Method for "studying" a poker book...

[sethypooh21]

So, I'm on a complete back to basics kick, and am rereading many of the educational materials. First time through I made the mistake of going straight to HPFAP, and WHOA BOY...anyway, after a year of being a profitable player, I've decided to dial in and really start moving up limits, and I think this probably requires some refinements to my game (this forum has certainly helped, my VPIP has dropped almost %10 in the month or so I've been coming here).

Refinement requires study, and study means books. First of all, which would you all recomend going back through first. Like I say, I'm a winning layer though most of my experience is NL/tourney holdem. Done with WLH, I think I'm well past its advice. What next? I've seen various recomendations for TOP, SSHE, ITH, and MLH (all of which I've read or skimmed).

And does anyone else have a method for study? Do you actually sit down and outline the concepts as you are reading (or afterwords)? I want to RETAIN this knowledge so I can better apply it.

Thanks in advance.

[uuDevil]

For reading order, the Clarkmeister rotation makes sense to me.

For study, try Lori's method.

[Leavenfish]

"And does anyone else have a method for study? "

This may sound lame to some, but since internet play is so fast and it's all to easy to play by rote, I find playing Wilson's Texas Holdem Turbo and at critical moments in a hand, taking the time to consult a book about what to do...to be helpful in ingraining a concept into my think little head.

[sprmario]

i'm doing something similar. I've got a lot of books. When I started playing, some friends who have played a long time and are winning players recommended I read the books so I went out and bought them. I haven't read all of them through seriously, but I am going through them now in the following order very seriously and highlighting and marking up pages that I find to be of particular value.

1. ITH
2. ToP
3. SSH
4. HFAP

I then plan to read super system 2 when that comes out.

My plan is to spend around 1 hour per night reading. I highlight and mark up the book where I see concepts that I have not applied already. I also mark up explanations for concepts that I don't think I had a good understanding about.

I'm giving SSH a read first because I just got it and I have read the others already... i'm then going to go back and read all 4 in that order and really study them.

[sethypooh21]

[ QUOTE ]
My plan is to spend around 1 hour per night reading. I highlight and mark up the book where I see concepts that I have not applied already. I also mark up explanations for concepts that I don't think I had a good understanding about.


[/ QUOTE ]

Ahhh, thank you this makes sense. Are you planning on doing something like playing for an hour, reading for an hour and then playing for an hour?

[sprmario]

Yeah I play first and then take a break then I usually read right before going to bed. I make comments in the margins and mark particularly insightful comments there.

[AliasMrJones]

For low limit online play (like the 2/4 and 3/6 I play) SSH is a must read and if anyone were playing these limits, I'd suggest they read it next if they haven't already.

The method I use to study a poker book is to read it all the way through once to get some of the overall concepts, then go back a section at a time. Read a section trying to really concentrate on what that section is trying to teach and thinking about how to incorporate that into my game. Then play some poker playing my typical game, except trying to focus on the times that particular concept comes up and really trying to implement what I've read. Then go back and read another section and then play, again trying to focus on the particular concept of the section I've just read.

If I'm re-reading a book (and I tend to cycle through my poker books which include HEP, WLLH, TPFAP, HPFAP, TOP and now SSH) I skip initial straight through read and just go to sections that I want to work on, but follow the same pattern.

I find that by focusing on one particular area with reading and then trying to implement while playing I am better able to integrate the concepts into my game and retain the information.

When I say "a section" what I mean really depends on the book. It might be a whole chapter, or it might be just a part of a chapter. The main thing is to take it in small enough bites that you can really focus on and read, play, read, play, read, play.

[Blarg]

I really like flashcards. When you write them, you have to do a lot of important key things that really drive home ideas.

You have to select ideas and clearly delineate them in your mind. You need a quick, very sharp take on a subject. That's hard to do with something as complex as poker, that has so many ways each subject relates to another. You really have to refine and focus your understanding of strategic concepts to separate them from each other, and then do a lot more of the same to get your thoughts down to flashcard size. You have to think harder, and think better. You can't skate over the material and give the old teenager's "Yeah, yeah, yeah" that it's extremely easy to do consciously or unconsciously. You have to care, in a way. Caring makes a big difference in memorization, and makes all learning easier.

Dorothy Parker I think said something like, "I write to know what I think." After you get your thoughts organized and delineated and workable, you're still not done. Writing them out shows you where your thoughts comes up shorter than you might have guessed. And it's a tremendous memory booster because it raises your subject to the very height of your attention. It's worth much more than reading often is, which can just be a skim or feel much deeper than it is. Writing is grunt work; you really have to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty.

Reading, thinking, writing, all evolve from each other and take you a step further along the same path. Writing out complex concepts in a form short and clear enough to fit on a flashcard means you really have to have given the subject clear, useful thought. Maybe even have penetrated into it quite well.

The form of flashcards I use is basically that one side quizzes you, giving you a chance to think and fail, and the other side has your answer. The basic set-up.

You can be creative with poker flashcards. You can color code them and work on one set at a time when you feel that certain areas need work, or shuffle them together when you just want a general review. You can ask simple questions, like what are your odds to make a flush on the next card when you have four to a suit on the flop. Or ask questions that require more complex thinking or memorization, like what are some reasons to not raise when you have the best hand(Ed's Miller's Two Overpair Hands comes to mind), and that address subjects rather just require spitting out something quick and simple. And you can get tricky, designing questions that can't be fully answered if you forget to embed exceptions-to-the rule in your answer.

Really, doing this successfully depends a lot upon your taking it seriously and having a desire to do it. You get out of it proportionately what you put into it. By the time you've gotten a nice stack of quality flashcards written up, you'll have done a lot more thinking about material you've read and want to plant firmly in your brain than you would have just by reading alone, and you'll reap rewards in accordance therewith.

And that's before you even actually use the darn flashcards in the first place!

Flashcards are ideal for learning because long-term memory often requires frequent repetition over a period of days. You can't read books easily over and over in short periods of time, or even carry them around everywhere to do it. But you can do that with flashcards. And you can use color-coding or just quickly run your thumb over a pack of flashcards to pick out what you want to study one day and have an especially concentrated emphasis on certain topics available for study in no time at all.

Being able to study for three or four minutes many times throughout the day can burn concepts into your mind much better than sitting down and spending hours on a book at a time, but not doing it nearly so often. That's why material that is crammed for sometimes is very hard to remember on exams and then leaps out of the mind right after a test never to return, but study that accumulates and is leisurely reviewed throughout a school semester can often easily be recalled in tests and stays available long after one has already finished a class.

That's how memory works, so it's best to play to its strengths.

There's my flashcard lecture again. If you hate 'em, you hate 'em. But it's worth reconsidering. I used to hate them because I somehow felt only idiots needed them. I saw a lot of lousy pre-made ones growing up. But when you make them yourself, they can come out really well, and long before you've actually even used them the first time, you've done your memory and understanding a lot of good just by getting to the point where the cards are ready to use. And it just gets better from there.

[Choven]

If you are learning the starting hand requirements (grouping and what to do in each position according to HPFAP), I suggest something other than flashcards. Playing online, I found it too time consuming to flip through a book to figure out how I should play a particular hand preflop. Instead, I made a color coded chart with all of the starting hands and what you should do in each position if you are the first one in, if there are callers, and if there's a raise. I printed this chart and taped it to the wall above my desk. Then as I played, I was able to refer back to the chart to figure out what I should do. I was amazed by three things:
1) I called raised pots way too frequently
2) I didn't raise in late position as often as I should
3) I learned the hands rankings in about a week

The chart is still on my wall and I occasionally refer back to it when I feel I'm playing too loose.

[Blarg]

Either way can work well. I do want to make some further response on these ideas.

The main things that made you learn quickly was that you had to recapitulate the ideas in your mind in order to work with them, which works so much better than just trying to grind them in with brute force memorization alone, or just hoping to catch them eventually while letting them slide in one ear and out the other with occasional study the way ideas can when you don't rephrase them in your own style of thinking and really internalize your relationship to them.

You had to be sure you had an adequate understanding, then organize the ideas. That takes a lot of thinking about not just things but what things mean and how your thought processes relate to them. By the time you had the charts done, you already had put in a solid, very productive amount of effort turning over the ideas in your head in your own voice, really making them yours. Learning from that point on can become surprisingly easy and rapid.

Same thing with flash cards. To even make them up, unless you make the world's lamest ones, means you have to think about them conceptually.

For instance, I did some hand groupings flashcards. "Aces and faces" was a mnemonic that painted a clear picture in my head about some groups, and "aces with spaces" for another. Those mnemonics made me able to group thoughts into meaningful clusters associated with easily memorable images, which was much better than just grinding along with rote memorization.

I also worked up an odds chart going from when you had one out to when you had 20. I rounded things off a bit, and then noticed a strange correspondence popping up. Numbers seemed to reflect each other. As in, when you have 8 outs, the odds are roughly 5 to 1 against you. When you have 5 outs, they're roughly 8 to 1. When you have 7 outs, odds are about 6 to 1, and when you have 6 outs, odds are about 7 to 1. Once I memorized that, I knew the odds on a chunk of numbers within that sequence of 20 almost instantly.

I noticed another correspondence. The first five numbers(when you have 1 to 5 outs) result in odds against you that aren't particularly patterned. They require rote memorization, but when you proceed further, your numbers become suddenly easy.

When you have 5 outs, you have roughly 8 to 1 odds against you. Let's put the next few numbers in table form.

OUTS ODDS

5 8
6 7
7 6
8 5
9 4

That "mirroring" I was talking about is visible here, but so is the the number of odds-to-1 declining very cleanly by one each time....87654. That's a recognizable pattern, different from the splotchiness of the first few numbers. Once you see these two patterns, or maybe even just one alone, you can easily remember what your rough odds are from 5 to 9 outs. The difficulty vanishes.

Let's look at the next cluster, and the tail end of the above one.

OUTS ODDS

9 4
10 4
11 3
12 3
13 2.5
14 2.5
15 2
16 2

Notice anything? The odds now are starting to clump in two's. Another useful pattern! This pattern covers a lot of ground. And by the time it stops, we reach the last pattern of the numbers, and luckily enough, we find another pattern to carry us through. It's a whopper of an easy one.

OUTS ODDS

17 1.5
18 1.5
19 1.5
20 1.5

The last chunk of numbers can be rounded off to come up with the same number! Couldn't be much easier than that.

Whether you remember one number and work your way forward or backward from there to remember another number you forgot, you get to do it in patterns once you remember a few simple patterns. It becomes pretty simple to memorize and quickly recall two columns of numbers and how they correlate to each other with virtually no study time once you've frontloaded the whole process with a little thought in the first place.

Mnemonic patterns can be easily found; even where they don't really exist. The brain is a pattern-making machine.

Some additional mnemonics that can apply the the set of numbers above that I've found useful are -- if you think of the number 10, what other number pops into your mind quickly? If you grew up on cop shows like me, it's 10-4. Anything else unusual about 10? It's the first number in the list of outs that is comprised of two numbers tuck together. Two -- just like the pattern it establishes of being the first "OUTS" number to give the same OUTS number...TWICE. Memorizing gets a little harder in this set of numbers when you have to remember decimals. That's unlucky. Just like the number 13.

Things like this can anchor you, providing a quick foundation to spring from to find other values in either of the two columns you need to do a mental search in, by remembering a pattern or two. If you know 10 goes with 4, you know it's followed by three right after -- and twice. You now know pretty much automatically that not only do 11 outs give about 3 to 1 against you, but so do 12. If you know the last 4 numbers of outs -- 17-20 -- all give you the same pattern of roughly 1.5 to 1 odds, then you know that 16 outs breaks the pattern, that 16 outs is about 2 to 1, and so is its partner in crime, 15 outs, pretty much all at once.

Anyway, finding just a few patterns means you can put a large number of unrelated, random things, like numbers, in your head very quickly. But...you have to think about them first. Some things will still require drawing up charts and flashcards, but even those can be made vastly more useful to memorization if you make conscious associations and look for patterns before you go any further. Making flashcards asking myself what hand groups constituted "aces and faces" and which constituted "aces and spaces" made the flashcards a much stronger learning tool.

Anyway, I hope some of this discussion has been useful. Doing this kind of thing helped me keep a lot of matrix tables and math in my head when I used to count cards in blackjack, and it helps in a lot of things, so I usually recommend it. It seems like a lot of work sometimes, but actually seeing patterns is easy. It's trying to memorize unrelated things you don't really care about that's hard! (It matters to me that the odds are roughly 5 to one that I'm going to fill out an open end straight draw on the next card, but I can't say I care about the numbers; just that they're useful to me. They have no particular grip on the mind whatsoever, yet I need those numbers in there. Knowing a few patterns, even if I forget the numbers a hundred times over, I could bring them right back to mind quickly again just by remembering the patterns.

Anyway, hope this is of some use to somebody. I realize that some people would object to my rounding off numbers for the odds, but in only two cases do I even round off much at all, when I turn 17 outs, or 1.75 to 1 odds, into 1.5 to 1 odds, and when I turn 5 outs from 8.4 to 1 into 8 to 1. These can be kept in mind as exceptions if one wants to, as they are the only noteable ones in the whole list of 20. 17 outs doesn't come up every day, and 5 outs isn't much of a burden to remember you're fudging a little, if you really think it's necessary. The rest of my roundings off are more on the order of turning 15 outs from 2.13 to 1 to 2.0 to 1 instead. Even if one thinks rounding off is just shocking, I hope I've provided some things here in this thread that some people could find useful.