The Importance of Taking Notes

If you have joined one of the best poker sites or larger online poker rooms, you may consider whether taking notes about other players is of any benefit to you. After all, with a hundreds of thousands of players online, what are the odds of ever meeting one of them again? The answer is pretty likely.

After a while most players will settle down into a particular game type and stake value. If you take (for example) NL Hold´em at $0.50/$1, which is probably one of the most popular levels of the game, half the ring table players will prefer to play short handed, whereas the other half will prefer to play full table. There will be others who just play STTs and more who just enter the site to play tournaments.

There are those who will play in the evening, those who can only play during the day and those who are on the other side of the planet from you – and probably sleeping right now. So, all of a sudden, you are down to playing with just a core number of several thousand and, if you chose to play full table, there are eight of them already sitting with you. As you play more and more frequently, those eight (or some of them at least) will be on the same table as you, possibly every day. The quieter the poker site, the more relevance you can see in this.

The best way to use your notes facility is to have a summary at the top of your notes page which characterises the type of opponent that your player is, and below more comprehensive details such as the dates that you played (pretty important for comparing standards of play over a period of time), the stake levels that you are playing at and any patterns that you notice in the way s/he plays.

You should try to make your notes as comprehensive as possible, recording suspected “slow” play, a fondness for continuation betting or any aggressive tendencies – also how they react to certain circumstances and at different stages of the betting. This information will be useful to you in the future, and over a period of time you will develop a significant library of facts and figures about your opposition.

No matter how painstaking the physical act of making notes may be, the more comprehensive you make them, the more effective they become. Being able to refer back to your notes during a game is an advantage that you have over all the players who overlook this facility, so the more importance you place in note taking, the more you will be rewarded.