Introduction
As part of the free NLHE Foundations Course, I’ve been providing a “hold my hand” approach to different types of analysis that you can do to learn about poker. If you want to take part, go to the link above, post in the thread, and I’ll put you on a PMs list for people who want to receive exclusive content that won’t be posted anywhere else. I’ll also help you with anything you need through this course as much as I can.
With that out of the way, this is a supplement to the main coursework where I’m going to provide an answer to a number of questions that I’ve received via PMs.
How to Improve
I’m often asked about what we want to achieve with this course in terms of how you can use it to improve. What you need to be doing is the following:
- Learning how to study specific opponents to learn their tendencies.
- Generalize those tendencies so that you can apply them to other opponents at the tables.
- Learning how to study specific situations that come up in hands.
- Generalize what you learn from that study to apply at the tables.
That’s really all there is to it in terms of the actual goals of the NLHE Foundations Course.
How to Put This to Use
That sounds all well and good, but what can you specifically do to put this stuff to use and grow as a player. The first thing you can do is go through each of the threads for the lessons where players have done the analysis I’ve asked for and do your own analysis based on the information they give you. Second, you can do more than the bare minimum for the homework. Third, you can start doing the same kind of analysis that we’ve been doing on other types of situations instead of waiting for me to tell you to do it.
Here are some exampes of some spots you can analyze:
- How does an opponent play the flop after calling with in the big blind when facing a SB raise?
- What does the opponent limp with after limpers pre-flop?
- What do different bet sizes mean on the flop on different flop textures for this opponent?
You can do this analysis following the same process we’ve done before. You look at the guy’s stats, and you search for every hand that’s went to showdown when that happened. You break those hands up into categories that make sense (flop texture, bet size, position, etc.), and then you make generalizations based on those patterns. Then you compare those generalizations to their stats to see if you can spot patterns that happen for multiple players.
Once you do that, when you’re at the table, you’ll be able to pull a wealth of knowledge from just seeing a player’s stats and maybe one or two hands going to showdown in certain spots.
Now go into the thread for this supplement and ask questions and post about what you think about this. I’m looking forward to reading the responses on this one.
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