Online Poker: Notes & Visual Aids for Optimum Game Selection

Table (Opponent) selection is HUGE in poker. While everyone I talk to “knows” this (pff), I see players exercise horrid table selection on a consistent basis. I am appalled (although you’d think at 26 years old I’d be numb to other people’s love of idiocy) mostly at the fact that a lot of solid players are missing out on a great deal of money because they are sitting playing each other half the time! I’ll look at a table full of decent players, scanning for the fish, often never to find one– what a bunch of morons.

My game of choice is limit HU. I cannot play decent players and hope to make a living like that, so, when a player who I deem “sub-optimal” to play sits down (and that doesn’t always mean he’s “good”) then I will sit out respectfully and tell the player that I am “waiting to play someone else”. Now, this isn’t lying, since indeed I am waiting to play someone else– specifically, ANYONE else who I can take a buy-in or two from. But, I don’t get through a day where I am not constantly cursed out and berated for this act.

Pretty standard.

Sometimes it’s humorous, sometimes just plain annoying (depending on my mood). But my ego is in check at all times, and I stay the course… the money course.

Soooo. Enough about me. Let’s talk about how we can maximize our ability for prime table/opponent selection and, thus, maximize our poker income (exponentially– I guarantee). If you think about it, poker is a game of “edges” (your edge over your opponent[s] that is), so the worse the rest of your table is: a) the higher your monetary expectation & b) the less skilled you need to be to win (which is how mediocre players can turn a profit while they hone their craft).

Well… there are quite a few different methods and programs that one can utilize for this purpose. I’ll talk a bit about a few and what I personally have come to rely on.

1. BASIC NOTE TAKING

You can take all kinds of notes on players...

I’m not talking scrawling quickly in your FiveStar while multitabling! No. On all the big online poker sites, you are able to take notes on players simply by right-clicking them and typing in a quick note. Your notes can be anything that’s helpful to you… even one word notes (because they can often communicate a lot) work sometimes! If you were to read some of my notes, you may read things like: “donks top pair”, “capable of raising the river with Ace high”, “do not play”, “overvalues their hands”, “3 barrels bottom pair”, “Never folds big blind” etc etc etc. Whatever information you can gather on players (hopefully to use against them later) is worth taking a note on.

Ooooh. Colors!

Maybe it’s just the girl in me, but I just LOVE Full Tilt Poker’s feature that allows you to “color code” your opponent’s notes. I think all “visual” people value this feature greatly… If used in a consistent fashion, color coding can feed the brain a ton of information in the nanosecond it takes to recognize the hue staring back at you. This is extremely helpful in those all too familiar scenarios where you need to make a quick decision.

This is how I color code on FTP.

So there’s that.

2. Poker Tracking Software

Every Stat You'd Ever Need... At Your Fingertips

I use Poker Tracker myself. But I have it on good authority that Holdem Manager is as good or better, so if you’re not currently using tracking software then I recommend you just pick whichever looks best to you. For this post, the examples you see here will all be of Poker Tracker (because it’s what I know).

PT gathers data and displays stats in real time!

What’s important when you’re using Poker Tracking software is that you take the time to learn and customize the layout/display– you want it to display the most important stats. I also HIGHLY recommend you color code your stats display/layout so that certain “ranges” of statistics are certain colors (whatever makes sense to you).

I’ll give an example using the 3 most commonly used stats: 1) VPIP (Volume Put In the Pot), 2) PF Raise, 3) Aggression Factor. A quick definition of each:

• VPIP- This is how often (how many hands out of 100) a player voluntarily calls a blind or raise (or what have you) and sees a flop. This number tells you right off the bat if you’re dealing with a player who is too loose or tight.
• Preflop Raise- How often a player raises Preflop
• Aggression Factor- How aggressive an opponent tends to be (determined by how often they bet/raise/reraise)

Now, depending on what game you’re playing, you’ll know (or can easily find out) what “ranges” are solid and what ranges are awry. In 6max limit hold’em, a solid player’s VPIP is usually around 28-34% (which I color orange). I will color a too loose range green and a too tight range red (although I can get much more detailed if I like!). You can, and should, have some sort of visually telling system of color coding your stats and layout the numbers exactly as you’d like them to appear on your screen.

An online pro's layout may be complex...

I would suggest to keep your stats simple and readable and add more as you can visually handle/need them.

3. Table Shark and other such programs

There are a number of cheap software programs you can purchase that will tell you (and often, alert you!) where the super loose tables are and categorize your opponents.

Whatever works!

I hope this blog was helpful. Feel free to contact me with any questions: atalantaq@hotmail.com