Every player has leaks. The hard part is not admitting it; it's finding which ones, because results lie. A losing month can be variance and a winning one can hide a costly habit. To find leaks reliably you have to stop looking at outcomes and start comparing your decisions to a strategy.
What counts as a leak
A leak is a repeatable decision pattern that loses EV. One bad call is a mistake. Calling too wide from the big blind against small-blind raises every time is a leak. The distinction matters because only patterns are worth fixing: they recur hundreds of times and the cost compounds.
A useful leak has three properties:
- It's specific: a position, a spot, a hand class. "I play badly from the blinds" is not a leak. "I over-fold the BB to button min-raises" is.
- It's frequent: it comes up often enough to matter.
- It's measurable: you can compare what you did to what the strategy does.
Why your results can't find it
Poker variance is enormous. Over a few thousand hands, a winning player can easily be down and a losing player up. Your win rate by position or by spot is mostly noise until the sample is very large. Looking at results tells you how the cards fell, not how you played.
Decisions, on the other hand, are available on every hand. If the strategy folds a hand 100% of the time and you call it, that is information, whether you won the pot or not.
The method: compare your actions vs GTO
- Collect your hand histories. Export them from the poker room or tracking software you use. See how to export poker hand histories for each major room.
- Analyse them against a strategy. A poker hand history analyzer replays each decision and checks it against the reference strategy for that spot: your pack, or a GTO solution.
- Sort deviations by cost × frequency. A small mistake you make in every orbit beats a big one you made once.
- Group them into spots. Ten flagged hands all in SB vs BB is one leak, not ten mistakes.
- Turn the top one or two into drills. Fixing is a training problem, not an insight problem.
The most common poker leaks
These come up again and again when players compare their hands to a strategy.
Preflop
- Over-folding the big blind. The price you're getting means a wide range defends, especially against small opens. See BTN vs BB.
- Flatting too much from the small blind in cash games, where you're out of position against everyone.
- Opening too wide from early position because the button range "feels" normal.
- Not adjusting to stack depth. Using 100bb habits at 25bb, or vice versa. Covered in preflop range mistakes.
Postflop
- Missing c-bets in position on boards that favour your range.
- C-betting too much out of position on boards that favour the caller.
- Over-folding to river bets. Players fold far more than minimum defence frequency suggests, because calling and losing feels worse than folding.
- Under-bluffing big river spots, so value bets get fewer calls.
How many hands do you need?
You need far fewer hands to find a decision leak than a results leak. A handful of deviations in the same pure spot already tells you something: if the strategy always defends a hand and you folded it five times out of five, that's not variance. For mixed spots, you need more hands before a frequency difference means anything.
From leak to fix
A leak you understand but haven't drilled will still be there next week. For each leak:
- Name it in one line: spot, position, what you do, what the strategy does.
- Add the spot to your drill rotation and train it until accuracy holds. See the GTO trainer routine.
- Re-check after a few sessions with new hand histories. If the deviation is gone, the fix worked.
Finding leaks in PokerHero
Upload your hand histories and PokerHero flags where you deviated from your strategy: the pack you drill, or your own edited version. Mistakes are shown by how often you make them and what they cost, so the biggest leaks surface first and each one can be sent straight into a drill.
For the human side of review (which hands to look at and how to label them), see how to review poker hands.
Frequently asked questions
What is a poker leak?
A repeatable decision pattern that loses EV, such as over-folding the big blind to button opens. A one-off mistake isn't a leak; a habit that recurs hundreds of times is.
How many hands do I need to find leaks?
Far fewer than to judge results. A few deviations in a spot the strategy plays the same way every time is already meaningful; mixed spots need more hands.
What does a hand history analyzer do?
It replays each decision from your hand histories and compares it with a reference strategy for that spot, so you can see where and how often you deviate.