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My advice is to always consider any expense of money as coming from your BR. If you are considering paying for a book or software or anything else, think of the cost in terms of BB's.
How many BB's is the cost?
Call it A.
How many BB/100 hands of improvement do you anticipate from this purchase?
Call it B.
(Note that this is your NEW winrate after you're a pro at the new skills minus the OLD winrate from before you made the purchase. Realistically, don't expect this to be over 1 to 3 bb/100.)
Take A and divide by B, and that's the number hands you expect to need to play to break even on the purchase. If you're playing 5NL, and you expect to increase your winrate by 1 bb/100, then a $50 purchase is 100,000 hands. In 100 hands, you'll make $0.05 more than before you mastered this new skill. Then after 100 times as many hands (10,000), you'll have earned $5 more than otherwise. Then, finally after 10 times as many hands again (100,000), you've recouped your investment and it's pure profit from there on.
This means that the higher you are in stakes, the more motivated you should be to invest money in getting better. Also, the higher volume you play, the more motivated you should be. If you're a casual player at the micros, the investment is almost always a -EV choice.
Very nearly 100% of the time, your most +EV option is to find 0 cost ways to study.
Posting hands here and on other poker forums is widely hailed to be a solid way to get free advice.
Using Equilab and just constantly playing with it and asking yourself questions about equity in various situations and then finding the answers is amazing for letting yourself do lazy homework that will actually stick with you as learning.
Trolling YouTube for poker videos which have a player you can relate to is OK, but can be pretty lame for retention of skills.
There's always the leak-finder ability of most poker-tracking softwares (only 0 cost if you've already purchased, though).
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