UltimateBet Sign Up Bonus Code: BONUS200
Get 40% sign up Bonus on first deposit up to $200!

Poker Articles Index:
Back to UltimateBet Poker Articles

Part 1

Every now and then at the poker table in a brick and mortar cardroom you'll see someone furtively scribbling cryptic notes in his notebook. You suspect that these notes record the hands he's played, how he's played them, and the outcomes he encountered. Or maybe they record tendencies or tells that he's noticed in other players. In any case, you don't ask what he's writing - it seems impolite to intrude somehow - and if you do ask, you hardly expect to get a frank and honest answer. He's working on his own Enigma Code, and he's not going to help you break it.

Online, of course, if someone is taking notes, you'll never know. It may be that your online foe is sitting in an easy chair in his underwear picking his nose between hands. But he may have six or seven data files open and running, and he may be busily recording, inspecting and interpreting all the data he can gather. This class of action is called data management or, more prosaically, making book.

The key to making book is committing yourself to keeping meaningful records about the games you play in and the foes you encounter. When you enter a new game, you want to know - concretely, not anecdotally - which of your enemies you've faced before and what they showed you. In the realworld environment, you have to trust your memory, but online you can use much more reliable tools.

Notebooks. Spreadsheets. Word processing documents. At minimum, use the note box that UB provides, slaving the information you collect to your foes' online identities. In this way, or these ways, everything you ever learned about your enemies can be stored and restored, a mere mouse-click away. Why would you not make the effort?

Because it is effort. If you're playing online poker for fun, you may not want to be bothered to make note of the fact that Buckiewuckie likes to check-raise his flush draws or that RocketGibraltar never met a pocket pair he didn't like. That's fine. Fun is fine. But know this: The best, most successful online players are making extensive book on you. They have measured you and decided, at minimum, whether you're a player they can beat. Do you know the same about them? Do you know - really know - which of your enemies can dominate and crush you? They're out there, but if you have bothered to make book on them, you never have to get in their way.

For instance, I'm humble enough to have a Black List, a list of players who have demonstrated to me that they have the best of me. I never mess with them. If I see them in a game, I find another game. Why wouldn't I? There are so many good games out there that I don't have to tangle with foes who have beaten me in the past. But I won't know to stay out of their way unless I know who they are and why and how they're better than me.

Right here, right now, start keeping a black list. When you come up against a player you know to be good, note his name and write a sentence or two, or a paragraph or two, about what makes him a superior player.

You can see the twin benefits of this, I'm sure. First you'll know who's a must to avoid. Second, by analyzing the play of superior players, you'll learn what they're doing right. Are they bullying the table? Putting good reads on their foes? Do they have great image? Simply by listing the attributes of players better than you, you can become better than you, too.

By the same token, you want to know who the fish are. You want to know by name the players out there who are chronically weak, chronically loose, chronically willing to play victim for you. Call this list your White List, if you like, or your Fish List, or any name you prefer. But start keeping the list. Start now.

Don't forget to record what makes them such easy marks. Do they buy in short? Call too often? Yield to bluffs or surrender orphan flops? Can you put excellent reads on them or make them respect your raises? Are they afraid of you? And then turn the mirror back on yourself, for just as you can hone your strengths by recording the strengths of others, you can identify your weaknesses by spotting the things that make the fish fish.

All it requires is a notebook or spreadsheet and a little hard work. You're not afraid of hard work, are you?

Top

Part 2

Information is power, this we know. Collecting information on your online foes actually gives you power in two different ways. First, of course, it gives you a line on their play, accurate data you can use to tailor your betting decisions. Second, perhaps more important, collecting information gives you something to do when you're not in the hand. It allows you to stay mentally engaged in the game - entertained, if you will - and helps you resist the atavistic urge to call too much and play too loose.

The most basic information you want to collect on your foes is whether they're winning or losing players over time. You'll never have a completely accurate picture of this, of course, because you can't observe any of your enemies 100% of the time they play. But you can track their performance when they're in there against you, or even when they're in other games that you happen to be keeping tabs on.

To do this, you'll need to note the player's name, how much money he had when you first joined the game, and how much he had when you, or he, left. This can be a tricky business, because players come and go so quickly and with such little notice, that someone you're tracking may leave the game before you're even aware of it. Nevertheless, it's a good idea to keep tabs on all your adversaries' stack sizes, so even if you don't have an exact dollar figure, you'll have an approximate picture, and that will be good enough to detect trends.

Suppose you've played against MonkeyBoy five times in a $4-10 limit hold'em game. Your book on him looks like this:

MonkeyBoy
4/4	in: 10pm	$200	out: 11pm	$0
4/7	in: 4pm	$500	out: 6pm	$250
4/8	in: 6pm	$500	out: 8:30pm	$550
4/11	in: 11pm	$1000	out: 1:30am	$0
4/12	in: 9am	$500	out: 9:10am	$450

What does this data tell you about MonkeyBoy? Of course it doesn't pay to over-interpret short-term results, but MonkeyBoy has booked one small win and four big losses in the times we've watched. He's gone broke a couple of times; once disastrously. And after that disastrous bust-out, he came right back for more the next day, only to take an early quick hit and run scared.

Does this mean that MonkeyBoy is a chronic loser in the game? Not necessarily. He may just be running bad, or he may be a new player who has not yet found his feet. Nevertheless, until I see evidence to the contrary (evidence I will accumulate by paying scrupulous attention to his stack) I will assume that this is a player who can be beaten.

If the numbers were all reversed - if I saw a player who was consistently beating the game - I would be wary of mixing it up with him. I would consider him skilled until proven lucky, so to speak.

It is, of course, impossible to collect even the most rudimentary information on a great number of foes. There simply isn't time to track everybody's performance, and still keep your mind on the game. Also, you'll quickly reach a point of diminishing returns if you find yourself starting book on a lot of players whom you never battle again, or battle only infrequently. These numbers have to be accumulated over time in order to become meaningful, so save your efforts for those opponents who spend a lot of time in the games you play. As a rule of thumb, I don't' start book on a foe until I've faced him two or three times in a short space of days.

Once you get into the habit of keeping book, it will become second nature to you, and it will get very easy. But it's not easy at first - it's hard to keep track of a lot of different foes, and it's hard to justify the effort. I would remind you of that secondary benefit this effort pays: It keeps your own head in the game. It also forces you to focus on the play of others and not just your own activities. Above all, it contributes to your ongoing growth.

If you still need a reason to commit to keeping book, consider the sport of horseracing. Many bettors bet hunches, and a few dedicated data miners handicap the races, looking for edges they can exploit. Since horse racing is a pari-mutuel betting system, where the winners are paid from a pool funded by all bettors, at the end of the day the smart handicappers are being paid directly by the lazy or hunchy punters.

The same is exactly true online. The savviest players are keeping extensive and detailed book on their foes. They're doing it now, and they're doing it at your expense. Not to put too fine a point on it, if you yourself are not doing this, you're simply another punter in the pool, funding those dedicated few who are willing to do the work.

Commit to keeping book. It will make you a better player within yourself and a more formidable adversary to your foes.

Top

Part 3

Tracking the play of your opponents to find out whether they're winners or losers in the game is, of course, the mere tip of the data iceberg. If you really want to get obsessive about it (and I encourage you to do so) you can record their betting habits, buy-in amounts, starting requirements, degree of trickiness and a hundred other aspects of their online play.

In brick and mortar games, all of this information comes to us in the form of "feel." You know, for instance, that you've played before against that guy with the bad toupee in seat three. You seem to remember that he likes to slow-play aces - or was that some other guy with a bad toupee? Then there's this woman over here... you're believe that she never bets unless she has the nuts, but you can't be completely sure, because the information is imperfectly stored in your mind.

In online play, the information can be perfectly stored, incident by incident, observation by observation, in any form you care to store it.

Some of the "advanced book" factors I like to track include: the capacity to check-raise; raising from early position with middle suited connectors; checking the nuts; bluffing; folding blinds. In the end, there's no "best" set of data to collect, since there's so much out there to be had. Over time, whatever information you collect will meld into a gestalt of the player you're tracking. Above and beyond his win/loss numbers, you'll have a sense of whether this player is tricky or straightforward, tight or loose, strong or weak. In fact, if you do nothing more than assign these either/or values to your foes, you'll be able to draw a pretty quick conclusion as to whether the lineup of a given game is favorable to you.

Again, I caution you against overdoing this data mining. Above all, you don't want to let the effort distract you from your own perfect play. In appropriate measure, making book on your foes will harmonize with your own play, and keep you sharp, focused and centered on the game.

For my part, all I really want to know is whether a given foe should be considered dangerous or gettable. If I have seen superior hand selection and appropriate trickiness and aggressiveness from a given player, I'm going to do my best to avoid him. Alternatively, if I see someone playing too loose or too soft, I'll do everything in my power to go after him, even following him from game to game. This is obviously a luxury of online play: If you're ever against known dangerous players, or even against unknown new foes, you're simply not taking advantage of the game you're playing. The mechanics of online poker allow you to handicap everyone, and then to easily select your most choice targets of opportunity. Make the most of those mechanics!

There's one other player on whom you should be keeping book - the most extensive, comprehensive and detailed book you can. Can you name that player? That's right - you! In the B&M realm, you might be inhibited about recording which hands you played, how you played them, and what the outcome was. In the privacy of your own home, you don't have to worry about that. You can record literally every hand you play, and then interpret the data on yourself exactly as if you were interpreting it on someone else. Or just download your hand logs and pore over them.

You might discover some startling holes in your play. You consider yourself reasonably tight and aggressive - but did you really limp in with J-3s in middle position? You consider yourself to be reasonably aware of your foes' tendencies - but did you really bet into a known flush-chaser when the flush card came on the river... and then pay him off when he raised?

Needless to say, this sort of cold self-examination will do wonders for your discipline. If you're staring at the hard facts of your leaks, the very desire not to have to stare at those facts will cause you to plug them up. Try it and see. It's great to keep book on other players - you learn how to beat them. But it's better to keep book on yourself - you learn how to keep you from beating you.

Top