Constructive Criticism

Just a short post today.

It is no secret that I have been struggling this year with poker. No matter what I am doing, it seems to be wrong. I do a few of things to try and help. I watch some training videos. I review my sessions somewhat. What I mean is that I try to mark hands where I had some sort of decision to make and try to analyse the hand. Unfortunately, what happens here is that it is hard to change your opinion on the hand. Of course, some misstakes are blatant and it is easy to figure out; but others not so much. If they were, you probably wouldn't have made the misstake in the first place.

Having said that, I tried something a little different. I opened myself up to a few blogger buddies (whose name I will keep secret to protect the innoncent) who are much better poker players and let them review these decisions. I didn't just send them hand histories which is somewhat useless because they wouldn't know any reads that you had on the hand. What I did was had them watch the hands on my machine while we were either hooked up with audio chat or normal IM. I have a program that can share my screen and they watched the hands on my HEM Hand Replayer which had stats on them and then I was also letting them know my reads on the hand.

Let me tell it was great and these guys let me have it, when needed; but in a constructive way. Beleive me when I tell you that I can take the criticism if warranted and in many cases, it was. Now has that help transformed me into winning sessions since then? Sadly no; but at least I'm not making those same misstakes... well hopefully, I'm not. Again, I am grateful for their opinions.

I hope to do this again soon. If there is anybody else who might be interested in something like this let me know. My program allows for a bunch of people to watch..

Have a nice day!!!