Ideas for group sweat sessions

I am thinking about hosting one like XTR did yesterday - obviously more for my benefit than for the benefit of anyone sitting in - and I was thinking about if I wanted it to have some kind of theme.

First I thought - hell yeah, I want a theme. I want to emphasize recall / memory - remembering what happens earlier in the hand (who was aggressor, how much did they bet, what did that do to their range), hand ranges, reads, note taking on hands I'm not involved with and such basic basic topics. I thought I'd keep my PT3 open on the side and if I happen to sit with villains I know I'll dig into my database of hands they played to expand on (or introduce, more likely) notes and reads on them when it is quiet on the one table I think would be sufficient for a session with this kind of topic.

Then I thought - I could make it a 45 min session and then do another optional 45 minutes where I go into some depth analysing one or more hands that occurred during the play session. Especially as a beginner it's sometimes hard (for me at least) to know where to begin to analyse - which questions to ask, how to ask them, determine what would constitute a meaningful answer, determine how to get that answer.

And suddenly I'm thinking heck - I don't even need a play session. And I could take requests! Say there's a hand on the BC that's been discussed a bit, the OP is a bit lost in how to actually arrive at the answer and instead of sitting down and just writing a marathon post in reply to it I could invite the OP and anyone else interested into a desktop sharing session and I could say "This is how I'd go about analysing that hand".

Don't get me wrong, my thinking and analysis is still very much beginner level so there would be areas where I make the wrong assumptions regarding opponent ranges and picking lines and I may get lost when the analysis gets complicated, but I could definitely cover some basics. And I would of course appreciate pointers on what I'm doing wrong, what I'm making more complicated than it needs to be etc.

I think it's actually not a bad idea to have a group 'sweat' session which is all analysis.

Thoughts? Other ideas?

I like this. While i feel analyzing someone's game while theyre playing is important, there is relatively few posts/topics concerning how to analyze a game after the fact. Logically, it would then follow that people would have little experience in analyzing their own hands after the game and something like erpel's idea would be highly beneficial.

And obv all sweat session videos should be posted in the "poker videos" section

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Originally Posted by JKDS

And obv all sweat session videos should be posted in the "poker videos" section

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I actually disagree with this. Not all of them. I think the formula I outline will also encourage impromptu workshop / sweat sessions where you bang out some concepts or analyse some situations. These may or may not be recorded. Or if you make a session based on actual play you may not end up in any interesting spots. Or you may run an analysis workshop, have it recorded, have a mod review it and decide it is flawed and uses the wrong techniques and/or arrives at the wrong conclusions.

Producing content is easy. It's dead easy. Producing quality content is hard. And sometimes we won't know until after the event whether this is interesting to watch, or whether it was just interesting to participate in.

All this said - the BEST recordings of sessions should definitely be put forward to the FTR poker video library.

Edited to replace ad-hoc with impromptu as that was the word I initially wanted to use in the sentence and managed to forget about before I got to type it.

ya i see your point actually. now that i think about it, keeping them in specific topics where people are giving lots of feedback after the session is probably best, if the session was recorded at all.

I personally think this is a great idea for a few reasons.

First of all, you can focus on meaningful hands. Even spenda said in the last sweat session that it sucks when you're coaching someone and no interesting spots come up. So this would be just the opposite, where only interesting spots come up.

Secondly, it's hard to analyze a hand while you're still playing. There's a lot going on, you can't pull up the history as easily so everyone is just going off of memory, and you might miss an interesting spot that's currently happening because you're all still talking about a hand from 10 minutes ago. Related to that, you'd be able to pause the action at any time and talk about what the current thought process would be.

Finally, when someone is playing and they have 9 people watching them and commenting on their play, it's difficult to play your normal game. It's natural to error on the side of caution because you don't want to be berated for making a stupid play. Obviously you don't have this problem if you're just replaying old hands in PT or whatever.

And finally finally, you can pick hands that all have a common theme. I think it'd be awesome to be able to watch a video that discusses only hands of a certain type.

I think this is a great idea, and since there's not really a "presenter" and a group of people sweating him, it becomes more of a round table discussion, and I think that would be very beneficial to everyone.

I'm not sure if anyone here has watched the Late Night Coaching vids with Joe Tall on DuecesCracked, but they have a nice method of session review that I would like to try getting together soon. They gather a session from a student that has leaks that should be looked at. They then pick all of the interesting situations that the student feels he needs to work on. This doesn't mean biggest winning/losing pots.. It can obviously even be small pots on whether you should cbet or not, or if it's correct to isolate with this hand. They toss all the hands into a replayer, and grab the assistance of some relatively good player (DogIsHeads in his LNC is the shit fwiw), and review it all. So you have 3 individuals talking about numerous hands while replaying it (recording ofc), witht he student there to ask any questions that may arise. I think this would benefit greatly.

And what could be done with this is have a situation thread in the BC. A thread where we encourage individuals to go with hand histories that represent situations they are commonly confused in. We can then choose the hand histories from there that best represent the most difficult spots, then review those.

It might be something you would want to do with your session.. If not, I may put this together soon, as I have meant to for a while, but haven't posted it in the BC yet. My only hesitation is the fear of getting a bunch of players who say they want to participate, and then having them not put forth the effort that others are.

I think thats a great idea staxo and I think it shouldn´t be limited to the BC.

Good things could come from this thread :)

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Originally Posted by kettleofish

Good things could come from this thread :)

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I agree, but I would encourage Spenda to pariticipate (so we don't all get banned) because he knows this poker shit up and down. Nuf said.

I would love for Spenda or someone equally skilled to be participating, but his time is limited and he has his own operation he's working on. Also, there's a real limit to how much hand-holding is effective. Learning this poker thing is something we all have to figure out for ourselves, and we all have to put in the effort individually.

Having someone really skilled along to provide a reality check would be great, but should not always be a requirement for a session to go ahead.

well everyone (except XTR) was so quiet I kind of just took the reigns really.

I think it'd be cool if we could get a good player in there each time to lead/guide the discussion in the proper direction. I like that it was recorded and I was able to hear the audio perfectly (must be why I heard myself talking the whole time...).

I'd say next time we go down to 10nl or so, if I'm around I'll try to join, if not maybe we could get someone else to help.

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Originally Posted by bigspenda73

well everyone (except XTR) was so quiet I kind of just took the reigns really.

I think it'd be cool if we could get a good player in there each time to lead/guide the discussion in the proper direction. I like that it was recorded and I was able to hear the audio perfectly (must be why I heard myself talking the whole time...).

I'd say next time we go down to 10nl or so, if I'm around I'll try to join, if not maybe we could get someone else to help.

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Agree.

I think it´s cool to alternate the limits between micros and small/midstakes. To make sure things go on for a little longer, we should be having weekly or bi-weekly sessions. I´m willing to host this ang get things going if you want me to, especially to take Skype management off your shoulders while you´re playing.. Post your requests in the first thread here. So we need a 10NL volunteer for the next group therapy, raise your hands!

I like both idea's. Stax's idea of a leak-plugging session, and erpels/RML's idea of a certain kind of hand only session. I think both of these should be delved into. Once I can actualy get a non-mac computer and HEM (should be a few months :() and get some HH's in there I wouldn't mind being the "student" with that said, I would like to participate in one if not both of these.

Good thread imo :D

I think that there was a bit of group awe that you were there Spenda with people preferring to hear your analysis and learning from that.
I'm just starting to learn the cash game side of things starting at 2NL and to me it seemed quite scary seeing 100NL and learnt quite a bit from it.I particularly noticed that XTR didn't chase his flopped gutshots just laying down his hand to a bet whereas I would most likely (at 2NL) have been calling at least one bet trying to get lucky.
XTR seemed very disciplined (possibly too disciplined as we were watching which he acknowledged) by being nitty which contrasted to Spendas videos when he would be punishing the nits.
I am willing in a couple of weeks when I've got a bit more experience at 2NL and multitabling it to do a session on the basis that everyone learns from mistakes ( and I'll probably be making plenty) which should give everyone plenty to learn from and stimulate the discussion on the rails.
Another point that really stuck in my mind from the session was Spenda saying that people opening 4xbb from the button didn't know what they were doing as they had the widest possible range and the blinds to call it were going to have a tight range.
A final thought on the Aces hand. When the guy shoved his entire stack over the top of XTR's 14$ bet was this a classic case of the only hands that would call were hands that beat him? Pocket Aces and sets.