Tips & Tricks to Study Analyzed Hands

So now that you know the mechanics of the Hand History Analyzer, how do you go about studying? This article will teach you a few tips and tricks to get the most out of the Analyzer.

Sort by biggest EV losses
What is EV loss, exactly?
Sort by biggest pots won/lost
Review hands with the sidebar and Replayer
Color-coded mistakes

Take a deep dive with the solution browser
Try to find underlying trends
What is a good score?
Should I try to get 100%?

Sort by biggest EV losses

The first thing you should do when reviewing your hands is to sort the table by your biggest EV losses. The goal is to find ways to improve, and these hands show your biggest mistakes.

Select the EV Loss How to study analyzed hands header in the HANDS table to sort by your biggest losses.

What is EV loss, exactly?

EV loss is defined as the expected value you lost during the hand if playing against a GTO solution. You can find more information about EV loss in the toolbar. Expand the toolbar and look for an action coloured red.

For example, in this spot, I bluff shoved the river after double barreling. As you can see, shoving was a 2.66BB blunder!

Sometimes it’s better to deviate against your opponent in order to exploit their leaks. This will show up as an EV loss but may still have been the best move. However, the GTO strategy is still the strongest strategy you can play against an adaptive opponent.

Use good judgment and don’t try too hard to rationalize your mistakes.
Ask yourself if this was an intentional deviation.

Sort by Biggest pots won/lost

Once you are done reviewing your biggest EV losses you should move on to your biggest wins and losses. These pots have a significant impact on your results so it’s worth it to spend time analyzing these spots.

Select the BB W/L how to study analyzed hands image 5 header to sort the table. Click twice to toggle between your biggest wins and losses.

When reviewing hands it’s important to separate the outcome from the process. Your biggest losses were not necessarily your biggest mistakes. Your biggest wins were not necessarily your best plays. Review your hands with an open mind and ask yourself honestly if you think you played it well with the information you had at the time. Try not to be results oriented!

Review hands with the sidebar and Replayer

Click on a hand to review it, this will bring up the hand history sidebar.

Color-coded mistakes

Correct moves are colored green.
Inaccuracies are colored yellow (inaccuracy means an action that’s taken less than 3.5% of the time).
Mistakes are colored red. These are actions that are never taken and/or lose EV.

Select “L” Analyzed Hands to expand the sidebar, then expand on streets where you didn’t make correct plays. This way you can examine the correct bet sizes and frequencies.

Select this Analyzed Hands icon at the top of the sidebar to open the Replayer. This is an easier way to review the action. Scroll through each street using the left and right arrows. The solver will present the optimal strategy at each of your decision points.

Take a deep dive with the Solution browser

Do you ever run into spots where you don’t know why it was a mistake? These are the most important spots. These are the spots where you actually learn something new.

Instead of reinforcing your own biases, We strongly urge you to explore the Solution browser. Select this Analyzed Hands icon to go to the Solution browser. The board and actions will be prefilled to save you time.

🤔 Ask yourself the following questions:

Are my range assumptions correct?
Who has the range/nut advantage? (Use the ranges tab)
How would you continue on later streets? (use turn reports for flop actions)
Are there any alternative lines that may be better?
How is your particular action constructed? (use breakdown tab)
Where are the continuation thresholds? (Use filters tab)
What hands are you targeting with your bet size? (Use filters tab on opponents node)
If you deviated, does the solution look drastically different from what you think villains’ actual strategy looks like? If so, were your adjustments correct?
Are the solver’s assumptions about the effective stack/bet sizes close enough?

Try to find underlying trends

This is a topic that probably deserves its own article. Studying GTO comes down to a lot of pattern recognition. You can never know the correct move in every spot, so it’s important to try and find your own heuristics.

Here are a few tips to try and find general trends:

Open the filters tab and select each of the hand classes to see what actions they typically prefer. It’s easier to observe the strategy one piece at a time.
Change one of the board cards to see if you observe similar actions.
Now change one of the ranges (e.g. CO vs BB becomes HJ vs BB) and see if the strategy has shifted. Try to work out why.
Use flop reports and filtering to find underlying trends for different board types.
Use turn reports to see how you should follow through with different lines.

What is a good score?

Anything above 85% is good. A solid ring game player only plays about 20%-25% of hands, which means 75-80% of your preflop actions are folded. These are automatically correct. For this reason, a score below ~80% in a 6max game probably indicates you need improvement. Solid regs typically achieve scores between 90-95%. 95%+ or greater is considered excellent by GTO standards.

It’s important to keep in mind which format you play. For example, HU or spin players play wider ranges, so they will inevitably have more chances to make mistakes.

Should I try to get 100%?

NO. Not only is this goal unrealistic, but it indicates that you’re never adjusting your play exploitatively. The best players will sometimes deviate from GTO to capitalize on their opponents’ mistakes.