How to study poker

In 2006 the psychologists Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke compared students who restudied a passage with students who were tested on it. Repeated testing gave better long-term retention than repeated study. The effect has a name, the testing effect, and it means the struggle to recall an answer is part of what makes it stick.

For poker, try pausing explanations to make your own decision before seeing the answer. A video of a professional explaining a hand feels productive, but you never had to choose. A drill that deals you the spot, asks for your action and then shows the answer makes you retrieve the idea every time.

The second finding is older. Hermann Ebbinghaus described the spacing effect in 1885: material studied in sessions spread over time is remembered better than the same amount crammed into one sitting. A 2006 review by Nicholas Cepeda and colleagues found that spaced practice beat massed practice in 259 of the 271 comparisons it collected.

Spaced repetition turns this into a schedule. Each spot you get right comes back later than last time, and each spot you miss comes back soon. The trainer uses an open-source scheduler called FSRS, which predicts how likely you are to still remember a spot and plans the next review around that. Here are the gaps it gives one spot, starting on the day you first see it:

As the gaps grow for spots you keep getting right, more of your review time goes to the ones you miss. That gives a practical way to spread short reviews across the week instead of repeating everything in one sitting.

The third idea comes from K. Anders Ericsson's 1993 study of expert musicians, which argued that structured practice contributed to the differences between the groups it studied. He used the term deliberate practice for structured work on specific weaknesses, with immediate feedback. Later research has argued over how much of expertise it explains, but the core advice holds up: playing more hands is not the same as studying them.

In poker that means finding your mistakes, measuring what each one costs and drilling the expensive ones. Where the grading source supplies action values, a decision in the trainer carries its EV loss, the chips the choice gave up against the best one, so you can see which mistakes are expensive, and the spots you miss come back as practice cards.

Order matters too, because some skills need others first. You cannot judge a call without pot odds, or a c-bet without ranges. The trainer's learning path puts 33 units into four levels, each unit a set of short lessons and drills:

Each session is 10 spots. The first 2 are worked examples, about 20% are reviews of earlier units that are due, and you pass at 80%. A unit you already know can be skipped by passing a test of 8 questions, and a finished unit comes back as a short refresh when the scheduler predicts your recall has dropped below 80%.

If you are new, start at the beginning of the path, or try one lesson first, such as work out the price of a call. If you already play, the placement questions find the level to start at.

A routine built on these ideas does not need much time:

• Most days, 10 to 20 minutes of drills. One path session, or the spots the scheduler says are due.
• After each session you play, one review. Pick the two or three hands you were unsure of and check them, rather than the ones you lost.
• Once a week, one new idea. A lesson or a unit, then drills on it over the following days so it gets spaced.