Build Your Routine

Everything in this wiki, assembled into a study system you can run. The key idea: poker skill mostly decays as feel (your fast per-spot intuition), not as forgotten facts — so maintenance is re-drilling, not flashcards. Adapt the volumes to your situation; the structure is what matters.

The skill lifecycle

Every spot you study moves through four stages. This replaces any fixed "study a topic then forget it" calendar:

Stage	What you do	How
1. Acquire	Build a brand-new spot's feel from scratch	Study the solution first, then blocked drilling (one spot, repeated) — worked examples beat struggling when it's new
2. Consolidate	Finish the build — deepen it, make it automatic	Interleaved drilling (mix it with other spots) → builds discrimination [interleaving]
3. Maintain	Keep the feel from fading	Spaced, interleaved re-drills — revisit at expanding intervals
4. Repair	Rebuild a spot whose feel has tanked	Drop back to blocked drilling on just that spot

The rule: block to acquire & repair, interleave to retain. A new skill needs concentrated, close-together reps; a learned skill is kept sharp by spaced, mixed reps.

The core loop (one cycle per leak)

1. DIAGNOSE  → find your real leaks (tracker vs winners + solver report)
2. ACQUIRE   → study the solution, then drill it closed-book until the feel is there
3. CONSOLIDATE → interleave it with other spots to make it automatic
4. APPLY     → use it in play; mark hands; review them
5. MAINTAIN  → re-drill it at spaced intervals (interleaved); repair any spot that decays

Every step maps to a principle: diagnose = deliberate practice, drill closed-book = retrieval, spaced+interleaved maintenance = the desirable difficulties, apply/review = feedback.

What to use flashcards (Anki) for

This is the part most players get wrong. Don't flashcard postflop strategy — a heuristic card is either something you'd never forget or a worse version of a trainer drill, and it can't rebuild feel anyway. Use Anki for the two things that genuinely are declarative and forgettable:

1. Preflop ranges — exact frequencies and thresholds.
2. (optional) Drill-scheduling — use spaced-repetition as the scheduler that tells you which spot to re-drill, graded by how the drill went.

Match the task to your energy

• Fresh: the hard work — acquiring new spots, generative drilling.
• Tired: the light work — marking hands, journaling, Anki ranges. Never learn new material fatigued. → Attention & Flow

Distribute, don't cram

• Short, frequent, focused beats long marathons — and it builds in spacing automatically.
• Re-drill at expanding intervals (days → weeks → month) — let a spaced-repetition scheduler decide what's due, and drill the due set interleaved.
• One topic at a time, finished — protect your attention; cut table count when a spot isn't autopilot.

Study vs volume

• Volume is necessary (earnings, variance, reps) — and it maintains the spots you play often, for free.
• Targeted study + feedback is what improves you, especially once advanced (more hours barely helps elites).
• The spaced re-drills matter most for your lower-frequency spots — the ones volume never reaches.

Don't forget the two non-negotiables

• Mental game — schedule it: tilt review, stop-losses, process over results. → Mental Game
• Sleep — it's when learning consolidates. → Transfer & Sleep

A simple weekly shape (example)

Daily	A focused drill block when fresh — your current acquisition or the spots due for a spaced re-drill (interleaved) + ~10 min Anki ranges
Most days	Play volume + a quick "mark hands" pass after
Once a week	A deeper hand-review session (your marked hands, reasoned out then solver-checked)
Monthly	Re-diagnose leaks; pick the next acquisition target; review tilt & results as process feedback

Key takeaway

Diagnose → acquire (blocked) → consolidate (interleaved) → maintain with spaced, interleaved re-drills → repair what decays. Flashcards are for preflop ranges, not postflop feel. Hard work fresh, light work tired, mental game and sleep protected — and let leak-shrinkage and your drill scores, not your graph, tell you it's working.

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This routine is the applied summary of the whole wiki. Each linked page explains the evidence behind its step. Want a coached version of it? → Join Dead Read.