Spaced Practice

Same total study time, spread out, beats it all crammed together — by a lot.

What it is

Distributing your study across multiple sessions over time, instead of massing it into one long block. Five 20-minute sessions across two weeks beat one 100-minute cram.

Why it works

The spacing effect is one of the most robust findings in all of learning research. Cepeda et al.'s review found spacing beat cramming in 259 of 271 comparisons. Cramming gives you good performance tomorrow but poor retention next month; spacing does the reverse (Learning ≠ Performance).

Mechanism: each time you let a memory fade a little and then retrieve it again, you strengthen it more than if you'd reviewed it while it was still fresh. Forgetting a bit, then recovering, is the workout.

How much to space — the ratio rule

Cepeda et al. (2008) found the best gap grows with how long you want to remember it:

You want to remember it for…	Roughly space reviews…
A week	~1–2 days apart
A month	~a few days to a week apart
A year+	~3–4 weeks apart

For skills you want forever, use expanding intervals: review after a day, then a few days, then a week, then weeks, then months.

Try this

Use a spaced-repetition app (like Anki) — it schedules expanding intervals automatically, so you never have to plan it. Add a card when you learn something; the app decides when you see it next.

In poker

Put your ranges and heuristics in Anki — it schedules expanding intervals automatically, so old formations resurface just often enough to stay sharp. → Anki for Poker

Key takeaway

Spread it out. Short, frequent, spaced sessions crush long crams for anything you want to keep. A little forgetting between sessions is a feature, not a bug.

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Sources: Cepeda et al. (2008) — optimal spacing · Dunlosky et al. (2013)