I’ve been away for a few days, at a course that my company sent me to attend: Basic Leadership. The idea is to make me more efficient in getting people to do stuff for me, and we discussed feed-back, active listening, the FIRO-model, and so on. What’s this got to do with me? Lots, actually. What’s it got to do with you? Nothing, with one exception: We spent a lot of time talking about how to consider something that has happened. We were told that there were three levels of doing this, known as R-R-R: Refer, Review and Reflect, loosely translated. I thought this part of the course was interesting, and I’d like to share some thoughts I have about how to use this as a poker player.

Refer
This is the first level, and is virtually useless as a learning tool. Here, we confirm facts or at least what we believe to be facts, usually without any explanation for why anything happened. Example:

It was folded to Ray who raised to $12 in middle position. I called on the button with 8-8, and the big blind called as well. The flop came 4-5-6, the big blind checked, Ray bet $20, I raised to $50, and both the big blind and Ray folded.

This is the kind of information you would find in a hand-history file if you play online. It doesn’t explain why I called with 8-8 (as opposed to folding or raising) nor why I raised the flop or what I thought the big blind or Ray had. This is the only information that most people include in hand analysis requests, and I think that’s quite a shame. There are lots of reasons to play the hand that way, and there are lots of reasons for why it could have been played differently. Not including reasoning in the post makes any analysis fall back on sheer math, and you shouldn’t need to post a hand to figure out the math. PokerStove or any similar tool will provide you with the answers you want for that.

Review
The word “Review” here is along the lines of something a review of a movie would be. It often contains more information on what we think about something, rather than just what happened. The same hand as above discussed on the Review-level would be:

It was folded to Ray, a loose player who I had played few pots with, who raised to $12 in middle position. I called on the button with 8-8 because I didn’t want to invest too much before the flop with a hand like that, and I believed Ray to be able to call huge bets with hands like A-10 if I raised. Against his range, I was either about 50-50 or way behind at this point. The big blind called as well, but I wasn’t too concerned about him, he liked to look at flops a lot. The flop came 4-5-6 which I thought was great for me. I was now definitely ahead of all A-x/K-x hands that Ray could have and I still had between 4 and 6 outs if I was still behind. The big blind checked, Ray bet $20, I raised to $50, and both the big blind and Ray folded.

There’s a lot more information in there, and if you make a post asking for advice on how to play a hand, this is the way I like it if you write it. The Review-level is where you should spend most of your time discussing hands. Refer doesn’t tell you anything, and a play that can be completely awful in the absolute sense (you bet all the way with the worst hand) may be entirely correct based on other factors such as your table image, history between the players, reads, etc.

Reflect
This is the top level of thinking about an event. Here, you gauge not only what other people think or feel, but you start to think about how YOU think and feel, and WHY. The amount of text that goes into the description of even a simple situation in the Reflect-level is quite a lot, so I’ll just do the above situation for the preflop decision as an example:

We had been playing for quite awhile and I was getting a bit tired. Often when I’m tired, I get a little bit irritated and that used to be a big problem for me since it often made me go on tilt if I played for long hours and got a bad beat. Ray, one of the regulars who I don’t really like that much, raised from middle position. He kept raising preflop and was bullying the table a lot. I felt annoyed with him in general, and although I usually fold-or-raise middle-pairs in these situations, I actually called. The decision to call happened very fast and I have to admit I didn’t think it through very much. I felt like there was a good chance he was just stealing, and under normal circumstances I would probably have let him. I decided to make some sort of a stand this time though, but I didn’t really dare to invest more money into the pot in case he really did have something. Last time I had a middle pair and raised, someone put me all-in and I was really worried about having to make a tough decision like that again, so I just called. The big blind - not one of the regulars, but had played at the table for quite awhile now - just called like he usually does when he’s in the blinds. That made me immediately regret that I hadn’t raised and I kept visualizing a 9 flopping and that guy sitting there with something like Q-9. I had more or less resigned to the idea that I had already lost the hand before the flop came, and I thought that I should probably stop playing soon.

… and so on. Now, this is of course not something that you’d spend time adding when you’re discussing hand problems with other people, given the really big amount of information you should include. But notice how interesting this is! By thinking more deeply about what actually happened in the hand, I’ve learned that my decision to call preflop - which looked so good on the Review-level - was actually a result of fear and irritation; I didn’t want to let Ray get away with another steal, and I was afraid to lose a lot of money. Those are not good reasons for any action in poker.

By thinking on the Reflect-level, we learn things that are otherwise not obvious to us. Reaching that level takes a lot of practise and patience, though, and it takes a special kind of honesty with yourself that I don’t think most people are prone to having naturally. It’s incredibly useful for finding out why we act the way we do, and can plug leaks in our game that no hand-review ever could. Try spending some time now and then and think about why you really played a hand the way you did.

Of course, my boss didn’t pay for this course so I could be a better poker player. The use of these exercises will be a lot more apparent in my line of work than at the poker table, but I still wanted to share this. I know there are people who like to read about poker strategy in this blog, but hopefully this post will provide you with something that you can’t readily pick up in any other poker blog or book.

Fredrik