A Poker Study Routine You'll Keep: 2 Hours a Week, Your Own Hands

A poker study routine is a repeating weekly loop: review your own hands, pick one leak, practise it, then check whether it moved. The version that survives a normal schedule is small, about two hours a week, and it starts from your hand histories rather than from a backlog of videos. I have come to think the order matters more than the volume, so this article walks through the loop in that order and says where courses and solvers fit.

What a poker study routine is, and why most of them collapse

A poker study routine is a fixed weekly schedule that turns off-table work into a loop of four steps: review hands, isolate one leak, practise it, measure the result. Most routines collapse because they begin with content (videos, courses, solver tabs) instead of with the player's own mistakes, so the work never connects to the games being played.

Why do most poker study routines fall apart?

Read how players ask the question. In a recent thread on r/poker, a player who has been profitable for almost five years at 2/5 to 10/25 cash admits they got by "mostly on feel, instincts" and asks everyone else what their process is. Another thread on the same subreddit asks whether people review right after a session, on a separate study day, or only when something feels wrong. The replies are not in our source material, but the questions say a lot: the missing piece is rarely motivation, it is a defined trigger and a defined task.

The cost of that gap can be long. Leo Song wrote on Cardplayer Lifestyle (September 17, 2024) that he lost money for about eight years before he started studying, and that he would tell his earlier self to begin sooner. The Bluffing Monkeys video on building a study routine names the two pitfalls that lead to burnout: skipping hand reviews, and cramming theory without ever practising it.

My read is blunt. Unstructured study is a leak of its own, because hours spent on spots you rarely play are hours not spent on the spots that cost you money.

Start from your own hand history, not from a content library

A hand history is the text record your poker room writes for every hand you play: seats, stacks, blinds, every action and the result. It is the only study material that is about your decisions, at your stakes, against the players you actually meet, which is why a poker study routine should be built on it.

How do you get hand histories out of your poker room?

Each room stores and exposes them differently, and some discard them quickly. The room-specific guides exist for that reason: how to export your Winamax hand history, how to download your GGPoker hand history before it disappears and where the ACR hand history folder really is each cover a path and a trap that is easy to miss. If your room bans trackers, studying poker without a HUD on GGPoker, WPT Global and CoinPoker shows that a review does not need one.

Know the limit of the material before you lean on it. A history shows what you did, not what you were thinking, and it contains no reads. What's actually in your poker hand history, and what it can't tell you lays out that boundary, and it is why the routine below asks you to write down your reasoning before you look anything up.

Your hand history is evidence, not a verdict.

The 15-minute review after every session

The post-session review is a 15-minute pass over three to five marked hands, done within a day of finishing and away from any table. It is the smallest unit of a poker study routine, and it is the one that makes everything else in the week cheaper.

Alec Torelli, on his Conscious Poker channel, calls a 15-minute exercise after each session the highest-value study habit he knows. His framing is practical: if you plan an eight-hour session, play seven hours and 45 minutes and spend the last 15 on review. Carrot Corner's "6 minute" routine uses the same logic on a smaller scale, reviewing one common spot while it is still fresh. TightPoker (Paul Seaton, May 20, 2025) adds the realistic floor: even two 30-minute sessions a week help, if you keep them.

Here is the version I would use:

1. Open the session and sort by biggest pot lost, biggest pot won and hands you flagged.
2. Keep at most five hands. A longer list will not get finished.
3. Before opening any calculator, write what range you put the opponent on and why.
4. Check the arithmetic: pot odds you can do in four seconds and equity against that range.
5. Close each hand with one word: keep, fix, or unknowable.

The last label matters. Some spots cannot be settled without a read you do not have, and "unknowable" is an honest result. For a longer version of the same pass, see how to review a poker session in 30 minutes.

« Don't just ask "did I win or lose?" Ask "was my decision good?" »

r/PokerTraining welcome post, 2026

Is it safe to study hands during a session?

No, and I would not blur this line even for a quick look. Real-time assistance (consulting a solver, a chart or any tool while hands are in play) is treated as cheating by poker rooms and can end in a closed account and confiscated funds. Carrot Corner's video reviews hands by sitting out of a one-table session and opening a solver, and you may see players copy that. Room rules on what counts as a break are not something to test with your bankroll, so every step in this routine happens after you have left the table.

Pick one leak a week and put a price on it

A leak is a recurring decision that costs you money, and the useful way to rank leaks is by what they cost in big blinds per 100 hands, not by how annoying they feel. Ranking by cost is what keeps a weekly study block from drifting toward interesting but cheap topics.

How do you choose which leak to study first?

SplitSuit's weekly study guide (2026) sets two conditions for the topic: it must be something you know you need to improve, and it must be something that heavily affects your win rate. That is a sound filter. To apply it with numbers, take an illustrative case: a player logs 20,000 hands in a month and a leak costs 1 bb/100. That is 200 big blinds a month, from one habit. Whether a leak is really costing that much is the question what a poker leak really costs you, measured in big blinds works through, and finding the leaks in your poker game covers where to look first.

Start the search with your own frequencies. VPIP, PFR and 3-bet describe your game in six numbers, RFI by position shows whether your opening ranges match what you think they are, and SPR explains many of the stack-off mistakes that appear in reviews.

The reason to narrow to one topic is old and well documented. Ericsson, Krampe and Tesch-Römer's 1993 paper on deliberate practice in Psychological Review describes improvement as coming from well-defined tasks with informative feedback, not from hours of generic activity. A single leak per week gives you both. For the wider picture of how working adults fit structured learning around a job, the OECD's skills and adult learning research is the reference to browse, which is one more reason to keep the weekly block small.

What does a full week look like?

The routines on the first page of Google for this keyword differ mostly in how much they ask of you and what they ask for.

The SplitSuit figure is arithmetic on its own table: 15 minutes to choose a topic, 20 to read two articles, 15 for a video, 5 for a forum question and 25 for the weekly journal, which adds up to 80 minutes. My template differs in one way: it spends the time on your hands.

• Four post-session reviews of 15 minutes each, which is 60 minutes.
• One 45-minute leak block: filter your database for the week's spot and review about 20 hands in it.
• One 15-minute weekly note: write the single rule you will try next week and the number you will check.

That totals 120 minutes. It is a starting template, not a tested result, so shrink it if your week is full. The two-session floor from TightPoker is a perfectly respectable place to begin.

Where courses, videos and solvers fit in the routine

Courses, videos and solvers belong after the review, as the tool you reach for when your own hands raise a specific question. A solver answers what an unexploitable strategy would do in a given spot. It cannot tell you which spots you are playing badly, and that is the job the review has already done.

When does a solver or a course earn its place?

SmartPokerStudy lists five levels of study. Level two is "study and practice, then review", where you go through your database and, for example, pull 50 recent c-bet bluffs to check how often they worked on each texture. Level three applies that discipline to a course or book, and level four applies it to GTO software such as GTO Plus and GTO Wizard. The video also claims that each level beats 90%, 95% or 97% of your opponents. Those percentages have no source in the transcript, so I would not plan around them.

Here the video and I part ways on emphasis. SmartPokerStudy calls level three the sweet spot; I would put the hand review ahead of it, because a course taken before you know your leak is a course aimed at the wrong target. Once the review gives you a question, the solver is the right instrument. Carrot Corner's post-hand solver check on a king-six hand in the small blind shows the idea: each answer is specific, because the hand came from the player's own play.

If you want to compare tools, best poker study tools: find the leak first, then buy the solver and the GTO Wizard alternative question cover prices and trade-offs. For a spot you want to drill repeatedly against solver output, GTO Wizard is the better choice, and I would not pretend otherwise.

When is a written debrief worth paying for?

Poker Debrief is a session-review service that reads a finished session and returns a written debrief: 18 hands reviewed street by street, leaks ranked by what they cost in big blinds, and a training plan. It reads 7 poker rooms with a dedicated parser for each, costs $3 per session with no subscription, credits never expire, and the first session is free and complete. Its free tools (hand replayer, odds and equity calculator, preflop charts, ICM and variance) need no account. Nothing in it works during play, by design.

It is worth it when you have the history but not the hours, or when you suspect your own review is flattering you. If you enjoy the work and can keep the 15-minute habit, the free routine in this article does the same job more slowly. Poker training site vs. session review compares the two approaches.

How to tell whether the routine is working

You cannot tell from one month of results. You can tell from process: whether the spots you review are the ones you play most, whether the stat you targeted has moved, and whether the same mistake still shows up in your marked hands. Win rate is a lagging and very noisy signal.

How long before a study routine shows in your win rate?

Longer than most players expect, and the honest answer depends on your sample. How many hands until your win rate means anything gives the maths, and what a losing session actually tells you explains why a bad week says little. How long a downswing can last is worth reading before you decide the routine failed.

Las Vegas Advisor suggests spending about 70% of study time on practice and 30% on theory. I find that a useful ratio for the structure, since it matches a review-heavy week, but it is a rule of thumb from one source rather than a measured result. Judge your routine on whether you did the work and whether the target stat moved, then give the results time.

Track the habit weekly and the win rate quarterly.

The routine I would start this week

Start with 15 minutes after each session, one costed leak per week and a 15-minute weekly note, and leave the course for later. That is the whole answer to the question in the title: a poker study routine you will keep is the one small enough to survive a bad week.

What is the smallest version worth starting?

Two reviews a week, five hands each, one leak chosen by cost. Export the hand histories first, using the guide for your room, then mark the biggest pots and write your read before you look anything up. If the habit holds for a month, add the leak block. If it does not, cut something and keep the review, because the review is the part that touches your own game.

Whatever you add, keep all of it at home. A better routine never needs a tool at the table.