you’ll have increased recall and be a stronger player for it.

How you can practice teaching poker

Here are some areas where you can teach others what you know about poker:

Post in forums

  • Hit up the forums of your choice and find some posts with questions to answer.
  • Think through the question you want to answer and answer it as completely as possible. Don’t just give the answer that first comes to your dome.
  • Treat your answer like it’s THE ANSWER – don’t do those quick one line responses that you often see in forums
  • Respond to responses – you’ll find that others will see things you didn’t see

Lead Study Groups

  • Start a poker study group with friends or acquaintances you know from Facebook.
  • It can by via Skype, Google Hangout, in-person, whatever.
  • Since you’re the one who started it, act as if you’re the organizer. Create topics of study and come to each session fully prepared to teach the subject matter.
  • Don’t act like the teacher, though. You want to express all of your opinions and ideas, but you aren’t giving a lecture.  Start with one point at a time and elicit feedback and thoughts from others.
  • If you’re leading a study session all about double-barreling for example, come prepared with 2 or 3 hands to discuss. You should have your thoughts fully put together and listed out so you can hit every point.  Know these hands inside and out, run the math and do the Flopzilla work ahead of time.  Come prepared with your own questions as well.
  • At every study session, you should be the most prepared out of all the participants just as if you were the teacher. Like I mentioned before from that research study, if you prepare with the idea of having to teach it in mind, you’ll learn the subject matter better than if you were studying to take a test.

Make Videos

  • This might be a scary thing, to make videos and put your own hand histories and thoughts out there for others to watch and comment on, but so what. Just do it!
  • Create your own YouTube channel and start making videos. Actually, you don’t even have to make a YouTube channel.  Put your first video up in the SPS Facebook Group.  Everyone there is pretty cool and any kind of feedback you get will only help to improve your game and the understanding of the concept you teach.
  • Get something like OBS (Open Broadcaster Software), a free software for recording your screen and microphone, and make your first video.
  • Plan the concept you want to teach, and you can even fully script it if you want. Record your screen and your microphone, watch the video to make sure there are no mistakes, then put it out in the world for others to see and give you feedback on.

Challenge

Here’s my challenge to you for this episode:  Make a poker strategy video on any concept you feel confident in, and post it in the SPS Facebook Group.  Just do it, poker people!  It can be any concept you want and as short or as long as you want it to be, your goal is to simply teach a concept.  Maybe it’s about cbetting profitably, or 3betting or defending the blinds.  Whatever the topic, just create a video to teach your knowledge to others.  Treat this as a growth opportunity; put yourself out there and learn from doing something new.

Now it’s your turn to take action and do something positive for your poker game.