Why (and how) to review your hands
When to review your hands, what to look at, and how to get something actionable out of it.
Gandalf
Co-founder of Poker Sciences
Reviewing your hands isn't mandatory. Everyone does it whenever they want, however they want, or not at all. This chapter doesn't force anything on you: it simply describes the three moments when reviewing your hands can make sense.
The underlying idea is simple. At the table, you decide in 2 to 3 seconds with partial information. Away from the table, with hindsight, your ranges open in front of you, and the tracker's tools at hand, you see what was invisible in the heat of the moment.
But you still need to know what to look for: opening your history to scroll through 50 hands as a spectator won't change the way you play tomorrow.
1. The three moments of work
You can work on your hands at three distinct moments, which call for different tools and a different mindset.
| Moment | How to handle it |
|---|---|
| Warm up | Ideally on the Trainer (active practice on your ranges). Without the Trainer, quickly review a few recent Spins to get back in the zone. |
| Post session | While it's still fresh, review the uncomfortable spots you still have in mind. |
| Cold review | Larger sample, deeper analysis, with no emotional bias. The spots you want to study calmly. |
In other words, reviewing your hands is mostly useful for post session work and cold review. The warm up is more of a Trainer job: actively practicing your ranges before firing up your tables is more effective than passively re-reading your hands.
The Quick Filters, which we'll see later in the module, let you save your favorite filter combinations for these three moments and come back to them in one click, without re-configuring everything each time.
2. A simple piece of advice: one spot at a time
When you start reviewing your hands, the temptation is often to want to look at everything: you open the history, scroll through 50 hands in spectator mode, mentally tick a box, and head back to play. In practice, very little actually sinks in.
What works better for most players is to take one specific spot and study it thoroughly across all your filtered hands, with your reference range open and a postflop tool if the spot calls for it. You're no longer looking at an isolated case, you see your pattern in that situation.
A spot is defined by a simple combination: your position, possibly your stack, and the action (preflop or postflop) leading up to your decision. A few examples:
- BB vs SB open 2 bb at 12 bb
- M3 BU open-raise at 20 bb+
- SB vs BB 3bet shove at 15 bb
- BU vs BB SRP, turn 2-barrel after a flop c-bet call
- BB vs BU SRP, defending against a reg's flop c-bet
No need to be that precise on the stack every time: a wide bracket (e.g. 12 bb+) often does the job.
What matters is grouping hands that genuinely play the same way. Ideally, you go even further and separate vs reg and vs fish spots: the ranges aren't the same, and neither are the adjustments.
If you hesitate on which spot to pick, here are a few useful leads, in order of priority:
- The spots flagged by the preflop error detector: you already know you're deviating on them (we'll come back to that detector in a later chapter)
- The recurring spots in your format (c-bet, 2-barrel, defense vs c-bet, delay c-bet, etc.): fixing a single one of these spots pays off across hundreds of hands
- The spots where you hesitate at the moment of decision: a zone of discomfort is often a zone of progress
The tools we'll see later in the module (advanced filters, preflop error detector) are designed precisely to isolate this kind of spot.
Beware of the big pot trap. A hand lost in a huge pot leaves an emotional mark, but if that spot doesn't come up often, its impact on your average EV is negligible compared to a spot that plays out dozens of times per session. Frequency matters more than pot size.
3. The 4-step method
Once your sample is filtered on a spot, here is a simple way to approach each hand, in 4 steps:
1. Set the situation without looking at your cards.
Reconstruct the exact context of the decision: your position, the effective stack, the preflop action sequence, and what you know about your opponents if you have a read on them.
2. Play the range, not the hand.
When thinking about a spot, you should always reason about your entire range in that situation, never about the single hand you remember. Otherwise you patch together case-by-case decisions, with no overall consistency.
- Against a reg : thinking about your whole range is the only way to balance your strategy: without that, your lines become readable, and therefore exploitable. More broadly, it's also the right way to structure your poker reasoning: a logic that holds up across the entire range, not a patchwork of isolated decisions.
- Against a fish : balance hardly matters, but reasoning about the range forces you to go through every possible hand in the spot in one go. You work the situation from A to Z rather than combo by combo. For example: "I bet big for value with the top of my range, I bet small with the middle of my range to protect without overexposing, and I check the bottom of my range".
Once the buckets are set (what you value, what you bluff, what you check), it's often easier to slot your hand into the right category.
And even if your conclusion turns out to be wrong, the simple act of actively questioning the situation is already a huge driver of progress: little by little you build your reading framework, you sharpen your reasoning, and it's that regular work that ends up paying off at the tables.
3. Compare to a reference.
If you're comfortable with the dedicated tools, you can go further, or even replace step 2 directly with this comparison. Compare your reasoning (or analyze what the theory says about that spot): either pure GTO theory, or theory against ranges built from your opponents' data (nodelocking).
The Leak Finder module will go into these approaches in detail; we won't unpack them here.
4. Write the fix as one actionable sentence.
An actionable fix is a sentence you can apply in your very next session. Not:
I need to play BB vs SB better
Too vague. But:
BB vs SB at 12 bb facing a 2 bb open, I 3bet shove most of the top of my range
Precise, immediately applicable.
If you can't formulate your fix in one clear sentence, it means you haven't really understood your mistake yet. Go back to step 3.
4. Key takeaways
Reviewing your hands isn't mandatory, but when you do it, a bit of structure changes everything.
• Three possible moments: warm up (ideally on the Trainer), post session, cold review.
• One spot at a time, studied thoroughly across all your filtered hands.
• Priority on frequency, not pot size. Ideally, separate vs reg and vs fish.
• Think range, not hand: strategic balance vs reg, full coverage of the spot vs fish.
• A 4-step method for each hand: set the situation, play the range, compare to a reference, write the fix.