How to review a poker session in 30 minutes and actually find your leaks

A poker session review is a fixed routine for pulling specific hands from your own hand history, naming what went wrong on each street, and pricing the mistake in big blinds instead of trusting how the session felt. Thirty minutes is enough time to do this for a normal session if you work from a checklist instead of replaying every hand in order.

Most players who "review" a session actually just remember it: the cooler on the river, the bad beat, the one hand where they got it in bad. That's not a review, it's a highlight reel, and it skips almost everything that actually costs money. The process below is built to skip nothing, on purpose, in the time you'd otherwise spend scrolling a poker forum.

What counts as a leak, and what doesn't

A leak is a decision pattern that shows up more than once and loses expected value against a reasonable baseline, not a single hand you happen to remember. If you fold big blind versus a button open too often, that's a leak. If you once called off with ace-high because you were sure your opponent was bluffing and you were wrong, that's a data point, not a leak, until the pattern repeats.

James "SplitSuit" Sweeney's breakdown of intermediate mistakes makes this distinction directly: he singles out over-complicating decisions, chasing GTO outputs the player half-understands instead of a simpler, sound baseline. That's a leak precisely because it recurs across many hands, not because one hand went badly.

What's the difference between a mistake and a real leak?

A mistake is a single decision that, with better information or less tilt, you'd play differently next time. A leak is the same wrong decision made by the same player under the same conditions, repeatedly, because a habit or a misunderstanding is driving it rather than one bad read. Reviewing a session is mostly the process of separating the two: you're hunting for the second category, because that's the one with a fixable cost attached.

The 30-minute review framework

Run this in order. Skipping steps is where reviews turn into 90 minutes of aimless hand replaying.

Minutes 0-5, pull the hands. Export the session's hand history and filter for three categories: pots over a certain size (say, 20 big blinds or more), any hand you 3-bet or were 3-bet in, and any hand that went to showdown. That's usually 10 to 20 hands out of a full session, which matches roughly what a structured debrief process reviews per session rather than every single pot played.

Minutes 5-20, tag each hand by street. For every filtered hand, mark the street where the decision actually mattered: preflop sizing or range, flop continuation-betting, turn barrel, or river call/fold. Dan "Jungleman" Cates ranks preflop as the single biggest lever for players below a decent-pro level, so if your filtered hands cluster there, that's informative on its own.

Minutes 20-27, name the leak. Write one sentence per hand: what should have happened, and what actually happened. Avoid vague labels like "played it wrong." A useful label looks like "called a river raise against an under-bluffed opponent" or "folded big blind to a standard steal."

Minutes 27-30, price it. Estimate the pot-sized cost of each named leak in big blinds, then add them up. A leak that costs 2 big blinds once a session is a rounding error; one that costs 8 big blinds three times a week is worth fixing first. The ranking, not the raw list, is the actual output of the review.

How do you pick which hands to review first?

Start with the biggest pots and any hand that reached showdown, because those are the hands where the outcome is verifiable against what actually happened, not just what you assumed your opponent held. A live-poker coaching session reviewed by Live Poker Guide illustrates exactly this: reviewing a $1/$2 player's biggest pots surfaced an ace-five suited multiway hand and a queen-seven suited 3-bet spot as the two clearest leaks of the whole session, both flagged from pots the player could still remember clearly, which made the review faster, not slower.

The leaks that show up most once you actually look

Across beginner, intermediate, and even solid regular play, the same handful of leak categories keep recurring, just at different price tags. Reviewing your own hands is the only way to know which of these is actually yours, because the categories that cost the most money are rarely the ones you'd guess from memory.

The river-call row matches what Live Poker Guide's coaching session found directly: a nut flush called off on a paired river board against a line that was, in their words, "extremely under-bluffed." The player wasn't short on hand-reading skill in general, they just hadn't logged that this specific spot kept recurring.

Why do intermediate players bluff too little in these exact spots?

SplitSuit's video argues it's a byproduct of fancy-play syndrome layered on top of half-understood solver output: players who've studied enough to distrust their gut, but not enough to apply a solver range correctly, end up folding out of caution in spots where a straightforward player would have bluffed or called. The fix isn't more theory, it's noticing the pattern in your own history and correcting the specific spot, not the whole strategy.

You don't need a HUD to see this, you need your own hand history

A heads-up display shows you live stats while you're seated, and on rooms that ban trackers, it's simply not an option. Session review doesn't need one. Everything in the framework above runs on the raw hand history export you can pull from your account after the session ends, whether or not the room your played on permits a HUD at the table.

That distinction matters more than it looks: nothing in a post-session review happens during a hand. The review is entirely retrospective, which is also why it's the one form of poker study that's compatible with every room's terms of service, including the ones that treat any form of live in-hand help as cause for closing an account.

The mental game leak that never makes it onto a spreadsheet

Terry Wood's "you layer" framework names something the stat-based leaks above can't capture on their own: tilt, impatience, ego-driven hero calls, and results-oriented thinking after a big pot. None of these show up as a single misplayed hand, they show up as a cluster of hands right after an emotional trigger, which is exactly why a 30-minute review built around isolated big pots can miss them if you don't check for the pattern specifically.

How much does tilt actually cost, in big blinds?

There's no honest single number, because it depends entirely on how long the tilt lasts and how aggressively it changes your ranges. What you can measure is the cluster: look at your hand history for the three to five hands immediately following your biggest loss of the session, and check whether your sizing, calling frequency, or aggression shifted compared to the rest of the session. If it did, that cluster is where a tilt leak lives, and it's often worth more big blinds than every technical leak in the table above combined, precisely because it compounds across several hands instead of showing up once.

A DriveHud user on r/poker asked a related, more grounded question after using its built-in leak analysis: whether the tool's suggestions were actually accurate for a 5NL-10NL player still building fundamentals. That's the right instinct, treat any leak-detection output, human or automated, as a hypothesis to check against your own hand history rather than a verdict to accept on its own. The player pool at every online stake keeps getting harder to beat as more of it studies with structured tools rather than feel, which is part of why market research on digital gambling platforms consistently shows online poker's player base skewing toward more prepared opponents than a decade ago.

Sample size matters here too, and it's worth saying plainly: one session, reviewed perfectly, still won't tell you your win rate. Variance dominates any small sample, so treat a single review as evidence toward a pattern, not proof of one, until the same leak shows up across several sessions in a row.