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At any point in my poker career you could ask me “how were you as a player 6 months ago?” and I could honestly tell you “My God did I suck.” Ask me the same question now, and not only will I tell you I sucked hard 6 months ago, but I still suck fairly often today. Self improvement is a slow and long process, and players often don’t know the most efficient means of getting better. There’s also a lot of pitfalls and misinformation out there, so not only do you need to know how to get better, but you need to know how to avoid getting worse. So what steps can we take to improve our game?

1. Coaching: Coaching seems like an obvious and natural first step. Coaching is a very quick and efficient way to find leaks you may never know you had, as well as work on your overall understanding of the game. Most coaching is done through either having the coach give you a hand history review, talking on Skype (for those of you who aren’t aware of Skype, it’s a free program to download where you can make unlimited calls from your computer to other computers located anywhere completely for free), submitting specific hands to a coach, or any combination of the above.

The hardest part is finding a good coach. For the most part if a poker player is worth the coaching then his time is fairly expensive. A good MTT coach can run between $50-$400 an hour and there’s not really a list located anywhere that I know of with available coaches and their rates. I’d guess your best bet is to start a thread on your forum of preference stating that you want a coach, and then list what you’re looking for in terms of training, what you’re willing to spend, and what you hope to learn. I’ve done serious coaching time with two players, Ajunglen and NoahSD, and having paid them about ~$200 an hour each I can honestly say it was well worth the money I spent. Both of them opened up my eyes to things I had never even considered in the game before, and I give considerable credit to both of them for making me the player I am today.

2. Hand History Reviews: This is a great exercise to do both by yourself and with other players you respect. Take the HH from a tournament where you feel you had a number of interesting spots, plug it into your favourite HH replayer, then go through the relevant hands and review how they went down and how you could have played them better. If you don’t know how to save the HH’s to your computer or where to find them, here’s the basic break down; In the case of Stars/Tilt (it’s a little more complicated with some, so we’ll do the simple version for now) fire up the program, log in, and then go to the ‘options’ choice at the top of the program.

Scroll down to ‘Hand History’ and if it’s not already clicked, click the ‘Save My Hand Histories’ box and make note of where to find them. They will likely end up in program files, ‘full tilt’, ‘hand history’, then select your user name and there they are. I personally like doing HH reviews with other players I respect via Skype and going through the hands together to get a number of opinions on what I could potentially do differently. This normally works best with a maximum of 3, maybe 4 guys. If you enlist too many you inevitably get people trying to talk over each other to get a point across, or too many arguments occurring about the proper way to do things instead of looking to reach a consensus. Most of the time though, the reviews I do are with one person and we exchange ideas back and forth about how to play the hands better.

3. Posting on Forums: I started playing poker in 2003, pre Moneymaker. I didn’t find online forums until early 2006, and I learned more in a few months posting on forums than I did in 3 years of reading books and talking about hands with local poker playing friends. Some forums are better than others for strictly hand strategy discussion, and it’s no secret where I do the vast majority of mine. Whichever forum/s you decide to do your posting on, being able to have the input from a wide variety of players and styles is an awesome way to broaden your horizons.

One difficult part of some forums though is that they can feel somewhat elitist or intimidating at the start, since you’ll be unfamiliar with the vernacular, the process by which things are done, and who’s who. Hang around, do some reading, and PM those who you respect and feel are approachable with questions if you’re not entirely sure whose advice to trust. There are plenty of easy going guys on the forums who don’t mind answering beginners PM’s about how things go down (myself included, so feel free as long as you don’t mind a slow reaction time) and will point you in the right direction.

4. Reading Books: Except there’s a catch here, some books contain good or mostly quality material, but a ton of poker books are from outdated players who I personally think have weak fundamentals and give fairly poor advice. I haven’t read every poker book but two tournament books/series I can legitimately recommend are the ‘Harrington on Hold’em tournament series, and Kill Everyone by Lee Nelson. Harrington has been honest in that he feels his books are slightly outdated (the game has evolved a lot in 3 years), but I think beginning/intermediate players will still learn a lot.

Kill Everyone is a great read but considering the concepts and math it covers is likely a bit heavy for beginning players and is more so on the intermediate to advanced level. As far as the other material on tournament poker out there goes, I’m not familiar with a lot of titles but I know that the old Cloutier/McEvoy ‘Championship Tournament Poker’ book is massively outdated and preaches a hilariously nitty style, and Skalansky’s ‘Tournament Poker for Advanced Players’ is fairly vague and only gets into specifics on a few subjects, though I believe there is an extended edition out now which I have not read and cannot comment on.

5. Experience: Some things really do only come with a level of experience. One good example is being able to anticipate ranges. It’s fairly hard to teach a person what a range is and what to expect as far as ranges go from certain plays. Yes, there are certain outlines you can give, but for the most part there many patterns that you only tend to really sense and anticipate after you’ve played tens of thousands of hands. There are a number of things that just become so much more natural with the more you play, and there really is no substitute.

6. Self analysis and honesty: There are very few people with an ego about their poker game who don’t suck. You need to honest with yourself about what your leaks are and you need to able to ask others whose opinion you respect what they think and be able to take the criticism in a constructive way. When you post a hand you need to know there’s a chance people might jump down your throat and say things like “this hand is an abortion.” Some will word it kinder than that, but most who think you played the hand bad will use honest language. With a post like that you can’t take comments personally, and if a person says “I think you played it bad” but doesn’t elaborate, you need to have the confidence and curiosity to answer with “Why? How can I improve it?” instead of “Why are you such a dick about it?” I’ve gotten my ass kicked for posting an atrocious hand more times than I can count, and I learned something every time.

7. Networking and AIM'ing with other players: Making connections in the poker world is a relevant aspiration. You want players that are roughly around your skill level to discuss strategy and concepts with, and these days many players simply circumvent public posting with AIM conversations with those who they respect. It’s important to find players that are fairly close to your level because an inequity in skill can create an awkward situation. If you spend a lot of time talking to a player who is vastly better than you he may feel like what he’s doing is coaching and he might want to charge you for his time. Conversely, if you talk to players way below you in skill level, you’re on the other side of the equation and you can’t learn much by simply preaching the same basic concepts over and over again.

There’s of course nothing wrong with having friends who are a variety of skill levels, and naturally most of us would like to pick the brain of a player who we think is really excellent but when it comes to finding a group of players that you spend the majority of time discussing strategy with you’ll want a group who are more or less at the equivalent of your level. If you have a personal friend who happens to be a poker God then you’re in luck, and some top pros are certainly approachable and willing to answer questions all day long, but it’s a short list. However, many pros also don’t want dozens of people messaging them asking for AIM details so they can spend their valuable time telling someone to shove AK with 12 BB’s over a raise. As far as me personally goes, I’m always willing to answer a PM with a hand or with a link to a HH/post, though as I said before it may at times take a few days for me to put down the Xbox controller and get around to answering. Feel free though, but for God sakes convert your hand histories people.

That’s all I’ve got for now. As always if there’s anything else people want to go over or have questions about, just ask.

* Tony Bond18 Dunst is a professional poker player who is currently ranked #1 in the PocketFives.com Sortable Rankings for the country of Australia.  You can read more articles from "Bond18" and other Contributing Writers by visiting our Poker Articles section.