How Studying Hand Histories can Improve your Play

Poker players wishing to move up stakes or improve their win rates at current levels are always striving to improve their game. One effective way of improving your poker performance is to study hand histories from previous sessions. There are several ways in which a relatively small investment in time can help you both plug ‘leaks’ and identify ways in which to play hands more profitably.

This article looks at how studying poker hand histories can improve your play in several ways. Firstly we cover how to retrieve your hand history data. Next whether to look for specific hands while playing or simply review the entire session is discussed. Finally the types of situation which can be identified from your hand histories are covered.

Each poker site handles hand history data slightly differently. With many of the leading sites , like Full Tilt Poker, you will be able to automate the saving of them to your hard drive or request that they are e-mailed to you. Where this is not available you will need to cut-and-paste the raw data from the sites after each session or take screen shots of graphical hand histories for important hands. Which ever method your favored site uses it is worthwhile to take the time to save these histories in order to benefit from them later.
One effective method of benefiting from hand history data is to leave ‘notepad’ open on your computer while you play and then capture the hand history of any situation where you face an important decision. Big pots, whether you win or lose, are likely targets for capture.

Some players prefer to look through the entire hand history after a poker session. There are advantages to both the ‘big hands’ and ‘entire history’ methods. While looking through your whole session it will be possible to identify smaller leaks – for example where you raised before the flop and folded on a later street. If there are several similar situations you may be able to identify the circumstances and play differently in future. Saving a few small bets will add profit to your bottom line over the long term.
The ‘big decisions’ method enables you to look in detail at pots in which large sums were involved. Analyzing these hands will enable you to effectively look at the odds, outs and bet sizes involved on each street. Taking the time to do this will enable you to decide whether there were any signs that could allow you to narrow your opponent’s range of hands. It can also show you whether the bet sizes you chose at the time would maximize your profit from the hand over time.

Whichever method of studying your hand history you choose the important thing to remember is this: Winning poker players are those who take the time to make decisions which both win the most when they are ahead, and lose the least when behind in a hand. Studying your hand history data can enable you to effectively spot trends in both your own play and that of your opponents. When a similar situation occurs in the future you will be in a better position to make those situations more profitable – both when ahead and behind.

In conclusion, studying your hand histories can help to improve your poker game in several ways. Keeping track of big hands and important decisions can improve your reading of opponent’s hands and help to ensure you are playing big pots when ahead. Analyzing full session hand histories can help you identify a number of smaller situations and which hands you are playing profitably. Remember to look at hands from both the viewpoint of maximizing bets won and minimizing losses when behind – each will contribute significantly to your profits at the end of the session.