Spaced repetition and poker

There’s an idea in educational psychology called spaced repetition. Here’s how it works.

Say you learn that “manzana” means “apple” in spanish. If you don’t come back and practice what you learned, you’re going to forget it over time.

At first, you’ll probably want to review your new vocabulary word every day. After you do that for a couple days, it’ll start to sink in and you’ll only have to review it once a week. Then after doing that a few times, it’ll really have sunk in, and you’ll only have to review it once every few months. So on and so forth.

The big idea is that when you learn things, you have to make sure that you review and practice them at reasonably spaced out intervals.

It’s worth noting that the education system sucks at doing this.

Say you take Chemistry 101 your freshman year, and then Chemistry 102 your senior year. They let you take 102 because you “have the prerequisite”. But if you haven’t thought about chemistry in three years, you probably don’t remember anything from Chemistry 101.

And then within a given class, you’ll learn about some topic, move on from it, and then have it pop up on the final exam 12 weeks later. Sometimes you’ll be lucky and the topic will be reinforced throughout the semester, but all too often it won’t, and you’ll have forgotten it if you didn’t take the initiative to review it yourself throughout the semester.

I’m not trying to get into a debate about the education system here. The reason I bring it up is because I think we’ve all developed some pretty bad habits from it. It’s hard not to when you spend 13-17+ years of your life in a traditional schooling system.

I think that this is very relevant to you as a poker player. All battles are won before they are fought. In poker, this means that games are won off the table. Eg. when you're studying. But if you’ve grown up in a traditional schooling system, you’ve no doubt had some really bad study habits ingrained in you, and thus your off-table work will suffer. My point is that learning how to learn is really important.

Let’s focus on spaced repetition for now, and talk about how you can use it to your advantage when you study poker.

There are some spots that come up over and over and over again. Cbetting a dry ace high or king high board is a good example. So if you study that spot and just go about your normal business playing poker, you’ll probably come across enough hands to hammer in that concept.

But other spots don’t come up as often. An extreme example would be a “bingo” board, like TTT or 444 or JJJ. For those spots, if you want to play them well, going about your normal business probably won’t be good enough. You’ll have to go out of your way to make sure you reinforce what you learn. Especially if you don't play a significant number of hands every month. I’d consider using an app like Anki or Supermemo to create flash cards.

I know, I know. Create flash cards to study what to do on a TTT board? Definitely seems a little weird. I doubt any of your friends are doing that. But TTT is just an extreme example. What about something like 4betting and dealing with 4bets? I know that for me, these sorts of unusual spots do come up and give me trouble.

Of course, there's something to be said for the fact that if these spots are occur infrequently, it isn't worth spending as much time studying them. That's a fair point. But if you're a more advanced player and already feel comfortable in the more common spots, you'll need to start pinning down these less common spots if you want to add to your game.

The overall message of this post isn't that all poker players need to study with flash cards and precise intervals. It's moreso just to be aware that spaced repetition is a thing, and to take it into consideration when you study poker.