A Few FAQs to "How To learn Good"

There’s been a really positive response to my article on studying ICM. I mentioned some of the positive feedback in a post earlier this month and since then I’ve found a Brazilian translation of the article, and an Italian writeup of setting up and using wizhud (registration required). It’s also lead to a renewed interest in my little WizHUD project.

I’m planning at least 2 follow-up articles regarding SNGs, but until then I wanted to answer here a few common questions I’ve received in response to the post:

So what filters should I be running every day?

I purposefully didn’t go in to detail on what kinds of filters you can run daily, because the focus of the article wasn’t to tell you exactly what to learn, more how to learn.

As mentioned in the article, the first stage was the marking of hands in-game, and reviewing these hands, groups of hands (such as a 20-hand bubble), and entire tournaments to problems. From there, you should highlight common issues.

For me, the most common daily review filters were those to check for obvious 'mistakes’ in the game. Check i wasn’t missing easy continuations bets; folding the wrong hands preflop; opening hands I should be folded – multitabling misclicks. Or maybe from hand review I generally feel my river play is poor, so I would create a filter for all hands where I put in a river decision.

As I also mentioned in the article, I may also “proactively” create filters for what I perceive to be potential upcoming leaks because of changes to my game. The example given was a change to preflop strategy so, expecting myself to not follow my new guide due to auto-pilot, I create a filter for these certain hands so I could catch any errors post-game. Or perhaps I read a forum post about an interesting line taken with an overpair, something new I wanted to try. So I create a filter for this to make sure all these hands are caught in the review 'net’.

Less-so, I might have some ICM-related filters. Generally this was the role of the weekly study session, but if (usually stemming from that weekend study) I felt there was one common key area i was frequently having trouble with, this filter would get “promoted” temporarily to the daily list so I could watch my progress daily.

What filters should I be running in the weekly study session?

The idea of the weekly review is to focus on one key part of ICM at a time. If you are just starting out learning the SNGs, or one format in particular, or if you want to overhaul your entire game from scratch, you can break down the ICM situations in to sections and sub-sections. It’s may be a good exercise. As a 6-max player, for example, your list might start like this:

Heads up
- Button pushes, < 8 BB
- Button pushes, > 8 BB
- Calling shoves, 6-12 BB
- Shoving limps
- 3 betting decisions
Bubble
- 10-15 BB
- - Button shoves
- - SB Shoves
- - BB shoves on SB limps

... the list goes on. Starting with the most common, you can work through the list at your own pace. Information you internalise in one will of course be useful in other situations.

More likely, you are already playing the games and want to retool your ICM. Through the daily review, you should be finding ICM mistakes. For me, the mistakes like “Well, that was a bad shove given he was calling that wide” weren’t so interesting for me; I was more looking for those hands where I went “Wow, did I not consider BBs stack size when making this button shove!” or “Damn, did I overvalue that mid pocket pair making that SB call!”. Those hands were the ones that lead to the decision on how to spend the weekly study day, because those were the hands that highlighted a misunderstanding of how the variables at play combined together to make the right decision.

As mentioned, I would usually just have one theme for the weekly review, but I would run the previous week’s (or weeks’) filters as a checkup. Once a situation had gone through the review, I would recheck it the following week to see if I felt I’d made better decisions, had overcompensated, or had further work to do. If the situation was common enough, it would sometimes get pushed to the daily review, but I generally preferred to keep ICM and SNG Wiz work separate from the daily, postflop decisions.

So I’ve got all these similar hands in SNG Wizard; but how exactly do I learn all this?

That will be the theme of my next article.

How do I quickly mark hands whilst I’m playing?

In the original article I mentioned an my AHK script, HEM Shortcuts. One of the features it has is a hotkey that marks the hand currently in progress. It does this by automating the following process:

Click on the last hand in the HEM HUD box.
Wait for a new hand to appear in the hands list in the HEM mini-view.
Select the new hand, mark it, and shut down the window.

It’s not the smoothest process in the world, but it works. But to get it working, it needs a little hacking of the script. Edit the AHK script in notepad, and look for these lines at the top of the script:

HHCLICK_X := 29 ; These are x-y co-ordinates for opening up the last hand history, with respect to the table.
HHCLICK_Y := 63

As the comment suggests, these need to be set to the relative X and Y co-ordinates where you want to 'click’ to open up current hand.

Taking this image as an example, the place you want the click is where it lists the last 3 hands in the black box near the top. Clicking on the top hand (where it says the player name, “00Oljlilill”) will open up the instant handhistory window. We need that click spot x-y co-ordinates. Load up AHK window spy program (by default this is
C:\Program Files\AutoHotkey\AU3_Spy.exe) and hover over the place you want to click on an active game window. In the box you will see the relative x-y locations of the mouse pointer. It will say something like:

>>>>>>>>>>>>( Mouse Position )<<<<<<<<<<<<<
On Screen: 1122, 403 (less often used)
In Active Window: 190, 40

that 190, 40 is what we need. Set these numbers as HHCLICK_X and HHCLICK_Y. Once that’s done, the following hotkeys will work:

win + Q Mark the last hand (i.e. the current one listed in the HEM HUD)
win + W Mark the current ongoing hand, or hand just completed (i.e., wait for the next hand to appear in the HEM HUD list, and mark that)
win + H Open up the mini view (no marking)

This only works on pokerstars; can it also be configured for other sites?

Certainly, as long as the HEM HUD works. The following line makes the hotkeys only respond when the current active window is recognised as a pokerstars table:

#IfWinActive, ahk_class PokerStarsTableFrameClass

If you remove this line, then the hotkey will fire for all windows (even if it’s not a poker table). If you don’t want this, you can customise the line to work for your specific site. For example, changing the line to the following will make it work for Full Tilt tables:

#IfWinActive, ahk_class QWidget

Thanks for much for your help! Do you accept donations?

Check out wizhud, I wrote it specifically for my needs when working on this process. If you like it, buy it. You’ll get lots of neato features (the Nash equilibrium feature alone is worth it), and you’ll support the author. Cheers!

How can I get all this stuff working in PT3?

The broader concepts in the article I’m sure transfer over to PT3. I don’t have much experience, but I’m sure similar filters are possible. The scripts I’ve written are not compatible with PT3, although I’m looking at adding support to wizhud.