Making Notes on your Opponents in Online Poker

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One thing in online poker that gets talked about often but rarely discussed at length, is the practice of making notes on your opponents. Everyone is aware that it’s something they should be doing, but how many of us really take the time to think about the processes we put in place for it? Do we focus on improving our note-taking the same way we focus on improving our hand-reading? I doubt it, but we certainly could do if we wanted. Let’s take a look at a few ways we can make our note-taking practices more efficient.

Tagging and colour-coding

This is probably the most fundamental aspect of note-taking – the ability to quickly and easily group your opponents into categories based on your interpretation of the way they play. It’s easier on some sites than others – PokerStars, for example, makes it incredibly straightforward to assign a colour tag to an opponent and add a description of what that colour tag means – but most sites have a way for you to do this, and it’s something that you should be taking advantage of if you play anything more than minimal volume on a particular site.

When it comes to deciding on an approach for this practice, there’s one thing I think a lot of people overlook – it’s much more beneficial to group players according to ability and playing style, rather than just playing style alone. The reason is that if you just create tags according to playing style – for example, if you make light blue denote a ‘TAG reg’ – then you haven’t addressed the fact that this player could be an extremely good TAG reg with a track record of hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit, or a very mediocre one who just barely scrapes by at a $10 ABI. The way you approach playing against each of these players should be very different, so they should come under different tags – you might simply use ‘big winning TAG reg’ and ‘breakeven TAG reg’ for starters.

For the sake of clarity, how do we know the difference between big winners and marginal winners? That’s why result-tracking sites like SharkScope and tools like Tournament Shark exist. You can debate whether or not these sites are ethical all you like, but if you’re not using them, you’re costing yourself money. They should be a regular and consistent part of your game.

Develop your own shorthand

It’s one thing to be able to tag players effectively and begin to note down instances in which you’ve been able to see them show down a hand (since these are by far the most useful things to actually note – it doesn’t help much to take a note if you don’t know what hand your opponent had), but it’s quite another thing to be able to use that note effectively when you notice it later on. If you play more than just a few tables online, you’ll find that it’s very hard to find the time to write a detailed, complicated note about an opponent in the few seconds you have between hands – this is where shorthand comes in.

You’re not going to have much time available to write each note, so develop a shorthand that works for you. Instead of typing ‘3-bet’, just use ‘3b’. Instead of typing ‘value-bet’, just use ‘vb’. Stick with common denotations for board cards, stack sizes and other simple factors, and then get creative and do whatever you need to do in order to be sure you’ll understand that note when you read it back again. The last thing you want is to open up your notes on an opponent during a crucial hand and see ‘plays KK like a donk in multiway pots’ – this is a judgmental, unhelpful, emotionally-charged assessment of what you assume to be a tendency on your opponent’s part, but which in fact may just be one solitary, marginal mistake.

If you had noted ‘c/c KK OOP MW 875cc on 43bb, c/r Tc turn’ (‘check/called Kings out of position multi-way on an 875 flop with two clubs with a 43bb stack, and check/raised the Ten of clubs on the turn’) you’d have all the information you need, without the unnecessary judgment and without any wasted time. Your notes should look like this one above – judgment-free, factual information about something of interest that your opponent actually did, which tells you how their play might relate to what you would expect in that situation, and thus gives you a heads-up about their tendencies.

Aim for maximum usefulness

Finally, make sure that what you’re noting down is as useful as possible. Don’t take note of a specific play your opponent made that was entirely ‘standard’, but instead look for the times when your opponent does something unexpected – if you can see a showdown and get an idea of, for example, the types of hands that your opponent tends to 3-bet bluff with at deep stacks, or how wide their BB defending range is, then that’ll be a goldmine of information that will help you in all future situations of that nature against that player. But taking the time to note that they got all-in on the flop with middle set in a spot where you happened to have top set is not really going to prove too useful, since you would have expected that from most players in that spot. Don’t use your notes as a chance to brag about hands you won in the past.

Your goal in taking notes should not only be to acquire relevant information about your opponents – it should be to render that information in a form that makes it most useful to you in future. If your notes are unintelligible, or they’re based on one random hand that doesn’t represent that player’s overall tendencies, or they’re full of tilted, emotional judgments like “this guy is a total fish, slowroll him at every opportunity”, then you’re just wasting your time taking those notes. Time is a resource, and when you only have a few seconds in between hands, how you use that time can be the difference between a five-figure or six-figure score, and a disappointing ninth-place finish.