Analyzing Your Play: statistics, record keeping, coaching

Most players dedicated to the game are constantly analyzing their play, and that’s the right thing to do if you plan to continue studying.

There’s a number of ways to perform this. Let’s take a look at three of them focusing on their strong and weak points. We’ll consider record keeping, coaching and the use of statistics.

Record Keeping

Many players keep records of their games including where they played, for how long, what the stakes were, what type of the game it was, and the most important point – how much they won or lost. Certainly, this method has its advantages, especially if compared to keeping record on each and everything. Yet, based on their records many players tend to simplify the point and conclude one of the following:

• “I’m winning which means I am a great poker player”.
• “I’m losing which means I am a fish”.

Poker is a complex game that includes various types of actions that may lead to the most unexpected results. One player has recently said that after he began to pay more attention to his rivals’ play, his poker results have improved. His “epiphany” was the result of him realizing that he used to play at about eight poker tables at the same time online.

When playing at such number of tables, it’s quite a challenge to pay attention to your rivals play. The best you can do in this situation is to focus on your hand and position. That player believed that his results were suffering due to the fact, that he was not focused on his rivals.

This guy is an experienced player, so he cut the number of tables he was playing at and went into reading his rivals, despite the fact he plays online poker. No matter whether on the internet or at the real table, studying your rivals is a key point not to be missed. As soon as the guy got focused on his rivals, his profits increased drastically, therefore he believes that this was his problem.

While focusing on rivals’ play should help improve your game, is it really so important? Maybe and maybe not! In our opinion, you can’t be 100% sure that there’s a course of actions that will lead to a complete success. With so many poker varieties, one should be very careful when drawing conclusions. Some situations in poker are hard to explain, but this doesn’t mean you are weak. You can’t know everything. If you learn to be flexible and adapt to different game styles, you'll definitely start getting higher profits.

Statistics

By keeping game records for further analyzing you’ll know whether you’re winning or losing. Statistics is something that may complete your story. For instance, if you are winning, does that mean that you don’t need to work on your game anymore? Well, you know the answer: you should never stop learning poker.

With the introduction of online poker, many statistic tools became available that will help you analyze your game. There are various paid services that will monitor your statistics and help you understand, where you are doing well and what you need to pay attention to. Academy of Poker provides Holdem Manager program for its players. Contact our managers and get it for free.

If you play online poker, you should be able to use services that are offered for free. Since you can be playing in different rooms, statistics they provide will differ as well. All the details on this issue you can learn from our managers. Different services usually collect different statistics, for example, the number of hands played from the blinds or from any other positions. They also take into account the number of pots won at the showdown and the number of pots won without a showdown.

Using such poker programs’ statistics can be really valuable in the long run. This will help you analyze your game on a regular basis. Are you playing more hands than previously? Maybe you’re losing too much? Maybe you’ve become less aggressive and are calling too often? These statistics don’t guarantee clear answers to all your questions, but they will give you food for thought when you are analyzing your game. So, it’s a very useful tool. If you’re still not taking advantage of such a service, then start doing it.

Coaching

On Academy of Poker website, you can find coaches available to help you analyze your game. Along with the growing popularity of poker, a number of seminars and streams have appeared where coaches are teaching the game or simply parsing your play focusing on mistakes made. Since this approach has a significant value, it is not always offered for free. Yet, we do offer an opportunity to study FREE OF CHARGE! Contact our managers to learn more.

Your main and most important coach is yourself. If you’ve decided to improve your poker skills, you’ll have to work hard. You will need to read poker literature and study poker lessons available on the Academy website along with analyzing your hands. Be honest with yourself and set goals that will help you improve your game.

Make your own list of important poker attributes to monitor on its basis whether you are getting improved or not. Here is a short list you can use as an example, but remember that people differ, so it’s important to try to make your own list.

• Discipline
• Monitoring your rivals timing
• Monitoring your table image
• Using your table image
• Analyzing hands’ range of your rivals

These are the points that come immediately to mind. Add your own ones and be honest with yourself. Use any analysis method to understand what needs your special attention. The key point in analyzing your game is being honest with yourself, as you’re the coach!

And now it’s time to learn how to build your bankroll.