I Ranked Every Way to Improve at Tournament Poker
There are more ways to improve at tournament poker than ever before.
Solvers. Trainers. Coaching. Courses. Study groups. YouTube. Database reviews. Or simply playing more.
But if you only have a few hours each week, which methods actually deserve your time?
After more than 14 years coaching tournament players, I ranked 22 common approaches from D tier to S tier based on how well they help you identify what needs improving, build the skill, get feedback and make better decisions at the table.
Here’s where they landed.
Watch the full breakdown here:
D Tier: Low-Value Improvement
Just playing more
Experience matters, but eventually volume alone stops producing improvement. Without review or deliberate practice, you can simply repeat the same mistakes thousands of times.
Line-checking individual hands
Finding out whether one exact river call was correct may satisfy your curiosity, but often teaches little that transfers elsewhere.
A better question is:
What can this hand teach me about the next 500 similar situations?
Poker streams
Potentially educational, but extremely inefficient. You don't control which spots appear, there's little repetition and you're mostly watching someone else make decisions.
C Tier: Useful, But Limited
Poker books
Excellent for durable principles and frameworks, but specific strategy can age quickly and reading is relatively passive.
Playing live
Important if you play live, but poor for deliberate improvement. You see fewer hands and often have incomplete information when reviewing afterwards.
Preflop charts
Great reference material. Not necessarily a great way to learn.
Seeing an action on a chart is different from producing it yourself under pressure.
Taking notes
Notes store information. They become valuable when you later retrieve, practise and apply what you've written.
B Tier: Good Sources of Learning
YouTube strategy videos
There is fantastic free poker education available, but YouTube doesn't know what your biggest leak is.
A brilliant video about three-bet pots is still a poor use of time if your biggest weakness is elsewhere.
Training-site video libraries
The content can be excellent, but enormous libraries create the problem of deciding what to watch.
Consuming poker education and deliberately improving are not the same thing.
Playing online
Better than live for improvement because you get more repetitions, exact hand histories and useful data.
But playing more hands still doesn't guarantee learning.
Reviewing your own hands
Essential, but limited by your existing understanding. You're using the same thought process that produced the decision to work out what was wrong with it.
Blind spots are easy to miss.
A Tier: Powerful When Used Properly
Study groups
Explaining your reasoning and having other thoughtful players challenge it is an excellent way to expose gaps in your understanding.
Solvers
One of the strongest tools available—if you use them to understand why strategies exist rather than memorising exact frequencies.
Structured courses
Useful because somebody has already organised the learning sequence. They're especially valuable when you've already identified that the topic matters to your game.
Trainers
DTO, GTO Wizard, Preflop Dojo and similar tools force you to make decisions, receive feedback and repeat.
That is much closer to the actual skill of playing poker.
Group coaching
You get expert feedback while also learning from other players' questions, mistakes and ways of thinking.
Teaching someone else
One of the best tests of understanding.
If you cannot explain a strategy clearly without your solver or notes, you probably don't understand it as well as you thought.
Reviewing hands by theme
Ten Big Blind-versus-Button hands teach you much more about that spot than ten unrelated hands.
Grouping similar situations makes patterns and recurring mistakes easier to find.
Aggregate reports
Instead of studying one exact flop, aggregate reports reveal patterns across hundreds or thousands of situations.
They help turn individual solver outputs into usable strategies and heuristics.
Structured training programming
Once you've found a leak, organise your study around fixing it:
Learn → Drill → Review → Get feedback → Repeat
Now your study sessions work towards the same objective rather than competing with one another.
One-to-one coaching
Great coaching can dramatically accelerate improvement through personalised diagnosis and feedback.
But a great player isn't automatically a great coach.
Good coaching should eventually make you less dependent on your coach, not more.
S Tier: Leak Finding and Assessment
If I could put only one method into S tier, it would be:
Working out what actually needs improving.
Because everything else depends on it.
A trainer can be excellent—but what should you train?
A course might be brilliant—but which course?
An aggregate report may be powerful—but which spot deserves your limited time?
A coach can help—but what should the coaching focus on?
If you don't know your highest-impact weaknesses, you're guessing where to invest your study time.
Database analysis is one of the best ways to identify leaks, but structured assessments, training results and detailed reviews can all help.
The Real S-Tier Method
There is one problem with putting leak finding at the top.
Finding a leak doesn't fix it.
If your database shows you're not check-raising enough from the Big Blind, you've diagnosed the
problem.
Tomorrow, you still have to find those check-raises at the table.
So the real S-tier approach isn't one tool.
It's a complete improvement loop:
Diagnose → Learn → Train → Apply → Review → Repeat
Find the highest-impact problem.
Choose the right tool to understand it.
Train the decisions deliberately.
Apply them when you play.
Review what happened and get feedback where needed.
Then use what you discover to decide what to work on next.
That's the biggest lesson from the entire ranking.
You can have an A-tier solver, trainer, coach and training site—and still have a D-tier improvement process.
The individual tools don't create progress. The system connecting them does.
So if I only had a few hours each week to improve, I wouldn't start by asking:
What should I study today?
I'd ask:
What's the highest-impact thing currently holding my game back?
Then I'd build my study around fixing it.
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