Taking notes

Published on January 6, 2011 by Ladbrokes_Poker   ·   No Comments

Do you remember when you were at school, college or in a meeting at work and there was something important you needed to remember? What did you do so that you did not forget any of the important information? That is right, you took some notes, which is something you should be doing when playing poker.

You see, poker is a game played with incomplete information as we only get to see our opponent’s hole cards in certain situations yet so we have to make assumptions of their holdings through the process of elimination and through picking up tells and reads on that particular player. One way to do this is to literally write down everything of note about the things you see your opponent do and trust me there are people who do this in a live poker room as well as online, though doing it online it much simpler and more discrete.

All online poker rooms have the facility built into their software that allows you to take notes on a particular player and it will store them for you, often placing a small icon next to players you have notes on so you can retrieve them quickly during play and use them to your advantage. Whilst the ability to take notes is great and a very useful tool, what should you be actually taking notes on?

Ideally you want to be able to use your notes to piece together a profile of your opponents so a good place to start is whether or not the player in question is loose or tight with their starting hand selections, then if they play passively or aggressively both preflop and post flop. This information alone will help you to construct a range of possible holdings for them in certain situations. Once you have this information, the bones if you like, you can start to add some meat to them. For example, take note of the cards they showdown and if they turn over a flush how did they play it? Do they like to continuation bet on the flop then give up on the turn? Can they three-bet lightly or do they always have a very strong hand when doing do? Basically make notes on anything you think will help you if you ever meet again.

If you are a tournament poker player then there a couple of well known tracking sites that will list the biggest winners and losers on a particular poker site so it always worth checking these sites or even performing a simple Google search to see if your opponent’s name crops up.

No related posts.

Tags: Auto, Draft, hole cards, information, online poker rooms, opponent