Which areas of poker do you need to study the most?

No limit hold’em is one of the most complex games ever invented and as a result, there’s no limit to the number of different spots we need to study.

This is where things get tricky. Let’s say it’s a Monday morning and you’re putting together a study schedule for the week. You list a bunch of spots and allocate one to each day (for example, early position push/fold on a Monday, blind vs blind on a Tuesday etc.).

Beautiful. But are those really the spots you need to be working on? Perhaps you have significant leaks in other areas that really need to be fixed, but you just don’t know about them.

The best way to find out which areas you need to study is to have a coach or a player better than yourself look through your database in order to identify the areas you need to work on the most.

That’s exactly what Jordan ‘bigbluffzinc’ Drummond does for Ben Spragg in the Spraggy Bundle.

Right off the bat, BBZ mentions how Spraggy had predicted that his cutoff and button raise first in (RFI) stats would probably be too tight. It’s safe to assume, then, that this would be an area Spraggy would choose to study on his own.

But it turns out those stats weren’t too tight at all. “Those numbers look fine,” BBZ tells him. “That’s definitely an improvement from previous [coaching sessions].”

This frees Spraggy up to focus on positions and spots where he’s not performing as well.

When looking over Spraggy’s win rate by position, one stat, in particular, stands out to BBZ.

“The big blind win rate stands out as being particularly bad,” he says. “This should be an area to focus on.”

So instead of studying a different spot every day and running the risk of the information not sinking in, in this instance, it would be better for Spraggy to focus on studying big blind play only throughout his next few study sessions.

BBZ also points out that Spraggy’s ‘big blind raise vs small blind limp’ stat is too tight for his liking, so instantly Spraggy now has an element of big blind play to improve on.

Check out our article: How to use a poker HUD

It’s not all about the negatives, however. BBZ also points out that Spraggy is doing very well playing out of the small blind, and therefore this isn’t a spot he’ll need to study much in the near future.

“That’s nice to hear,” Spraggy says at the end of the 17-minute Database Review video. “But I want to get to the bottom of how we can do them better.”

Check out our article: How your HUD informs your study of poker charts

GETTING YOUR DATABASE REVIEWED

If you’re looking for ways to improve the efficiency of your own poker study, it might be time to book a database review for yourself.

You can book a one-on-one coaching session with any of the BBZ Poker coaches and one of the first things they’ll want to do is take a look at your database stats.

It can be a real eye-opener.