The Value Of Poker Training Videos

I’ve received many emails from players asking “what is the real value in poker videos?” It’s a fair question, especially when the price tags get into the hundreds. The first thing that dictates the value in poker videos is that you learn well from videos. If you aren’t sure if you learn well from videos, check out my post on learning styles in poker.

Next you want to make sure the covered material is not only relevant to your games, but also that you have the prerequisite knowledge (when necessary). It’s useless to purchase a HU SNG video if you play fullring cash games, and even more useless to buy a range merging video when you play micro-stakes games. I’ve seen many players use too complex of strategies in the wrong games and get crushed for doing so. You also want to think about your overall game, and prioritize what you need to learn. For instance, it’s more important that you can CB well than triple barrel bluff well. CB spots happen way more often and influence your WR in a huge way. Focus on spots that happen often and affect your WR the most…this includes preflop opening/calling/3betting and CB/flop in 3bet pots/value betting/showdown value.

Which brings us to the fun part…proving the value of a video. For this, lets use a DB provided by an old LeakFinder student. Say this player were to buy the 3 betting poker videos for $50. He plays 50NL (.25/.50) and thus spent 1 buy-in. These videos cover everything from 3/4betting to postflop play in 3bets, and also how to call when facing a 3bets. Let’s run a filter for Call v 3Bet = True/AIPF = False for this hero:

Over a big sample this filter will be negative for most fullring and 6max players. But what we can do is compare our call v 3bet to just outright folding against the 3bet. Assuming we open to 3bb and fold to each 3bet, we would be -300bb/100 here, so it’s easy to see that hero is performing very poorly when calling 3bets. Let’s say the videos improved hero to the breakeven -300bb/100 winrate here…this would have saved hero more than $400, which certainly covers the price of the package (and you also learn more than just this is the videos!) This isn’t to say that each individual improvement in your game would be so large, but a bunch of tiny improvements add up to more money in your pocket.

Many players at this point would argue that they could just read, study, play, and learn this all on their own. For most material this is true, but think about the time that goes into that. Those are precious hours that could have been spent playing better poker and making more money. Plus, videos could easily improve other ares of your game with tangential material. So long as the video concept(s) aren’t too basic/advanced, the short and concise format is usually the better outright value compared to self study. In poker our goal is to maximize edges, minimize losses, and create profit in the process. Videos do that to your studying by minimizing the tine spent, improving your WR, and helping you make more money (and faster!). Regardless of which study method you choose, good luck and happy grinding!