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 is no limit to the number of different spots you need to study.

This is where things get tricky. Let’s say it is a Monday morning and you are 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, and so on).

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 do not 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 is exactly what Jordan “BBZ” Drummond does for Ben Spragg in a database review session.

What Spraggy’s Database Revealed

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 is safe to assume, then, that this would be an area Spraggy would choose to study on his own.

But it turns out those stats were not 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 is 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 a specific element of big blind play to improve on.

The Lex Veldhuis Database Session

In a collaboration video between Twitch poker legend Lex Veldhuis and BBZ, the two break down Lex’s PokerTracker4 database by position in a recent hand sample to find areas for improvement. The 50-minute video shows you some general parameters to apply to your own database in order to identify where you are leaking at each position. BBZ points out areas like:

• Raise small blind open limp
• 3-bet frequencies from the blinds
• 3-bet vs steal
• Fold vs steal

It Is Not All About the Negatives

BBZ also points out that Spraggy is doing very well playing out of the small blind, and therefore this is not a spot he will 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.”

Getting Your Own Database Reviewed

If you are looking for ways to improve the efficiency of your own poker study, it might be time to get a database review. One of the first things a coach will want to do is take a look at your database stats. It can be a real eye-opener.

A database review gives you direction. Once you know which areas need the most work, you can structure your study sessions around fixing those specific leaks rather than guessing which spots to prioritize.