One thing that alot of people talk about when they are advising on how to improve ones game is to look through your HH and fix the holes.

Well........as I think Abba said in another post.....if you could easily point out your faults and just fix them like that, then there would be no problem. My problem is looking at my hand histories....and staying focused. I find it so damn boring looking over hands I have played, and noticing where I lost and why....although sometimes I find it difficult to decide weather I lost because of me, or because they made a stupid decision in calling/raising, etc

what are the most common holes in a players game? maybe i can check to see if i have those holes and possibly fix it. dont get me wrong, im not a loosing player (not yet lol), but then again I am playing micro stakes. So being up say $50 for 1 night, is very successful for me.....just to give you an idea as to where I am with my game.

I have yet to make a big cash in a MTT, so mainly stick with the cash tables right now. Any advice is appreciated.

I don't go over many HHs by themselves, rather I look for trends in general stats over 1000s of hands.

I know as I'm playing a hand if there is a real problem that I don't have it solved, those are the hands I post. Granted they often show me not at my best but that's not the point.

Don't come here and tell us you don't enjoy looking at HHs. It's something that a lot of people feel is necessary for you to improve your game. If you don't want to do that, then don't. But if you do, the idea is to go through the HHs, and by all means post every single hand that you have a question about, whether you won the hand, but think you missed value, or you lost the hand and think you should have played it differently, etc. That's why you go through your HHs. It's not because we think you can spot your own leaks. Also, even hands you feel are standard, post those, and then see if they in fact are.

I would start by focusing on the hands that stick out in your memory of the game: the bad beats, the ones where you lost a lot of chips, ones where you had the nuts and didn't get paid off, etc. Ask yourself, "Could/should I have done anything differently?" Post those hands in the forum to get advice from others. You don't necessarily have to examine every hand you played, but you definitely want to examine the ones that stand out.

Zach:

Im the first to admit I dont know a whole lot, but I was more refering to those who look at stats of say 5000 hands for general patterns, and small holes that are costing them alot of money thats more or less what I was refering to.

They aren't mutually exclusive. Put simply, there are macro- and micro-trends. Both are evaluative opportunities and both can help you improve.

A good first thing you should look at is your "standard" play in certain spots. For example, look at how you usually play flush draws. Post a standard flush hand heads up, 3 handed, out of position etc. If everyone sais "pretty standard" then that isn't a hole. A lot leaks people have are as simple as thinking they should always call when they should raise etc.

After that, try to find similar hands that have some slight differences (pf pot size, position etc).

I am creating a graphic viewer for my Full Tilt HH for this very reason. It can get very boring to go through hand after hand of text files.

You do understand PT comes with that, right?

I didn't know that, but I use a Mac mostly. Can't get the kids away from the PC long enough to use it

exchanging HHs w/a friend u respect is a good idea.

Yeah its better to filter all your hands into one category you feel may need work and look at that.
for example try looking at all you Out of Position AK hands in which you lost money at show down and see how you played them.
If theres a trend developing figure out where you went wrong and fix it.
or post the hands here and people can critique them.

Indeed!

Let someone else view an entire run of hands during a really bad session.
And see if they can point out some useful tips.

--CM

hmm ok thanks for the tips!

Is there an easy way to get such stuff out of PT? I mean how do you get PT to show you "AK, oop, NL cash, last 3 months, lost money"

I've been toying with the idea of seeing if I could build some sort of automated hand analysis tool that would spit out suspect hands for further review. It'd probably be easier for limit than nl since limit is driven more by pot odds and NL more by implied odds. Even better would be something that could automatically analyze groups of hands - you lose money when you cold call with big off suit aces from the blinds - but that might be too much to ask for.