Want a quick way to evaluate your poker skills in multi-table Texas Holdem poker tournament play?  The surefire way to draw some conclusions is to analyze two things.  What’s your chip total when you busted out and why was your chip stack that size?   Here’s the good thing about this little bit of data tracking, the last hand you played is the first hand you analyse–so it should be fresh in your mind.  If you are playing online poker and multiple tournaments at once it’s not as easy as after busting out of a casino tournament and walking back to your hotel or worse driving home, but you should still reflect on those hands and take notes even if you are still alive in other tournaments.

Rack your short term memory, and if it was a good (but obviously not great) tournament, delve into your long term memory too, to come up with some crucial hands.  You are trying to figure out your subconscious online poker strategy because even if you consciously think you are doing one thing, in reality you may be doing something else entirely.

The purpose of the exercise, for now, isn’t to berate yourself because of a slip-up that sent you home or to whine to the poker gods about the bad beat you absorbed it’s to get some critical information for future tournaments.  In reality, you should never indulge in those exercises. In poker you have to accept you’ll make mistakes and work to limit them, and you have to understand luck is twofold you are going to get some bad luck whether you want it or not. In case you have noticed, the alleged poker gods don’t do much listening to the whiners out there. Make your own luck.

Besides, who cares if your opponent made a terrible play or if you suffered another dose from your unlimited bad luck medicine. You want your opponent to make a terrible play and even if it ends your day it merely means there are still players you can exploit and dominate in the long run. Better to ask yourself did you play the hand right, because after that what else it there that you want to consider? Well, you are also trying to track some raw data that on its own may not mean much. However, when plugged into a longer run of tournaments you can track and trace where your subconscious mind is guiding you in places you may not think you are at.

Every poker player knows that aggression is part of the game, so is hand selection, and picking your fights astutely. With each hand you still want to mull over what could you have done differently and would it have changed the outcome?  You don’t want to monitor which opponents you mixed it up–if you had a choice in the matter. If you were short and looked at AK probably not a consideration same with Aces at any point, but sometimes there might be a choice there. When there is a choice there could be a pattern of leaks.

Lets say you think you could have bet different, acted different, or approach the hand from a different stance, it’s possible it wouldn’t have changed the outcome on that hand but ask yourself would it positively change the outcome in future hands.  Did you find yourself falling further and further into a trap? Do you consistently double and triple barrel when you opponents are simply not the guys you can bluff? Or worse, does their first call indicate they have a hand you’ll neither be able to get them off of and one you won’t be able to catch up too. So why are you betting into them?

To be continued…