The whole idea of recording player notes….given that you’ve been playing free online poker for an extended period of time….should not be new to you.

You’re well aware of the fact that almost every online poker site you’ve visited has provided you with the ability to record notes concerning your individual opponents play….most often, you simply ‘right-clicked’ your mouse and it brought up a note box. And, I would hope that almost all of you have taken advantage of that poker site option.

If you didn’t, shame on you…that was a costly mistake. A mistake that you best not be making in your future play at the B&M cash game tables; if you do make the mistake, it’ll cost you money….possibly a lot of money.

Of equal importance, now that the fraud and chicanery has been amply documented at online poker sites, I’m hopeful that y’all are no longer playing for ‘real money’ on any of the ‘deposit required’ poker venues available through your PC.

And, I’m just as hopeful that y’all have limited your Internet poker play to only NoPayPOKER.com…which, in my opinion, offers you much more than any other ‘free poker‘ site. Plus, it’s a great place to render improvement to just about anyone’s game play, and it’s a great place to build a bankroll.

In the end, when you can thump the ‘Farm Animals’ with regularity, I truly believe that your game can be played profitably at a B & M card room.

However, since there is no PC available to you while you’re playing in a real poker room, no ‘right-click’ option, you’ll have to improvise…you’ll need to develop a manual note taking system, or a mental note taking system.

And, while some of you may be capable of the latter, I’m not; there would be way too much information to store in my aged, and rapidly deteriorating, brain cells. I have a hard enough time remembering what day of the week it is.

So, I’m certainly not going to remember how ‘the young, balding, heavy-set guy from Hammond, Louisiana plays pre-flop’, or the fact that I actually should have known that his name is Andrew…since, at one point, we introduced ourselves to each other.

This being true, my improvisation has been built around a small notebook (3″x6″, in an 8-ring binder).

• I maintain all of my player notes in this book…and, not unlike the semi-complicated on-line note taking system I employed many years ago when I played for 60 hours a week on the Internet, the notes recorded in this binder are seriously complicated.
• I want physical and logistical information about players in this book.
• I want codes that represent their playing style…pre-flop, pre-turn, pre-river, and post-river in this book.
• I want their betting habits described in this book.
• And, I want their physical, verbal, and behavioral tells fully documented in this book.

Should all of this sound somewhat cumbersome, let me be the first to tell you that when you begin the process of recording notes, you’ll find yourself believing that the task is…yes, is…cumbersome.

But, once you’ve worked your way through the initial difficulties, you’ll eventually realize that it’s no more than a routine task to which you’ve become acclimated. You meet someone, you find out the name, you observe physical characteristics, you learn where they are from, and you make an entry in your notebook.

• The binder can be structured around a name sequence, a location sequence, or a physical characteristic sequence; meaning, you’ll need to choose the order in which you maintain your entries within the binder.
• I use a name sequence. It’s always easy for me to apologize to someone for having forgotten their name, and then initiate a re-introduction.

And, if possible, you’ll want to make all of your player note entries while you’re away from the table; the process of allowing others to witness your note taking efforts would be a pretty big mistake.

Therefore, it’s best to use smoke breaks, coffee breaks, rest room breaks, food breaks, and/or phone breaks to accomplish your recording goals; don’t be like Greg Raymer…. openly recording notes is going to scare people away.

Be consistently mindful, when you’re recording notes, of the need for complete accuracy; any mistake in your notebook could end up becoming very expensive. And, that type of costly mistake would only be attributed to your carelessness; no one else would be to blame.

Then, once the sequential order of your notebook is established, and once you’ve begun to enter the ‘physical and logistical’ data concerning your competitors, you’re ready to begin making actual ‘poker play’ notes.

Yet, time, space restraints, my book publishers’ legal authority, and other factors will not permit me to detail a coding system for you. Moreover, I’m compelled to believe that each of you are in possession of the where-with-all to develop the actual codes to be used in your own notes….it’s not as though each of you has just fallen off the donkey cart; you can do it, I don’t need to do it for you.

What I will do…in this Article…is present a guideline, a structure, for the notes you’ll be recording.
This should provide all the assist you’ll need to get your ‘player notes’ started.

And, when you have an accurate set of ‘player notes’ filling the many pages of your binder, coupled with the ability to use those notes during cash game play, you’ll have a vastly improved ability to move a considerable number of your opponents chips to your stack….so much so that you will have firmly ‘rooted’ yourself as a consistent winning player.

• Additionally, beyond the physical and logistical notes that we need in the book, as previously stated, we also need a way to record playing styles…pre-flop, pre-turn, pre-river, and post-river.
• Plus, we need a method of recording our opponents betting habits and tells.
• Clearly, this appears to be a very difficult, time consuming, and mentally challenging task.
• And, while I would like to tell you that the whole process will be easy, I can’t.

Nothing you’ve worked on in an attempt to improve your game play will be as difficult a task as will the work you’ll need to successfully conclude regarding Player Notes….the task of accurately recording Player Notes is an effort of significant magnitude.

Absent the necessary time and effort on your part will be cause for large amounts of money to be deposited in your opponents bank accounts….not your accounts.

So, first, we’ll label the sections of our individual player pages in the notebook:

1. ‘F’ for pre-flop playing style.
2. ‘T’ for pre-turn playing style.
3. ‘R’ for pre-river playing style.
4. ‘X’ for post-river playing style.
5. Then, it’s ‘B’ for betting habits
6. ”C’ for tells and body language

The ‘F’ (pre-flop), ‘T’ (pre-turn), and ‘R’ (pre-river) sections should, for the most part, all use the same coding elements.

• You’ll need to develop a set of codes that keep you informed about the way in which your competitors play.
• And, again, I believe that each of you are quite capable of establishing these codes….providing, of course, that y’all possess a willingness to do the required work.

As an example, you might code a very aggressive player as ‘VA’, you might code a tight and conservative player as ‘TC’, you might code a calling station as ‘CS’, you might code a player who won’t fold a premium pocket as ‘PS’ (premium station), and you might code an extremely good player as ‘XG’.

Now….keep going; code a timid player, code a chip flinger. Can you think of more? Of course you can!

Personally, regarding the entire note taking process, I use approximately 225 codes; although, I will cautiously admit, there are times when I think that I record more data than is actually necessary.

Yet, the work I do in recording notes is now instinctive, it’s natural….I don’t think about it, it just occurs in the normal course of playing my game. Importantly, the same will be true for each of you one day in the not so distant future.

The ‘X’ section, post-river playing style, needs to be somewhat different.

• Here, we want to make ourselves aware of any players propensity for bluffing
• Plus, we’ll want almost all of the types of ‘playing style’ information as used in ‘F’, ‘T’, and ‘R’.
• Yet, the bluffing component to the ‘X’ code is of paramount importance.
• So, if you’ve observed a player’s propensity for aggressive post-river betting, where the bets are almost always an attempt to steal the pot, get a code into your notes to remind yourself of that players bad habit, or habits.
• One of the codes I use is ‘PB’. It tells me that when all 5 cards are exposed on the board, this particular player has a penchant for making a bet that is no more than a bluff.
• And, occasionally, I get to capitalize on the data recorded in my notebook.

Next, is the ‘B’ section…betting habits. And, we need 4 subsets to the ‘B’ section:

1. One that correlates to pre-flop betting.
2. One that correlates to pre-turn betting.
3. One that correlates to pre-river betting.
4. And one that correlates to post-river betting.

Plus, we should only be interested in notes that describe bets when the player is actually a contender in the hand; and, we certainly can’t delineate a note if the players’ pocket cards are not revealed to us at the end of the hand.

As an example, If the player routinely bets 3 times the BB when he’s holding his version of playable pre-flop cards, we would be interested in capturing notes on his betting habits; something like ’3P’ for three times the big blind when he’s holding pocket paint, something like ’8A’ for eight times the big blind when he’s holding pocket aces, or something like ’6K’ for six times the big blind when he’s holding pocket kings; providing, of course, that he does, in fact, make those bets.

Plus, going a step beyond, we’ll need something like ‘RA’, ‘RK’, or ‘RS’ when the player re-raises a pre-flop raise; where ‘RA’ means he’s holding pocket Ace/Ace, ‘RK’ means he’s holding pocket King/King, and ‘RS’ means he’s holding pocket Ace/King (the ‘S’ part of ‘RS’ translating into Big Slick).

Last, is the ‘C’ section for tells and body language….it’s identified as ‘C’ only because of the influence that Mike Caro has had on my game, the games of many of the exceptional players I know, and the games of just about all the full-time professional poker players; most of whom each of us would be able to quickly recognize.

I use codes like ‘NF’….fidgets at the table when holding a ‘nuts’ hand, ‘NS’….silence at the table when holding a ‘nuts’ hand, and, ‘NT’….talks at the table when holding a ‘nuts’ hand. Or, ‘TT’….constantly talks at the table with whatever he’s holding; essentially a non-tell.

Better yet, ‘TR’….talks at the table only post-river, and only when he holds the ‘nuts’ hand (see article 7 for a great example of this one in play)

Additionally, the ‘C’ section is broken down into 4 subsets….

1. One for pre-flop.
2. One for pre-turn.
3. One for pre-river
4. And one for post-river.

And, obviously, the four codes cited in the preceding paragraph apply only to the post-river subset. Yet, you’ll need a variety of codes for each of the 4 subsets.

Principally because most of the available tells at different stages of the hand can be vastly different.

To demonstrate this, consider the player who is dead silent pre-flop, remains dead silent pre-turn, continues the dead silence pre-river, but then becomes openly vocal post-river….as was the case when the quad eights bested my quad fours (as described in Part 7 of this series of Articles).

When that happened, I should have been extremely pleased with my code ‘TR’….without it, I could have easily lost $2,200 more than my losing hand had actually cost me.

Yet, I don’t recall having experienced any euphoria. No! None! Mostly because the recording of player notes is simply a routine task for me….and, that being the case, the proper use of that one particular code was no more than a routine play; albeit in a fairly dramatic hand.

So, the player notes, and the codes you are going to use, have now put you in the position where you have some work to do.
In fact, I would suggest that it’s not just some work, or a small job, I would suggest that you’ve got a substantial amount of work to do…and, I’m not doing it for you; all I’ve done is lay out the guideline for you to go about the process of accomplishing the task.

However, I will go into considerably more detail about the subject matter of ‘Player Notes’ within the next two Articles….numbers 9 and 10.
Again, though, the burdensome task of developing a coding system, and learning to record notes, is going to be yours; not mine.

Plus, given the fact that Articles 9 and 10 will not be posted for a period of at least two months, you’ll have ample time to work-up the codes your going to need, and you’ll have ample time to teach yourself to properly record those notes in practice sessions.

Begin the process….the only person to be rewarded, monetarily rewarded, will be you.
Sure, you, I, and anyone we speak to about this work effort is going to understand that this is a daunting task. But, the end result of successfully completing the work will be well worth the challenge, time, and effort. As motivation, I’ll share a piece of personal information.

My player notes bring me an average of two large pots for every 6 to 7 hour session I play at the B & M felt.
Annually, in playing somewhere around 150 sessions, the total amount of cash that takes up residence in my wallet, as a result of using player notes, far exceeds the median income of the American employee.

Get started! It’s your turn to win some money.

Now, slightly altering the subject matter, have you ever seen a really good B & M poker player, tournament or otherwise, sitting at a table, who looked at the pocket cards he or she were dealt before they watched every other player look at their cards?

• Have you ever seen that very same poker player look at the flop as it was being spread by the dealer…before watching all of the other players?
• Have you ever seen that very same poker player look at the turn card as it was exposed by the dealer…before watching all of the other players?
• Or, have you ever seen that very same poker player look at the river card as it was flipped by the dealer…before watching all of the other players?

I’m suggesting that your answer is “No”…unless ‘all-in’ bets had been made. And, why?
The answer lies in each of the sentences within the above paragraph. The really good B & M player is NOT looking at pocket cards, flops, turns, or rivers…he or she is looking at every one else at the table.

He or she wants to see what reactions are made visible by each of the opponents seated at the table. He or she wants this information in advance of knowing how the dealer’s action affected their own hand. Obviously, for good reason.

Any one, or more, of the competitor’s could be yielding a ‘tell’. And, if he or she wasn’t looking, he or she would never get to see the clearly visible tells that are constantly presented at the table.

This being so, you’ll need to do the very same thing…you’ll need to read tells through your opponents facial expressions, body language, spoken words, and/or lack thereof, with an ability that equates to ‘professional expertise’.

And, if you’ve yet to learn how to do this, I’m suggesting that you quickly begin the reading assignment previously mentioned multiple times in this series of Articles; the book I reference is authored by Mike Caro…you’ve got to read what he’s written.

It’s worth your effort….he’s the very best at describing a host of easily discernible tells at a poker table. And, absent an ability to read your opponents tells will be cause for your earning power at the poker table to be dramatically diminished.

Plus, absent an awareness of your own tells will be cause for your donations at the poker table to be dramatically increased.

Best of Luck at the Tables

Michael

(c) copyright 2009; no reproduction, all rights reserved by D. M. Vadnais

NB – If you’re thinking OMG I can never do that don’t despair! Go back to article 1 in Building a Bankroll and read the whole series by poker master pro D.M. Vadnais on the NoPayPOKER.com blog then go practice your free texas hold em poker online on the main NoPayPOKER.com site. As our maestro says in previous articles, you can win real money playing real free poker on NoPayPOKER.com and with that fund your bankroll for the real deal when you go up to the B&M bigs.