Any player who’s serious about live or online poker will come to the stage where they want to review their own hands. This is more complicated than simply making decisions on the basis of the odds, as you would with video poker hands. It’s more about honing your skills by evaluating your plays in specific spots. Take a look at how to get started with hand reviews in poker.

What are Hand Reviews in Poker?

Doing a poker hand review means analyzing a hand history, investigating all the decision points in the hand, and trying to identify any spots where you could have made better choices. This will help you find your leaks and realize how to plug them. As a result, you’ll gradually improve your game and become a stronger player. 

You’ll progress too slowly if you grind away at the tables without the insights that a hand review can provide. Reading poker theory on its own won’t get you far unless you can implement it correctly in the right spots, and even mastering poker math won’t help without implementing poker study strategy to improve your play. Hand reviews are the best way to integrate theory and practice, so you can learn how to play poker better.

Getting Set Up

The first step to conducting hand reviews is to schedule regular sessions. You might prefer to spend 15 minutes reviewing a session you’ve just completed. Alternatively, you might take 15 minutes before you begin a session to review hands from your previous session. Think of it as a way of warming up your mind. A more in-depth weekly poker study guide session is also a good idea.

The Analysis of Poker Hands Explained

Say you’re analyzing a specific hand where you have to decide whether or not to call a big raise on the river — say, 28BB to potentially win 56BB, so the pot odds are 33%. The question to ask here, using essential math behind Texas Hold’em poker, is whether or not you have enough equity to call and win 33% of the time against your opponent’s river betting range.

First, ask yourself what your intuitive response is. Does it seem like calling in this situation is too loose? Or is it a snap call? Make a note of your gut reaction. For example, you might have a hand equity of 31, 35, or 40%, depending on whether you put your opponent on a tight, loose, or balanced range. In each case, it’s enough to call. Now compare this result with your initial reaction. If you had folded instead of calling, you’d have had an insight to work with. That’s the purpose of a poker hand analysis. Applied with discipline, this approach can yield great results.

Live Poker Hand Reviews

Live players can jot down hands in a notebook or a phone app for later review, but when they’re in a game, they’re under considerable time pressure. As a result, they can take notes of details that aren’t particularly relevant. That’s because it’s tough to think like a poker analyzer at the best of times, let alone at the table. It’s not a case of intuitive poker tells; live poker strategy is based on hard mathematical information. So, even live players, but especially those who want to know how to play live poker like a pro, would be best advised to sign up at one of the best online poker sites, if only to generate enough stats to enable useful hand review material.

Play Poker Online Better at BetMGM

The best way to analyze your leaks is to run up plenty of stats by getting in as many hands as possible. A great way to do that is to play poker with real money online at BetMGM. Register to enter cash games, join sit-and-goes, and take part in daily, weekly, and monthly poker tournaments. Get your best poker hand in at BetMGM, and get the upper hand by signing up for your new account with an online poker welcome bonus.