Evaluating Your Play – Part I

One of the most important routes to improving is to evaluate your performance. The purpose of this is to uncover things that you have done wrong, and correct those things in the future. Unfortunately there is nothing harder than making an unbiased analysis, especially of hands that have resulted in a big win or big loss. We all make what has been called by psychologists “the fundamental attribution error.” The poker player makes this error by crediting his good results to his own skill and his bad results to bad luck. In order to escape this trap, you have to learn to separate good and bad plays from good and bad results. The other side of the attribution error is that we tend to attribute other people’s good results to good luck, but their bad results to bad play. This article will be the first of series dedicated to examining how best to evaluate your play.

It is best to evaluate your performance when you are away from the table and in a relaxed, rational (unemotional) mood. In order to do this, you must remember what happened. The importance of record keeping cannot be overemphasized. When you play online, computer software can do this for you automatically. When you play in live games, you must do it yourself. In previous columns I have recommended that the basic minimal recording should include Day, Date, Game, Stake, Start Time, End Time, Total Hours, and Result. The reason for both day (of the week) and date (month and date) is that both may help you decide when to play. You may learn that you generally win on Fridays, when some loose amateurs play in the game after working all day. Likewise the day(s) after the 15th and the end of the month may be good, since players may have just received and cashed their pay checks. This sort of macro data relates to the whole session, but may not tell you much about your own play. The one mistake this type of record keeping consistently shows for most players is that they play longer sessions when losing, and that their biggest losses are bigger than their biggest wins. This implies that the quit too soon when the game is good and they are playing well, but don’t quit soon enough when the game is bad or they aren’t playing well.

Along with record keeping, I also recommend taking notes. If an interesting hand arises, especially one in which you are involved, record the details. If you notice that one of your regular opponents has a tell or pattern, jot it down. The easiest way to do this is to carry a few index cards and a pen with you. When you write down the details of a specific hand, make sure you include as much data as possible. The minimum should be each key player’s position and stack size. Then note their initial action, preflop actions, the flop and the action that follows it, the turn and the action that follows it, and finally the river and the action there. If there are any other relevant factors try to include them as well. Names or descriptions of participants in the hand, whether they were winning or losing, tired or rested, drunk or sober, etcetera. Perhaps one player looked sad, hesitated and then raised. Did he have the nuts or was he genuinely unsure of what to do? The fact that a player’s wife is watching may have a crucial influence on the way he plays the hand. Ease into this slowly. For the first few sessions, just try to annotate one or two hands. Once you start to accumulate a file of interesting hands, you can use them as a basis for evaluation and discussion.

In the next few columns, I will discuss in great detail, how you can evaluate your and your opponent’s performance on these specific hands. For right now, just start to build up a file of hands you have played. Even if you never look at them again, and believe me there will be some you’d like to forget about, just the process of recording exactly what everyone involved did at each stage of the action will increase your ability to focus on the game and observe your opponents accurately. ♠

Steve “Zee” Zolotow, aka The Bald Eagle, is a successful games player. He currently devotes most of his time to poker. When escaping from poker, he hangs out in his bars on Avenue A — Nice Guy Eddie’s at Houston and Doc Holliday’s at 9th Street — in New York City.