Learning from your own play, and not just your reading...

[elonkra]

I have no idea how I've made money playing poker over the course of the one year I've been playing online. I just started recording my play for the first time today, and I decided to set up a column in my spreadsheet for notes about bad plays I make during each tourney so that I might force myself to learn a little something from each game that I play, whether I win or lose.

I won the first game I recorded today, but could've easily lost the tourney late in the game when I raised AQ suited out of position preflop instead of pushing, in spite of the fact that I pushed the last 55% of my chips in on a postflop bluff when I was first to act and the flop missed me w/3 rags. Got called by 99, and an ace luckily fell on the turn.

Finished 6th in the second game I recorded, because I made an awful play when I went all-in w/88 after a string of very agressive play:

The game was six-handed
The blinds were $100/$200
I was in a very comfortable 2nd place w/roughly $3400
I was first to enter from the cutoff position (3 left to act)
Chipleader was on the button and called me with his JJ that held up.

Does anyone else make these sorts of notes? Had I not noted these things in my records, I would have forgotten about my screwup in the game I won after my two pair held up, and probably not bothered to think about exactly how I screwed up in the second game, chalking it up instead to the bad luck of having a guy with JJ on the button. Hopefully, making these notes will improve my play and force me to try to learn more from my own awful rookie mistakes instead of thinking I can just soak it all in by reading HOH and 2+2. Anyone have a different routine for learning from their own play that they find helpful? It seems like it'd be hard, for example, to learn and 4-table at the same time w/o some type of reflection. Is it absolutely necessary to review hand histories, for example? I don't even know how or whether you can retreive them from UB (where I just started playing), and I've never really bothered to pore through my hand histories in the past.

Any input?

[tjh]

When I started to track my cashflow in a serious manner I also put all my notes in one place and started a poker diary. I am playing 100 SNG's one table at time, "how old fashioned" and my notes are full of stuff like that. Not aggressive enough, not tight enough, aggression has become a leak, sieze opportunity, fear the flush, etc.

John Vorhaus in his books recommend taking notes and keeping a diary.

I slowed down on adding to the journal as I settled into a playing style and now the biggest method of communicating with myself is post-it notes on the computer.

The required post-it for begginers has got to be one that just says "FOLD MORE" and nothing else, that was my first and biggest leak.

My most recent post-its and the two that are on my monitor right now are
"Aggression has become a leak"
and
"Tighter is Better"
A friend or housemate added
"always ? along with a /images/graemlins/smirk.gif " to that one ..


--
tjh

[michw]

I keep track of all my S&G's with an excel spreadsheet. I highlight the tournies that I made an obviously bad, inexcusable decision. I then write a 1 or 2 sentences describing my idiocy and review these notes on occasion. I see 8 tournies highlighted out of my last 100 or so. I've probably made more terrible decisions, but these are the ones I've caught and recorded. The tough part for me is focusing on the decision made rather than the results. This is probably an impossible or burdensome task for the multi-tabling pros out there.

[Blarg]

The more process of writing forces thinking. A famous author once wrote, "I write so that I know what I think."

Writing about anything in your life at all helps to give you a much better understanding of it, poker included. It brings the ordinary background of life to full conscious attention. That does an enormous amount to help commit it to memory, too. Especially if you want it to be a somewhat understandable read later, when you don't remember each and every particular, or if you want to write clearly enough to be understood by others. Writing that way helps refine your understanding and even juggle it around a bit, exposing it to light differently, so that you sometimes wind up opening up your understanding and getting more out of ideas and memories you think are so simple or firmly set that they've got no more to give. Writing can deepen understanding, because writing is itself part of a learning process.

Keep it up. One good idea or hand example written about and fully considered can teach you more than a thousand games played. One kept idea is as good as a book.