Building a Preparation Checklist That Fits Your Own Play
Most checklists fail for a simple reason: they are copied from someone else and never adapted to the person using them. A list of generic reminders feels productive when you write it and then gets ignored at the table. A better approach is to treat a checklist as a working tool that reflects your own habits, your known weak spots, and the specific decisions you tend to face. This article walks through how to build one from scratch, what belongs on it, and how to test whether it is earning its place. Nothing here depends on any particular product, service, or program. It is a method you can apply with whatever materials you already use.
Start from your own recent mistakes, not from general advice
The fastest way to build a useful checklist is to look backward before you look forward. Pull together a short list of situations where your decisions felt rushed, confused, or later regretted. Your notes, memories, or any hand history you have saved are enough material. You are not trying to catalog every error; you are looking for patterns that repeat. Maybe you consistently overvalue marginal holdings in multiway pots, or you lose track of stack sizes late in a session, or you forget what you intended to work on after a hard result.
Each recurring pattern becomes a candidate line for the checklist. Write it as a question you can answer quickly rather than a vague intention. "Play better in big pots" is not actionable. "Before calling a large bet, have I named the hands that beat me and the hands I beat?" is something you can actually check. The difference between an aspiration and a checklist item is whether you can tell, in the moment, if you did it.
Separate pre-session, in-session, and post-session items
A single long list tends to be skipped in full. Dividing your checklist by timing makes each part short enough to use. A pre-session section might cover your goals for the sitting, the stakes or game format you will play, your energy and focus level, and any adjustment you want to test. An in-session section should be very brief, perhaps three to five items you can glance at during a break. A post-session section covers the review: what happened, what you want to examine later, and what you will record.
Keep the in-session section especially lean. The purpose is not to read a document while the hand is live. It is to catch a few high-value reminders, such as checking your position, confirming the size of the bet you face, or noticing when you are tilting. If you find yourself needing a long list mid-hand, the earlier sections are doing too little of their job.
Write questions that force a specific answer
Good checklist items are questions that cannot be answered with a reflexive yes. "Did I focus?" will always get a yes. "What is one specific spot I am looking for this session, and how will I recognize it?" requires a concrete answer. Aim for items that produce a short written response when you review them later, because that record is what lets you see whether the checklist changes anything.
A useful test is to ask whether two different people would give the same answer to an item. If the answer depends entirely on mood, the item is too loose. Tighten it until the answer is something observable, such as a number, a named situation, or a yes-or-no tied to a specific action.
Limit the list and review it on a schedule
A checklist with twenty items will be ignored within a few weeks. Aim for no more than five to seven items in any section, and remove anything you have consistently satisfied for a long stretch unless it still guards against a costly error. Items that you never seem to remember are either too hard to perform in the moment or are not worth the space. Rewrite or delete them.
Set a review date, perhaps once a month, to ask three questions: which items did I actually use, which ones changed a decision, and which recurring problem is still missing from the list? This maintenance step is where a checklist becomes a living tool rather than a static artifact. It also protects you from clinging to items out of habit after your game has moved on.
A short comparison: a useful checklist versus a decorative one
A decorative checklist looks thorough and is rarely consulted. It tends to contain general virtues, is long, lacks timing structure, and never gets revised. A useful checklist is short, sequenced for the moments it matters, written as concrete questions, and tied to observed mistakes. You can usually tell which kind you have by checking when you last changed it and whether you can point to a decision it improved.
Before you finalize your version, run through this simple check: Does each item target a real pattern from my play? Can I answer it in a few seconds? Is it placed in the section where I will actually see it? Will I know later whether I followed it? If the answer to any of these is no, revise that item before adding more.