Hand Analysis 101

When I first start working with a new student on hand analysis, I often hear their interest start to fade after a hand or two. At the beginning, each hand takes anywhere from five to ten minutes and it can seem like you'll never learn anything if it takes so long just to examine one hand. Those students who stick with it are usually the ones who are able to excel and improve their games enough to move up in levels and make real money, so I do my best to show them why the process is worth going through.

If you take a hand, run it through a program like the Popopop Replayer or the PokerXFactor Hand Replayer, and then open up PokerStove and a spreadsheet, you can probably analyze a hand in less than a minute once you are comfortable with the process. You don't have to analyze every situation to make a big improvement to your game. In fact, just doing a few hands can teach you a great deal about how to think critically at the tables and allow you to find places where you tend to make mistakes.

If you seem to be calling too much on tough river decisions, then you don't need to analyze every one of them. You can see the trend after five or ten hands and make a minor change to your game. Folding a little more on the river in those tough cases and also understanding how to analyze those situations quickly will undoubtedly make you money. In the process, you have found a flaw in your game and started to correct it in a very short amount of time.

I start by examining the situation from the very beginning. A mistake made early in a hand is often the cause of tough decisions later on, so be sure to look at each decision you make and not just the place where you became unsure about what to do.

First, put your opponent on a range and look at how your hand plays against that range. PokerStove or Hold'em Ranger can be a big help with this part of the analysis. Next, update the range of hands you have assigned to your opponent each time you get new information, which is usually when he bets, checks, calls, or raises. With each change, look at all of the options you had available to you and figure out which one was the best choice. Remember to consider future rounds and the effects of your decision on how the hand may play out.

You may want to put each choice you can make into the spreadsheet and then look for the one with the highest Expected Value (EV). You may also want to break up your opponent's range into chunks that are easier to work with. For example, on an A-4-3 board when you hold 5-6, it doesn't really matter which set your opponent has; it will play out the same. You will want to play against all of them in the same way. In many cases, you can divide your opponent's range in to just a few pieces and then find the frequency of each with a program like Hand Combos.

Mixing these tools and working with them will not only help you to find places where you can improve your game specifically, like the example above of calling too often on the river, but it will also help you understand the game better. If you learn to analyze things slowly, you will start to do it more quickly. Some of it will even become automatic. Soon, you will be analyzing complex situations and finding EV where you couldn't before. That's where the real money is made.

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