Throughout history people have searched for the Elixir of Life — a potion that gives anyone who drinks it eternal life. None have succeeded in finding it.

It is not through lack of trying either. Qin Shi Huangdi, the first Emperor of China, eventually went crazy and died looking for it as long ago as 210BCE. It seems likely that his death was related to ingesting mercury (as advised by his alchemists and magicians) in an attempt to live forever.

Most people nowadays understand that such a potion does not exist. Of course, aftertiming always has been easy.

So what place does this have in a poker magazine? Well, many players seem to think there is a magic formula that will make them unbeatable, a formula that the top players are hiding from them and would instantly propel them to the highest limit games known to man.

Guess what. There isn't.

(If there were, there would be no games that revealed this secret anyway, so assuming that there isn't is fine for the purposes of this article.)

Things you already know: There is no elixir of life. (Fixing Leaks)

Life expectancy has risen dramatically since the days of Qin Shi Huangdi, and although there are differing opinions as to exactly how much it has risen, and which factors are the main contributors to that increase, it is clear that this small move towards living forever has been achieved with a series of even smaller steps and hard work. Let's see if the wasted time of Qin Shi Huangdi can teach us something about keeping our poker life as healthy as possible.

Many people panic when they ask themselves the question, "How can I fix my leaks?" They believe they will never improve without the aid of coaching, reading or asking questions and so make no effort to improve their game themselves.

It is important to do as much as you can yourself. A coach who needs to learn about you and your problems from scratch is going to spend far longer helping you and run up an unnecessarily high bill. Reading books that are not related to your problems is likely to be less efficient than reading those that are, and asking a stream of ill-thought out questions simply annoys people and makes them less likely to help in the future.

Self-analysis can help reduce the likelihood that you will waste your time and money in trying to improve your game.

If you are struggling to find a way to eliminate your own weaknesses, you're probably not approaching it methodically enough. If you go to see a Doctor and tell him "My child is sick", it helps if you have some symptoms to tell him too. He's a Doctor, not a miracle worker.

The best place to start from scratch is the big pots. Don't second guess yourself or try to be too clever. Just because you know that it is possible to lose money in a pot where you have played correctly, it doesn't mean that you did play correctly. Similarly, just because you would have won a pot if you hadn't folded, it doesn't mean it would have been correct to call. However you're looking for a logical starting point. If you replay big hands (either in your mind or literally depending on whether you play live or online) and look for potential errors, you are starting in the right place. You don't need to find many problems in big pots to make the time spent looking worthwhile.

After reading the next line, I want you to stop for a few moments and imagine what things must have been like before proceeding. If you go back just a few hundred years, the average life expectancy was between twenty-five and thirty-five.

Despite the disagreements over life expectancy factors, one thing had a massive impact on the figures and can be agreed upon by almost everyone, and that is infant mortality. This was such a large factor that it sometimes distorts how people perceive the past. Life expectancies such as the ones I quoted above conjure up images of people barely reaching adulthood before dying. Of course, this was not the case. People were still reaching ages of 60 and beyond, but many infants were not reaching the age of one, which messed up the figures somewhat.

The lesson from this is simply that the bottom line is not always enough information and can in fact be downright misleading. There is evidence to show that despite rising life expectancy, that until the last two or three centuries, there was very little change in your expectancy if you were already an adult. That was great news for the infants, but not so great for those who already wanted to live for longer.

It is also great news for us, because it serves as a reminder that the bottom line figure is made up of lots of components. Fixing each component will improve the bottom line, but fixing the bottom line itself is not a concept that makes sense. What we want to know is which components are important.

Since the Middle Ages, both medicine and the standard of living have improved and somewhere between them they have raised the bottom line of the life expectancy total. More people work to cure common diseases and deadly ones than obscure ones. The reason is pretty self-explanatory, we don't need an analyst to tell us that the diseases that affect a large number of persons are the ones that are more important.

Thanks to this weird kind of natural selection, you can waste less time worrying about which problems are important and be confident that you already know. You'll notice the common ones and the big ones more easily, just like those in medicine do. So the order you would put them in simply by instinct is likely to be closer to the most efficient order to fix them than you would expect. A 0.1bb/hr flaw that comes up five times an hour and a 1bb/hr flaw that comes up once every two hours are obviously going to be near the top of things you notice, even though you notice them for different reasons.

Of course you're now sick of the history analogy and although you're now able to find your own weaknesses, you would love to know how to approach fixing them yourself too. If I mention "Life expectancy" or "Qin Shi Huangdi" once more you'll likely put your fist through the monitor. I'll try to talk about self-analysis for a while instead.

Hopefully you now have your weaknesses identified and have them prioritized in some kind of order that you feel happy with. Trust that order and review what seems most important. How do I propose you do that by yourself? I'll outline some thoughts below.

When reviewing hands that you lost, always assume there was a point when you could have lowered or prevented the loss or even turned the loss into a win. When looking at hands that you won, assume you could have won more by changing the play at some point. You will nearly always find that such a point exists. Now change the line you took and insert the method that would have helped you to do better.

Does it look realistic to do this on a regular basis? If the new line looks sensible, find a similar hand and see if the line would have worked there too. Do this for as many hands as it needs for you to be reasonably sure that your original line was correct, or that your new one is an improvement. Nobody is perfect. If you are happy with where you're going, that's good enough for now. You have a whole list of things to look at.

Confidence in your own analysis is crucial. If you are honest with yourself in the long run then the worst that can happen is you'll notice that the new approach is not helping and you'll analyse the same hands for a third line of approach. So trust yourself. You can't do any serious harm as long as you don't become lazy. If you only change one or two things at a time, you'll have a better feel for how those changes are affecting your game.

To help with your confidence, let's look at a worst-case scenario, one where it's obvious what is wrong. You're sick of losing to flushes, so you decide to fold every time a flush hits on the river and you don't have it. You must discount this hand from your sample and look for other examples of the same thing. If you have a large collection of online hands, that's great. If you only play live, you'll have to keep some kind of notes when it comes up again.

Whenever this situation comes up, note the pot size, the final bet size (if no limit) and the result if you were to call. You can soon get a feel for whether your newly invented play is going to be a long-term winner or loser for you. It will probably only take a handful of pots for this one to become clear on your balance sheet, if your new play is far from ideal. (Of course in reality, simply thinking about scenarios will save you making this particular costly mistake.). You'll soon go back to the drawing board and try to find other places in the pot where you could have turned losses into wins. Maybe you should try betting the turn when you have the nuts versus a flush draw. In no limit, maybe you will discover that there are some bet sizes you shouldn't be calling on the river, or you could have taken down the pot at a different point, or maybe you could have got a cheap showdown with a small bet. There are many possibilities to look at.

You will of course often cost yourself money, although hopefully nothing as dramatic as the example above. A scaled down version of this practice is not going to cost you a great deal in the short term. To offset this lost money, you'll discover a lot about poker. You'll have analyzed a situation by yourself and come to your own conclusions. You'll know why some of your conclusions were flawed and try to find new approaches to the hand. Eventually you'll either work it out, or you'll get sick of not being able to work it out. If the latter occurs, you'll now try to find out about this specific situation. You'll know what you are looking for if you're reading about the subject and you'll ask pertinent questions if you're discussing the subject.

When you find what you are looking for, you'll have a fuller and lasting understanding of the whole scenario, and because of this, you will remember what you should be doing more readily than using some formula that onlyworks for one specific situation. You should also be able to avoid ingesting any poisonous advice.

Poker immortality is not to be found in a magic formula. It is found through analysis and hard work. .