How to Improve At Baling When the Villain Has Trips

JaxCrax

When I started playing here I would by a Villain holding trips--it seemed like all the time.

So I started tagging and reviewing those hands. I had not looked at them in six months until a few minutes ago when I pulled up those hands again. I started going through them and thought, "I am not doing too bad here." And I wasn't. I was getting away pretty good.

Then I thought to go back and see what was up. What was up was that the sequence of hands I were replaying were in reverse chronological order. That is, I was replaying hands that were the last ones I tagged, which was in April. That is, I was replaying the hands I played after I had reviewed the other hands a few times.

There is absolutely no doubt that I had improved at getting away from trips. I had improved a lot more than I knew. I thought I had made some improvement, but today it looked to,me like I made substantial improvement.

All I did was create a tag and I tagged those hands when the Villain had trips, and I,while replay those hands.

When I found out APT would keep all of my hands and that I could review them whenever I wanted, like today, after I have been playing micro stakes for 6 months--that is really what sold me on APT. I just got another good review on getting away from trips. (By the way, I am not affiliated with APT and I paid full price for my membership [I mention that because I have gathered that some people, probably friends of Steve and Allen, have gotten free memberships.)

Anyway, I highly recommend tagging and reviewing specific types of hands. I think you will see the same type of results I just saw. Learning poker is not just playing. All the pros talk a lot about review of hands and discussing hands. Some talk about knowing, or memorizing a certain number of hands--I don't know how many. I don't have many memorized but I think I am going to start memorizing some. I mean, there are many recurring situations.

As far as learning from reading poker books--I have a bunch of poker books, including a very few good ones, but most of those books were written to sell books and not to teach anybody much of anything.

AllenBlay

Thanks for the kind words - I'm glad to hear that the site works well for you.

I think the type of tagging and reviewing you talk about is the best way to get better at poker. The more you play, the more you start to recognize patterns, and when you review the hands, it really helps with the process.