Reviewing your game
A very important part of becoming a better poker player is to constantly review your own game. Many players are inclined to neglect this since hitting the tables to play another session tends to be more fun. The fact is that regularly reviewing your past hands and tendencies is very likely to actually make your future sessions more enjoyable, simply for the fact that you will end up improving your win rate. After all, most poker players strive to win as much money as possible.
As PokerOffice users, this is something you already understand and you have the proper equipment to effectively look through your historical hands and results. Below, I will go through one way of doing so.
A look on Starting hands
Many players know which starting hands to actually play, but the tricky part is to play them correctly. The first and most obvious way is to check how much you’re winning or losing with your different starting hands.
In PokerOffice, you can easily see all of your different starting hands displayed in the Starting Hands table on the Overview tab. Now, there are a lot of different hand categories you might want to analyze; big pairs, small pairs, suited connectors, hands including an ace, and so on. As an example, let’s focus on suited connectors.
To get a better overview, I recommend opening up the filter tool which is opened by hitting the icon with a little funnel on it, located next to the Date Filter (hover it with your mouse cursor and a tool tip reading “Display and Edit Ring Game Filters” will show up). Now continue to the Hole Cards tab and on the right hand side hit the On button next to Suited Connectors. Just like that, all your suited connectors will be automatically highlighted in the starting hands table. Now hit the OK button to filter out the hands from your database.
In the Starting Hands table on the overview tab, you will now see all your suited connectors. Sort the hands by hitting $Won in the menu. In this example I notice that I’m not doing well with 87s, which is a hand that, if played correctly, should be able to show a profit.
Am I doing something wrong or is this just a case of bad luck?
As we all know, poker is a game played long term and statistical fluctuations are to be expected and because of this you need a fairly large sample size to be certain that you’re doing something right or wrong. To figure this out, look into the Game Details table, located right below the Starting Hands Table. Then press Profit in the menu of the table to sort your losing pots from biggest to smallest, click on the first row in the table, hold down your keyboard’s Shift button and then click the 10th hand in the list. Now right-click inside the highlighted area and choose Replay Selected Hands.
Once the Replayer has started, go through your losing hands to figure out if you’ve played them bad or if you’ve simply experienced a streak of bad luck. If you put a lot of money into the pots when behind, then you need to consider this a leak and adjust properly in the future. Have you hit good hands and others have hit even better, or maybe you’ve gotten your money in good but others have simply hit lucky hands, then consider it to be variance and continue to analyze other hands.
Still can’t figure out why you’re doing badly with the starting hand?
If you haven’t gotten a good idea of what’s wrong after looking through the hands in the Replayer, then maybe you’re simply playing the hands in the wrong situations. Have a look at the Positions tab in PokerOffice, and check how your hand is doing in the different positions. In my example I notice that I’m doing really well in the Cutoff and Button but losing a lot of money from the early positions. This is a clear indication that I should consider only playing the hands in more favorable positions.
Yet another way of analyzing leaks with certain hands (or all hands) is to use the additional Ring Game filters. You can for example filter out the situation in which you raised preflop or called preflop. This should also indicate positive and negative tendencies. This is more on the advanced side though, and generally requires a very large sample of hands.
Using PokerOffice to review your game - Part one: Starting Hands
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