Building a dream study plan

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Building a dream study plan

I know just putting in the time alone doesn't make you great. If you want to be great at something, the best chance you can give yourself to be great is to dedicate yourself to it; doing the work and the homework right every night.

I realized I love poker and I wanted to be great so I committed myself to between 45-120 minutes a night of study in the evenings. But I want to study right, I don't want to be the guy at the YMCA shooting hoops all day, because at the end of the day he's still awful.

So what are the best ways to study? And I like to study/practice, so there really are no wrong ideas. Even when I was playing soccer, I preferred practice to playing because that's where my favourite art is: building your strategy and ability to showcase it when you later perform.

To be honest I ended up watching a lot of discussion training videos while taking notes, because it was so easy and fun. Since I was taking notes I still felt it was active enough to justify doing. I hadn't set any limitations on my schedule other than time, so I think I just never really tried my other ideas because I didn't already like them because I hadn't tried them long enough to like them. That logic sounds ridiculous out loud, but I think it's pretty common.

I'd love perspective of things to try while I build my dream study-style. Right now my vision looks something like this:

Assumption: I'm playing a lot of poker at the time so I'm not overloading the information before I get a chance to test it in the field

Tuesday: Training Video with notes
-emphasis on condensing the knowledge into a point I can review in my warmup and apply to my game to make my best even better OR a correction to one of my common mistakes.

Wednesday: Opponent analysis
- The player pool is getting pretty thin, and I see the same faces every day. It makes sense to spend the time to disect my opponets, and learn to destroy them.
-Right now I just filter through the hands that go to showdown, specifically vs regs of similar playstyles to mine, run through them with general notes, look for common themes and try to understand what he's thinking. Make sure I put this into note form I can quickly and accurately adapt my play with.
-I would love further insight into how to breakdown an opponent and analyze them.

Thursday: Live Sweat Session/Sweat recording/Commentating a done sweat
-To gain new perspectives from my own, and other insights. Basically to find out stuff I don't even know I don't know.

Friday: HH Reviews with extensive poker stoving
-Become comfortable with how equities are affected by different variables, and practice developing accurate range construction based on my reads of the situation.

Saturday: Card Runners EV work
-Haven't used this yet, but it seems like a really powerful tool for understanding how altering one part of your range affects the rest and get a general idea of the overall situation.
-Seems like a generally bad ass tool to have some skill in.

Sunday: Free-Choice

NOTE: Monday is my regular holiday but can swap out for any other day if there's a daytime event that week

A good post I read on study options http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/101/coaching-advice/systematic-training-drills-nlhe-1107105/

Other possible ideas to develop:

The hand reading game from the above post
Driling pokerstove/math based stuff
Discussion of general theory groups - maybe pick a particular topic in advance and just develop the idea ie. building your opening range reactive to the table, what to look for and how much weight to give to what etc.
Forum time: Right I just do it that when I've got some time, or I'm just particularly into it (this is the first forum I've felt that way about 4 years into poker)

Really looking forward to hearing how people got good, or better yet great!

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